Mp3s: good enough

It's no secret that CD sound quality trumps mp3 sound quality, but that seems to matter less these days:

In February, a music professor at Stanford, Jonathan Berger, revealed that he has found evidence that younger listeners have come to prefer lo-fi versions of rock songs to hi-fi ones. For six years, Berger played different versions of the same rock songs to his students and asked them to say which ones they liked best. Each year, more students said that they liked what they heard from MP3s better than what came from CDs. To a new generation of iPod listeners, rock music is supposed to sound lo-fi. Good enough is now better than great.

Do survey participants really prefer the antiquated, lo-fi sound? Or has digital music just become so pervasive that an effect of normalcy has set in on listening habits? I think it's the latter; the preference of medium is dictating the preference of message. And that worries me because I think it means that music is becoming less important. The sacrifice of quality for convenience (i.e., Live Phish downloads that are available 6 hours after the show, the original "free" download of In Rainbows) is creating a generation of listeners who are merely satisfied with how their music sounds. In a world filled with awesome technology, why wouldn't you expect--no, demand--better?