MP3 players for lossless audio

If you're searching for the best possible sound quality from your digital music collection, you need to start at the source: the audio. Unlike MP3s, lossless audio formats, such as Apple Lossless, WMA Lossless, FLAC, and WAV, promise bit-for-bit reproductions of music ripped from CDs.

There are many drawbacks to lossless audio, however, and the most obvious of those is file size. A 4GB iPod Nano, for instance, can only hold 150 songs encoded with Apple Lossless, compared to the 1,000+ MP3s you could fit in the same space. With this in mind, high-capacity portable audio players, such as the 120Gb iPod Classic or 120Gb Zune, make the most suitable containers for taking large lossless audio collections on the go.

Another issue with lossless audio is forward-compatibility. You can pretty much depend on MP3s remaining broadly compatible with music devices over the next 5 to 10 years, but the same cannot be said of lossless formats. So far, the only universally-compatible lossless format for portable audio is the compact disc.

The following six MP3 players support at least one type of lossless audio. Apple's iPod Classic (as well as the Nano and Touch) work with Apple Lossless, while the Zune 120 and Flash-based Zunes support Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) Lossless. Cowon's O2 supports both Apple Lossless and WMA Lossless, as well as the non-proprietary FLAC format and Monkey's Audio. Other noteworthy FLAC-compatible players include the SanDisk Sansa Fuze, SanDisk Sansa Clip, Iriver LPlayer, Cowon D2, and the Cowon iAudio 7.