Well this should come as welcome news for all you audiophiles out there. CNN is reporting that Apple, along with other digital retailers, are exploring the possibility of serving up songs with higher studio-level 24 bit quality.

Professional music producers generally capture studio recordings in a 24-bit, high-fidelity audio format. Before the originals, or "masters" in industry parlance, are pressed onto CDs or distributed to digital sellers like Apple's iTunes, they're downgraded to 16-bit files.

With higher quality recordings comes the possibility and likelihood of premium pricing, but if you're one of those people who claim they can discern the acoustic differences between a CD and Vinyl, then it may be well worth it.

One potential hold-up, at least for the time being, is that while iTunes supports 24-bit audio recordings, current iterations of the iPod and iPhone can't play them (the songs are converted internally to 16-bits). That said, Interscope-Geffen-A&M chairman Jimmy Lovine explained that hardware changes may be forthcoming.

"Apple has been great,” Iovine said “we’re working with them and other digital services – download services – to change to 24-bit. And some of their electronic devices are going to be changed as well. So we have a long road ahead of us.”

And with higher quality songs would come much larger song files. Now it's not uncommon for a 4 minute song to check in at almost 8MB. Bruno Mars' hit song Grenade, for example, is 3 minutes and 42 seconds long and is a 7.5 MB download. With files that large, I suppose larger capacity iPhone and iPod Touch hardware becomes that much more important. Does that mean a 128GB iPhone and/or iPod Touch loom on the horizon?

We can only hope.