About modern electronics...
When it comes to amplifier design, the Holy Grail is to have the new amplifiers perform as well as the old class A amps. The ultimate in fidelity is when you run the amps class A, but the design drawback is that they are heavy and wasteful of power. To reduce the cost and shipping weight of the product, a class D amp is the best. But trying to design a class D that matches class A performance is a real task. Class D has the greatest efficiency of power, which makes the heat sinks much smaller and the power supply much smaller.
When it comes to capture and replay of sound, the digital storage techniques have the benefit of long term fidelity that doesn't change over hundreds of years. The old capture techniques that used analog storage were very good when the sound was first captured, but with age the fidelity decomposed, so 100 years from now the signal to noise ratio would eat that up and you end up with something that no longer was what the musician intended to present. The Holy Grail of digital storage is to get enough bits of information into the data stream to fully represent the old analog recording methods.
So modern technology is just shifting techniques to provide low cost, low weight, and long term fidelity that can still compete with the quality of the old technology of class A with analog recording.
