Depending on the format, maybe twice the size of an MP3. I think thats reasonable for five bucks. I can't vouch for the quality of the record company offerings, though. iTunes AAC doesn't hold up against LAME, though it could if they used a slightly higher bitrate. It seems to me that quality is purposly reduced in online music stores to make the hardcopies seem more valuable than they really are.
But a good engineer can compress a multi channel song into a small size without compromising too much on quality. And surround sound has a way of tricking the listener into hearing more sound than has acutally been encoded. It all just makes MP3 sound so obsolete, especially CBR.
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