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And then you have the headphone issue. Most iPod users would never dream of using third party headphones, since they want the world to know that they have a stylish, white music player in their pocket. This is of course lunacy, since by simply investing in a decent set of headphones, the sound quality from their iPod would be greatly improved – but hey, I keep forgetting, it’s about looking cool and not about your music sounding good.

But let me get back to High Definition TV, probably the most significant enhancement to television picture quality since we moved from black and white, to colour. With HD, surely the masses will be forced to adopt high quality home entertainment whether they want to or not? Well, yes and no.

HD TVs come in two flavours, 720 and 1080 lines. Obviously 1080 offers the best possible picture quality, but I can’t see too much 1080 content making its way to the UK anytime soon. The first stumbling block for 1080 is that right now I've only found one LCD screen on sale that supports it, with pretty much the entire market made up of 720 compatible HD TVs. This means that almost everyone buying an HD screen right now is limited to 720 lines, so what incentive is there for anyone to broadcast or distribute 1080 media?

Add to this the fact that the HD broadcasting rollout will be spearheaded by Sky, and I have to wonder if we’re going to see any kind of image quality improvement whatsoever. With the amount of compression that Sky seems to apply to current digital satellite broadcasts, I dread to think what an HD signal will end up looking like. But the saddest part of all, is that I doubt if the majority of viewers will even notice!

Of course I may be wrong about Sky and the company might be prepared to swallow the massive bandwidth costs associated with minimal compression on an HD signal. Perhaps the World Cup next year really will look fantastic viewed on an HD Sky box and it won’t resemble the mass of pixels that we’re so often treated to today. But if I’ve learned one thing about big companies over the years, it’s that they won’t spend money unless they have to.

With this in mind I’m begging you, the consumer, to demand better quality. Don’t be happy with the cheapest television you can find, look for one that will give you a viewing experience worthy of the HD Ready logo. Force the broadcasters to offer you the best possible picture quality – you’re paying a lot of money for your television service so you should get the best out of it. Big companies will always cater for the majority, and if the majority are happy with a substandard service or product, why should they waste money improving it?

Pirsig may be right about quality being hard, or even impossible to define, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not entitled to it!