I have pondered the same thing. My wife just got an Itouch, and she and her daughter loaded it up with all kinds of music, she loves it. Now consider that she generally will not spend more than 10 minutes listening to serious music on a good system (like mine). She is even content to play music from the itouch on the internal speaker, yes, it sounds worse than a tin can! Why? Well, I guess because it is easy and it is the music she likes. It reminds me of a similar stuggle I've had when in the 80's I had my own photo studio. People would call and ask why my prices were 4x as much as the JC Penny Portrait studio. My response was, if you can't tell the difference, go to Penney's. I think we've gotten to a point as a society where people just don't really care all that much about the quality. Oh there will always be some, but it is a small crowd. One more experience to relate! My wife and I like good wines. When we first moved to Columbus 4years ago she was invited to a neighborhood Pampered Chef party so she took one of our few bottles of very nice wine we had brough from an Oregon vineyard. Our neighbor served it with ice and 7-up. I could have cried.