Science Fiction Time ?

Storage formats that are not medium based, i.e. MP3, that are small, incredibly high quality(better than DVD-A, and SACD).

SACD and DVD-A are a fads based of technology that is quickly getting to its EOL, why should we still be using such limited, delicate physical media. You should just be able to queue up an album from remote storage arrays which have every song concievable already on them.... well maybe not, thanks to the RIAA

heh, i could set up an array like that in in less than a week, the technology already exists....but i'd get sue'd for the rest of my life

you know how it goes...profit before progress

The future is a virtual room like the "holodeck" on Star Trek with "controlled" particles joined to recreate the actual musicians, instruments and recording hall. The original performance would be enacted by a computer, resulting in real soundwaves. Of course, the danger is that you could become trapped on the "holodeck" with the safety protocols removed--wait, I think that WAS an episode...

I think room stuff is still thinking in the box. I'd suggest an array of speakers made like a phased array radar that would sense your head and follow you around so you are always in a 3d sweet spot sound wise.

Also we need a pure solid state music source, a crystal that is scanned (3d latice) so no rotating wow, flutter,jitter etc is introduced. We are almost there with RAM memory or flash card (digital cameras) up to 1Gbite already available.