Will Quantum computing change the DAC game (in our lifetimes)?

The arrival of the AI will save us all! 

You have to be nuts to think that a $100K DAC is "somehow" superior to a $1K (or less) DAC!

"All the King"s horses and all the King's men couldn't put Humpty back together again!"

Quantum computing, as far as I know, affects the processing of data, not the encoding of it.

More likely quantum and AI will be used to better understand how we hear and design various different encoding mechanisms, but I don't see this as coming to a DAC near me directly.

We're in a remarkably great place in terms of digital music. The price of storage is very cheap, network speed inside and to our homes is amazing. I remember when having a home network switch at 10 Mbits/s was fast.  Now we have 10 GigE, a factor of 100 faster inside our homes!!  Not to mention how many CD's' we can store for pennies.

I think the frontier in DAC computation, encoding and transmission has been pushed far enough, now it's all in the analog stages.

In all probability.

Crack me up. Like it even matters. Have you any idea how many times since 1980 we have been promised Perfect Sound Forever? The original CD itself was supposed to be Perfect Sound Forever. Now its so old its been superseded so many times you've all lost count, its had to be re-named Red Book CD, and is now even growing its own vintage appeal - a whole long montage of imagery scrolling by trying to keep you from noticing the treadmill you're running on is going nowhere.

I mean seriously, someone should start a thread attempting to list all the technologies that were supposed to finally deliver Perfect Sound Forever ..... at this point I would settle for merely good sound next year.

I don’t think you will be seeing Quantum Computing embedded into your desk side, desktop, laptop, handheld or Audiophile stack... Maybe at some point in the future you may see it in the Recording Studio or Streaming Services... And then most likely not... Computing components in the last 50 years or so have not been anything new... Just smaller and faster, Moore’s Law, and reinventing the same old same old... A few people are scratching at the leading edge with their FPGA architectures... And even FPGAs are pretty old tech... Folks are still having a difficult time fully understanding and simulating the works of Maxwell, Tesla and Faraday...  On a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero...

Depends on your age. Quantum computing isn't going to be a factor in music streaming and storage in my lifetime.