Fast forward 25 years, what will audio be like?

I wish I could share your optimism about the near future. The trajectory I see has us fully indentured and thoroughly under control of the plutocrats who are taking control of everything from the Supreme Court to the food sources. DNA and GPS will prove to be formidable control and punishment tools. We will be competing desperately for any opportunity to earn any amount of money and we will have nowhere to house a system even if we could buy one.

Picture the West Virginia coal mining town represented in literature and song. The stores and the housing all belong to the company who will evict you for the slightest provocation. All of the rights you had bestowed by the vestiges of organized labor have been lost. No limits on days or hours worked. No vacations, sick days or holidays. No raises. You work until you no longer can and are then discarded. Since the company controls both your wages and your cost of living, they can calibrate both to keep you in debt for life.

Under circumstances like that, audio will be an impossible luxury. You'll be making your own instruments from discarded objects and whatever you can scrounge from the remnants of Mother Nature. The good news is you will be able to sing the blues like never before. 2039

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue will be available in fifteen different formats. A double blind evaluation of all Kind of Blue Formats by Stereophile Magazine in 2035 will demonstrate beyond all doubt that the best sounding format is the original Columbia Records cassette.

Music will be passe, no one will be listening to it anymore.

Macrojack, for the bottom third of the population you're describing their reality in 2014.

My perception during the half-dozen decades I have been around is that while prognostications of both radical change and various doom and gloom scenarios have always seemed to be plentiful, they almost never come to pass. Sure, bad things happen at times, but they are usually sporadic and unforeseeable.

I agree with Frogman's first post above, and with Onhwy61.

Regards,
-- Al