Fewer people care about anything any more. We are in a period of decline. Society is collapsing in slow motion, in particular any and all social contracts.

I don't think this follows, because the function of a telephone call is more utilitarian than anything else.

People call for leisure of course, but the phone's part of that leisure activity is still just to convey information not art. The kids all switched completely to txt for the same non-utilitarian conversations once it became available.

For all it's low fidelity, it was actually quite high fidelity, in that it was actually very good at conveying all the "voice body language" information besides merely the words. It was just highly optimized for one job and that job was not music.

i dont think its that people dont care about quality but they simply have never experienced a better alternative.

an example would be i game on my computer and for years i had a 60Hz monitor and it wasnt til 2020 i upgraded to 144Hz monitor. it is night and day difference in feel that i can never go back to a monitor under 120Hz