CD, DVD, SACD & BluRay - same plastic, more data

The traditional Hi-Fi Source has been the Vinyl record, with CD's taking a second place in terms of quality for most Hi-Fi buffs. 

The advent of the SACD player (or super audio CD) with it's enhanced audio quality means that the SACD format is gaining favour amongst the Hi-Fi Community. 

The MP3 Player in general and the MP3 format in particular has been widely disparaged as one of the poorer music encoding formats, and while popular in the downloading community, it's lossy compression methods and dynamic compression make it a distant second choice to the .WAV and .FLAC formats. 

Audio heavyweights Linn of Scotland recently got behind the FLAC format with their Linn DS - Digital Source line of equipment, and this seems to be making inroads into the HiFi community, so don't throw out your MP3 player or iPOD just yet!

It seems as though if you want the best quality, it's still Vinyl, the best portability then go for .FLAC's on a NAS drive or similar and SACD is the middle groud.

The emergence of other Hi Definition sources and formats, for example HiDef Radio and SACD quality internet downloads means that there are ever expanding choices for content.  The old debate between the analogue camp and digital upstarts is set to rage for a long time to come yet.

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