Are there any audiophile quality streaming options

Onemug - p.s. - you might want to try MOG through the regular desktop application trial period before committing to an additional $5 a month for the iPad content. I like MOG a lot, obviously, but it might not suit everyone.

Sfar,

Can't thank you enough. Once again your answers are perfect. I plan on trying that 14 day trial starting tomorrow.

I'm listening to some easy Jazz on Pandora One right now. I am pretty impressed with the quality on some of the better recorded songs and that's at 192 kbps. Looking forward to hearing what 320 sounds like.

Good question. Imagine a service like MOG that streams 1,411 kbs or even more, say 3-4 thousand kbs (real Hi Res, 24 bit/96 khz)! I can stream HD movies with 5.1 soundtrack on VUDU through my ROKU box. What are the technical limitations preventing high bitrate music streaming? BTW, I've been fooling with a service called Orastream which seems like a step in the right direction.

RD, As you say, this isn't a technical problem since HD movies are already being streamed. The only real issues I can think of are the bandwidth cost that the streaming company would incur and the fact that all of their music would have to be re-ripped at the higher bitrate. I wouldn't want to have to do that for my current catalog which isn't very big - imagine doing it for the 16 million plus tracks MOG advertises! This assumes that they weren't forward thinking and already have the uncompressed tracks somewhere.

However, probably the real issue is record company restrictions. The labels will flip when you start talking about sending out unadulterated digital copies of master "tapes" much less high-resolution copies. HDTracks had to raise their prices for high resolution downloads due to pressure from the record labels. Of course this is totally artificial. The only difference in costs for a 24/96 track vs. a 16/44 are the slight increase in costs for storage and download bandwidth.

Dick

Just signed on for MOG primo. Thanks to all for the great info here - I'm looking forward to using the service