"Meehan Mydog" not@all wrote in message


Is there is a hi-fi unit

The better portable players are essentially the same quality as a CD player,
if they are not playing uncompressed audio or audio that is compressed, but
not lossy-compresssed. IOW, if you avoid the potentially innocuous sound
quality losses in MP3 or other modern lossy compression schemes, there is
simply no possible loss of sound quality.

Moderate compression using modern techniques still give you benefits on the
order 8:1, or more with no reliably perceptible loss. MP3, WMA, and MP4
files have a bad name because many people have turned the compression way
up, which need not be done. Discursion is still the better part of valor!
;-)

sized machine available on the
market yet which has the capacity to enable digital
storage of several hundred _uncompressed_ CDs?

If you're talking pop CDs, the average CD has about 400 megabytes of audio
on it, or less.

Lossless compression, which most portable players support one way or the
other, will reduce that to about 200 megabytes. Lossless compression has
zero audible impact no matter how you look at it, because the data that goes
into the digital-to-analog converters in the player is the same.

200 CDs @ 200 megabytes each = 40 Gigabytes. Totally uncompressed that's
still just 80 gigabytes. Even the original iPod supports uncompressed audio
files (WAV or AIFF).

I was working on a job site lately and noticed that one of my co-workers was
carrying an 80 GB iPod.

So, your basic requirement of "several hundred _uncompressed_ CDs" is not
out of reach.

I think I'm talking in TBs here.

No.