It seems that, with two channel audio at any rate, good ol' Red Book CDs really are still the high-fidelity standard. Sorry, folks, A-B-X double-blind tests don't lie, and anyone who thinks CDs sound bad is fooling themselves. Engineers figured out how to make a true high-fidelity audio reproduction in the late 60s. The next fifteen years was spent sorting out how to bring that sound into the home. Which they did, and then made the electronics affordable about ten years later. The rest is speakers and digital-analog converters. Anyone who tells you differently is almost certainly trying to sell you something.

Now multichannel, that's different. Which is why I you'll pry my SACD player from my cold, dead hands. But I digress...