How many years before MP3 becomes king?

It already is the king of fools. Maybe next it can work its way up to king of pain.

Everything has it's cycles. Fitting lots of data onto a small card is today's novelty. Somewhere in the not far future, the pendulum will swing backwards as people discover sound quality all over again. But it will then be combined with much higher storage and delivery capacity than is available from the cd or lp.

When I was in college and listening to lp's on a cheap record player in my dorm room, I was oblivious to quality too. You get more demanding of quality as you get older, and I expect today's kids are the same.

Besides, what's wrong with having compression (AAC, WMA) in casual listening situations, like in your automobile, with 70dB road noise, or walking down the street listening to your ipod? It's in your home that you really care about music quality.

Never.

I agree with Flex. For music lovers MP3s have a very useful purpose. They're not high end, but not every music listening experience needs to be about audiophile values.

It's already dead. There are new compression formats being released that are far better. Apple's Lossless format for example.