Best lossless MP3 players

If you want the best sound quality from a music player, you'll need to use a lossless audio format and some decent headphones.

Cowon's iAudio 7 offers support for the FLAC audio format and boasts a terrific audio chip to boot, so those lossless files sound exceptionally good. It also has expandable memory and stunning battery life, not to mention being pretty cute.

Of course, Apple's iPod classic gets a mention, though it supports Apple's proprietary Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) and you'll need to use iTunes to manage these files. Still, it's a superb player with significantly better sound quality than its predecessor.

Creative's Zen doesn't support lossless compression but it will play uncompressed WAV files for untouched lossless quality. Its audio decoder is excellent and even without SD card expansion, the most recent model can hold 32GB of music and video.

Finally, Cowon's iAudio D2 was a nominee for our prestigious Editors' Choice award in 2007. It supports FLAC audio and like the iAudio 7, rocks a stunning audio chip for terrific sound reproduction. As an added bonus, its 16GB maximum capacity is expandable with SD cards.