First, a few necessary words about mastering: The basic goal of the 'Mastered for iTunes' store essentially cuts that ideal off at the knees, or at least points to the fact that we may have already been off that road for some time.
For a decade, we were on a road to a musical utopia: great-sounding audio files that we could send from one place to another with ease. Among many, the hope, for the duration of the MP3 era, has been that quality would steadily improve in tandem with bandwidth and storage capabilities, so that eventually the quality of downloadable digital files would equal or surpass that of files burned onto little plastic discs. Users accepted that compromise because of the huge gains in convenience - no more carrying around booklets of CDs or waiting weeks for your local record store to restock a physical format.
