Sennheiser HD-555 Audiophile Headphones List Price: $169.95 Sale Price: Too low to display Used From: $95.00 Average Rating:
	The Sennheiser HD-555 Audiophile Headphones use an internal surround reflector to generate an extended spatial sound field, making it the ideal headphone for home theater and music. Other features include Sennheiser's E...

	M-Audio Audiophile 2496 MIDI Digital Recording Interface List Price: $129.99 Sale Price: Too low to display Average Rating:
	The Audiophile 2496 embodies a quantum leap in computer audio fidelity and performance unequaled by other audio cards in its price range. This critically acclaimed PCI card features premium digital audio converters, elegant board design, and ultra-stable drivers just like the rest of the Delta line, but with a simpler I/O configuration...

 

Audiophiles play music from phonograph records, compact discs (CDs) and from digital audio file formats that are uncompressed as well as ones that are compressed utilizing lossless data compression like FLAC, Windows Media Player LossLess and Apple lossless. Since the early 1990s, CDs have become the most common source of high-quality music, obliterating the mass market for records. Debate is sharp in this area, with analog proponents arguing that analog sound is "warmer" – has a bit of distortion which they find pleasant – and does not suffer from digital sound's alleged loss of audible information in the sampling process, while digital proponents point out that analog formats as having a smaller dynamic range, greater deviations in frequency response, and greater distortion, which lessens sound quality. Nevertheless, turntables, tonearms, and magnetic cartridges are among the most exotic and lavish high-end audio products despite the difficulties of keeping records free from dust and the delicate set-up associated with turntables. The 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the CD format, in theory, restricts CD information losses to above the theoretical upper-frequency limit of human hearing – 20 kHz, see Nyquist limit. Some believe, however, that the brick-wall filter used by CD players to remove ultrasonic noise can create audible distortion. Newer formats such as DVD-Audio and Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD), with sampling rates of 96 kHz or higher, have been developed in an attempt to address this criticism. Despite the popularity of MP3 digital-audio players, some audiophiles criticize these devices because of their reliance on lossy-data compression even though at high bit rates, the resulting files are transparent. In MP3 encoding, musical information is lost in proportion to the degree of compression. Audiophiles who use a digital-audio player will often encode their music at higher bit rates to maintain sound quality at acceptable levels for casual listening. Many digital-audio players, however, can also accept uncompressed formats such as WAV (PCM), foregoing compression in order to retain quality. Some players, including iPods, also allow lossless-data-compression algorithms, which can compress audio files without degrading their sound quality. Popular lossless formats include FLAC, WavPack, Monkey's Audio (APE), Apple Lossless, True Audio, Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless, and Shorten. Although many digital-audio devices have integrated converters, there is a healthy demand for after-market digital-to-analog converters.