Hi,
Several days ago, a question came to mind.
When mp2 was released, it wasn't nearly as good as mp3, and hard drive space was more expensive. You'd never see 500GB hard drives when mp2 was out. Now, we've got all kinds of formats still focusing on low bitrate material with very large hard drives at the disposal of many people. Manufacturors of digital recorders, particularly voice recorders, still use low bitrates.
Lossy codecs aren't going to die anytime soon, we know that. I myself experiment with all bitrates at the moment because I'm too lazy to figure out that I could probably deal with material encoded lossless, for example, even with limited space.
Do you think in the future people will start buying more CDs, keeping lossy encoding at least a practical option? What do you predict will happen in the relm of lossy encoding in the future, say, fifteen or more years from now?

I suspect there is an upper-limit to how tuned lossy codecs can become, though things keep getting transparent enough for me at increasingly low bitrates. The logical endpoint of lossy compression could be perfect deconstruction of the audio into a simpler representation, like a module or something.

I have the distinct feeling that within the next three years, President Palin is going to blow every lossy codec off the face of the universe, along with the planet that spawned them.

And if that doesn't happen first, I believe that history has already thoroughly taught us that one can never have enough HD space. There's always someone eager to cram 3 or 5 or 50 times the data into his/her 5000 TB drive. And why not?

I've been hearing this "lossy will no be longer necessary!" mantra ever since hard drives hit the 50 GB range.

640TB ought to be enough for anybody…

hopefully today's developers will turn into making some nice, editing friendly lossy codecs for HD video

Classic!

P.S.: To add something more useful...

If you compare those old times where 640 MB seemed unnecessarily much, and current times where 640 GB seemed unnecessarily much, what changed? Sure, we now have entire software-frameworks and HL-languages which bump up app sizes... but thats still just a fraction of the space available nowadays. There is however something, which constantly increased in size - from 1990 to 2008 - its media-size. Video capabilities appeared and transparent stereo sound. And resolution increased across the board - both regarding sound and especially regarding visuals. Unless some grand new audio-thing is invented, i do not think that audio will increase much further - not even with multichannel.... perhaps a 4-6x increase, but not more. I think that with visuals, we are still far from the end of the road. Nowadays, people use plain 2D screens at sizes between 17" and 40" at resolutions between 1000x1000 and 2000x2000. Even if we just add stereoscopic visuals at resolutions of 8000x8000, we already at about 60x the storage-space required. Now add to this entertainment media which generates content out of insanely huge datasets... like for example super-high-resolution satellite maps of the entire planet.... and we break the 100x barrier easily. This is stuff which can be done in the next 10 years..... can available storage spaces increase at that rate? If not, would compression be used?