Overlooked at the Steve Jobs announcement today is the big new non-touch-screen iPod, dubbed “iPod Classic.” The top model boasts a capacity of 160 gigs; that’s room for a lot of music and video. Pretty soon Apple and the record companies are going to start pitching us the idea of lossless digital music.

Background: The files we listen to on our computers and iPods are, for the most part, mightily compressed versions of the big music files on a typical CD, which amass samples going by at a rate of tens of thousands per second. As a rough rule of thumb, an mp3—I’m using the term generically for any iPod or computer music file—is about a tenth the size of a CD track.

The price we pay for that, however, is poorer sound quality. You can hear a little bit of deadness underneath the music in a typical mp3 file. It doesn’t have to be that way—”Apple lossless,” a compression codec already available in your iTunes program, claims to provide sound indistinguishable from a CD, for example.

But: lossless files, while still compressed, are about five times as big as a typical mp3 file.

But with 160 gigs the new iPod playing lossless files is the equivalent, for a normal music fan, of a 30-gig iPod playing mp3s.

The rock ‘n’ roll audio geek used to be a cliché, but no one talks much about audio quality these days.

The good news for Apple and the music companies is that now they can embark on a new campaign, telling us that all our digital music just isn’t up to audio snuff—but fortunately we can now rectify it by buying from the fabulous new “Lossless Store” on iTunes!

In a few years, mp3s will be the 78s of the digital age. The genius of this is that the music industry has made a big chunk of its money the last few decades reselling us music we already have. But how can they resell us digital tracks? This is one answer. And they might even get some money back from the poor souls who digitized their CD collections into mp3s and sold off their discs; they can be guilt-tripped into buying some of it back once again.