We’ve already lost a tremendous amount of craft over the last 1,000 years. There are almost no craftspeople left in the world who can do the kind of moldings & designs you see in renaissance era buildings.

Having been a classical musician, what I noticed about getting tuning right is there is a body sensation of lightness/breath that is palpable if you are a classical enthusiast - even if you can’t distinguish the sound you are hearing from an “ideal memory” of what it should sound like.

But the largest reduction in auditory tech has already happened - mp3 compression.

Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low fi digital compression, but almost everything we hear everywhere is coming through streaming services.

The rare delights of extreme tech built around the first principles of a discipline like sound/music are achieved by overcoming very difficult and confounding problems. They are technical wonders as much as they are refined experiences.

I once worked with a scientist who had permanently solved the issue of mic feedback. Imagine what revolution that would be for AV use cases everywhere! But it required a radical shift in the protocols used to build both mic and speakers, so even though Sony optioned it there’s not a single product you can buy with the tech.

Like the Internet, everything is really just a semi-poor adaptation to a semi-poorly design system. Fundamental protocol changes (like ipv4 to ipv6) are brutally hard.

We like to believe that modern society is hard-wired for improvement, but it seems mostly hard-wired for minimal change that delivers marginal improvements detectable by the lowest common denominator consumer/user.

To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality.