I have quite a few albums on SACD and in 99% of cases the SACD (or SAC D layer if it's a hybrid disc) sounds better. SACD has a beefiness and sometimes an “analogue quality” that for me makes it my favourite digital format, beating both CD and hi-res PCM.

Make no mistake, the differences I noticed were very slight and were I not looking for any differences, with the exception of the sonic width, I might not have noticed much of a difference at all. From a frequency range, clarity, definition and accuracy standpoint, the SACD disc was almost on par with the MQA disc.

So why was SACD not a commercial success? First, there was a format war. The DVD Forum, headed by Toshiba, refused to pay patent royalties to Sony and Philips, and they launched a competing format: DVD-Audio, which couldn't be played in a CD player. Ironically, the royalty for an SACD was the same as for a CD: $.

When comparing bitrate, or the amount of data transferred per second, High-Resolution Audio's bitrate (9,216 kbps) is nearly seven times higher than that of CDs (1,411 kbps) and almost 29 times higher than that of MP3s (320 kbps). And the higher the bitrate, the more accurately the signal is measured.