Disclaimer: I'm a skeptical audiophile, i.e. I love high-quality sound, understand the placebo effect and raise my eyebrows (but not my credit card) at $15,000 speaker cables.
What I find most fascinating about all of this is that the human body is not subject (yet) to Moore's Law. Computers catch up to us, fast. So, while 16-bit 44.1kHz audio was impossible in terms of processing power and storage 20 or so years ago, now it's trivial. At some point, anyone will agree that the resolution of music recordings exceeds the listening capabilities of even super-ears folks. 192kHz 24-bit stereo audio, uncompressed, is only ~4GB per hour; a trivial amount of storage and a very low data rate. Make it full 7-channel just for giggles, and it's ~14GB/hour. So a run-of-the-mill (today) 4TB drive can store ~300 albums. A typical audiopohile collection of 5,000 albums will require 70TB of storage, 100TB if you want some RAID redundancy, and that's with no lossLESS compression. Today that's $8,000 of storage, and it takes no imagination, plus 0.6x conservative lossless compression, to get that down to $2,000 or so. Not cheap, but not outrageous. The albums themselves cost said audiophile about $75,000.
Will there still be a debate that 192kHz 24-bit isn't "enough"? Probably. But human ears aren't changing much, and, it could be argued, we hit the limit of perception for most people at 44.1kHz 16-bit. At 6.5 times that resolution, it's probably enough. Problem solved (modulo a lot of infrastructure changes).
The same will eventually happen for video. 8x, if you've ever seen it, is like looking through a window, until the camera pans (which it shouldn't). Many people can't tell the difference between 480p and 1080p, never mind 4x.
It's already happened for photography. The resolving power of modern high-end digital sensors exceeds that of all but the best lenses. Storage of these multi-megapixel images is a non-issue.
There are imponderables, though: passionate, intelligent and sincere people I know wax lyrical over the aforementioned $15,000 speaker cables. Sound reproduction in a home environment, or when hearing headphones, is extraordinarily complex, and nobody has ever achieved "the absolute sound", i.e. a feeling that you're in a live music environment when listening at home. All you can hope for is some of the emotional involvement that the recording artist intended, whether in the studio or live. In the car on on good earbuds, I can JUST about tell that I'm listening to a 192 or 256kbps AAC (or MP3): it's in the sizzle of a cymbal and the like. But it's a fine line. At home, sure, a good audio system can make you cringe when listening to a highly compressed source. I've ABed the same recordings at 44.1/16 and 96/24. On high dynamic range stuff (orchestral, mostly), the quiet passages show a difference, albeit a minor one, because the signal is encoded using only 2-3 LSBs.
What's hardest to understand is the emotional engagement offered by (good, well-recorded, well-pressed) vinyl. It could certainly be a placebo effect, or it could be something yet to be understand in human hearing response when listening to digitally-encoded audio. To my surprise, the difference between a $10 speaker cable and a $500 speaker cable is clear, and in the favor of the $500 cable. There's some science there, but also a lot of voodoo. One or two manufacturers claim to have figured out how to measure the difference, but they're not saying how, for obvious reasons: they're, um, "marketing", or they really have found something to measure and want to keep it proprietary.
Finally, audio technology is really advancing, and fast. The DACs in most iDevices are ok: not great, but ok. The bundled earbuds are bad. But as little as $30 gets you decent earbuds. At $100 you're experiencing perhaps the same quality of sound as from a $1,000 pair of speakers. A decent DAC can be had for $250. A decent headphone amp for $200. So Mac/PC (which you already have)+$250 DAC+$200 amp+$100 earbuds gives you sound far superior to what most people enjoy. Not free, or cheap, but not very expensive, either. Then, I bet, a lot of people will want to move up from 128kbps MP3s.