Fast forward 25 years, what will audio be like?

I suspect systems will continue to evolve into even more synthetic sounding ones, less emotionally involving, less satisfying, kind of like a soundtrack for a long forgotten science fiction movie. The opposite of that gripping analog sound one gets with vinyl and cassettes.

Music will be stored on cloud servers. You won't use local hard drives or disc media.

You will access the internet wirelessly, no more LAN cable, using a device with firmware in semiconductor memory (ala Sandisk), no hard drive.

All music will have video associated with it, like YouTube now, and the sound quality will be so-so, like good FM.

Your music cloud access device will stream signal wirelessly to your speakers. The speakers will be powered but without speaker wire, like Dynaudio XEOs. But the quality will be lower.

The speakers will be small, a little bigger than the Bose tiny cubes so they have enough room for a small class D amp inside, as well as the wireless receiver.

There will still be some big honking subwoofer to sit in a corner.

So in summary, no wires except power cords. One box to interact with the internet, plus powered tiny cubes and a big subwoofer. Mediocrity, but still better than iPad or notebook sound -- the kids will think its nirvana.

Major brands will be Bospo Corp (after Bose acquires Oppo), Matsushita-Harman Inc, and OSA Co (formed from the merger of Oracle, Sony, and Apple). All hardware will be made in India by Wang & Kumar Mfrs Ltd. lol

I'll just keep my current system in good repair. haha

The entire Library of Congress will be compressed on to a little chip that sounds horrible and no one will care because its digital.