According to rocker Neil Young, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on a project to bring higher-quality music to the masses. In an interview during the D: Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday, Young said he was collaborating with Jobs on the project before his death, though not much progress has been made since then.

Young is particularly sensitive about the fact that most music today comes in the form of highly compressed AAC or MP3 formats. "My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I've been practicing for the past 50 years," Young said. "We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it's degrading our music, not improving."

To address the problem, Young said, he and Jobs were working on updated hardware to store and play back "high-quality audio." The quality that Young referred to seems to be 24-bit 96kHz audio—the same quality used to record and master most albums these days. As he noted, even the standard 16-bit 44.1kHz audio used for CDs only contains about 15 percent of the information captured in master recordings. (Our own calculations suggest it's more like 30 percent, but the point is still valid).

Upgrading to 24-bit audio is something that others in the record industry have tried to talk Apple into doing before. In fact, in early 2011, Universal Music Group's Jimmy Iovine said that UMG had also been working with Apple to enable iTunes to use 24-bit audio.

"What we're trying to do here is fix the degradation of music that the digital revolution has caused," Iovine said during an HP media event. "We're working with [Apple] 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."

The road may indeed be long. Along with audio hardware upgrades to handle the higher resolution files, storage will also be an issue. Today's iPhones and iPods can store thousands of tracks compressed in a 256kbps, 16-bit 44.1kHz AAC format. 24-bit 96kHz files, even using lossless compression, would require far more than the 64GB maximum storage available from the top-end iPhone 4S.

Andy VanDette, Chief Mastering Engineer at Masterdisk in New York, believes higher-fidelity audio files would be nice. He told Ars, however, that "being able to have your entire album collection in your pocket is cool too. I can only hope that bandwidth and storage will increase to the point that we don't need lossy compression schemes."

Another factor in moving to higher quality audio standards is that there doesn't appear to be much consumer demand. Most listeners can't tell the difference between iTunes Plus compressed tracks and CD playback on consumer audio equipment. Only a small niche of audiophiles with high-end equipment are likely to appreciate the improvements in sound quality. And the question remains: will artists and record labels still sell these higher quality tracks at 99¢ or $1.29, or will the price be even higher?

There's no doubt that at some point in the relatively near future—perhaps a decade—that our mobile devices and storage capabilities will make compressing audio files unnecessary. As it stands today, though, we see little point in trying to move digital downloads to high-bit rate formats outside of audiophile circles.