Those who would want to play quality music and video should invest in a quality DVD player that can play all formats such as Divx, SACD, VCD etc. The biggest selling format of all time, the digital versatile disc player forms the back bone of a high quality home theatre system. With its razor sharp images partnered with dolby digital/DTS surround sound, a DVD player is the easiest way to jump on to the bandwagon. Latest iterations also include DVD audio, which is a high resolution audio format to be far superior to the plain CDs and also HD DVD, which is high defenition DVDs.

VCD and MP3 - The reason for covering these under the DVD section is because the popular cheap DVD players play all the formats under the world and so also the VCDs and MP3 for music which requires some demystification. Despite being very popular in China and South east asia, VCD world over has been dumped long back. In fact in many advanced countries the format was never formally launched! These countries directly jumped to DVDs from LDs. Another reason for VCDs to be popular in our part of the world is the VCDs are pirate's heaven. The cost is low and copying is easy.

If you have ever experienced a good DVD vis a vis a VCD demo, it is impossible to return back to low definition and highly compressed AV quality of VCD! The sound that VCD delivers (MP3) is also very poor, it is one tenth compressed compared to the CDs. Add to the situation that most of the discs are poorly mastered and badly engineered (in fact these terms do not apply to VCDs.!) the final quality is pittance.

While India is barely going CDs, the sound of MP3 from bad tapes was supposed to be a big leap for the never good sound Indian ears. But the fact remains that the MP3 was created to cater computer applications for playing chimes! While the hi-fi world is grossly dissatisfied with the CD quality and looking forward to SACD and DVD-audio; on the other extreme are pirates pushing what is an audio nightmare.

MP3 is bearable only on the low resolution multi-media speakers and VCDs can be acceptable on the vintage TVs. But if one is seeking even half decent quality entertainment, then perhaps VHS tapes are better than both these...!