Audiophile vs MP3? The article's premise was good, but then it strays. They don't mention compressed lossless files, for instance, just WAVs, which is ridiculous. Also, they buy right into the view that MP3s are bad quality, which is simply not true at the higher bitrates. It's well-nigh impossible to tell a well-encoded 320Kbps VBR MP3 from the WAV it was encoded from, and many a double-blind trial has been done on audio forums to prove the point. The headphone issue is a bigger one, but that's a matter of price, not size. For $1K, Ultimate Ears will sell you IEMs that will blow away any speaker system under many thousand more.
But the initial premise of the article, as I said was good: to some degree there's a split between volume-seekers and quality-seekers. It would be interesting to see if hi-fi headphone or speaker sales are increasing concommitantly.

It isn't often that Google completely kills a product, which makes the announcement of the end of Google Answers noteworthy. Interesting failure of a collaborative content creation experiment.

Pirates of the Arabian Sea.

--Ari