The news the Beatles are to re-release their back catalogue in a new remastered form is great news for fans of the fab four.
After more than two decades of waiting, all of the band's original studio albums are to be re-released on CD in September in the digitally remastered stereo versions, as The Beatles, Apple Corps and EMI Music finally begin to take their first tentative steps towards releasing the material digitally.
However, don't expect to see it on iTunes just yet.
The companies involved will undoubtedly want to capitalise on CD sales before forcing fans to buy the same music in yet another format. For the online sales, whenever they may happen, there is also a huge problem - quality.
Engineers at EMI's Abbey Road studios spent four years on the Beatles remasters,  apparently "utilising state-of-the-art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment and carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings".
Put simply, listening to these songs (or any modern recorded music) as an MP3 file, or even Apple's higher quality iTunes plus file, is not a great experience.
If you're using Apple's stock headphones, and listening on a busy tube, of course you may not notice any difference.
But anyone with an iPod and a decent set of headphones should try a little experiment.
Take your favourite CD, and try importing it into iTunes as an Apple Lossless file (you can switch this in the preferences menu). If you're not using Apple software, try a format called FLAC. Now, listen again, either with your headphones or, for full effect, on your living room hifi.
The difference is astonishing - you'll find entire new instruments suddenly appearing, and rather than a 'blob' of sound from the middle of the speakers, on a well recorded CD at least, you'll find it easy to pinpoint instruments in the room. And more importantly, when you then go back to listening to a 'normal' MP3 file, you'll realise just how bad they are.
So why isn't every song sold online in this lossless format? Space. These lossless files, which are an exact digital copy of the CD rather than a compressed version, take up a large amount of space (around 50mb per song), and would radically cut the number of songs you can carry with you.
However, as storage costs drop, this is a situation that has to change.  It is now possible to buy hard drives capable of storing a terabyte of data for under £100, more than enough for lossless version of all your music. And with each new iPhone or iPod released storage capacities seem to be doubling.
But at the moment, it's virtually impossible to find music (in any quantity, at least) to buy online in these lossless formats.
While online music firms have upped their file quality, they have not yet made the move to lossless. In many cases the only way to get the files is to buy the CD and rip it yourself, which in an age of instant gratification, is simply not good enough.
In the fight against music piracy, consumers have to be given a legal choice, and for anyone interested in high quality audio, unfortunately there just isn't one.
Your only options are to order a physical CD and wait a few days, or turn to some of the more dubious sites to instantly download pristine digital copies. For many music fans, it's not a difficult choice - and ultimately, it's the record companies that are missing out by failing to offer their customers what they want.

So come on Apple, Amazon and the rest - it's time to finally abandon the MP3 and go lossless.