"I've been happily using my Roland VS-880 recorder for a few years. Recently a friend of mine told me they use data compression on the recording and it isn't truly CD quality. He uses another brand due to this, but when I listen to the two the quality seems the same to me. Is he right about this?"

The term CD quality gets thrown around so much it's starting to not mean much, especially in light of the fact that most recorders we use these days are better than CD quality. In the strict sense CD quality means 44.1 kHz sampling at a bit depth of 16 bits (other things are implied, such as PCM encoding etc.). Roland does use a CODEC to store the audio on its hard drive so the data is compressed (meaning not 44.1/16). Many of their newer machines allow the user to disable this compression feature, but most users don't choose to because they can't hear much, if any, difference and they'd rather save the space on their hard drives. When the VS-880 first arrived on the scene this was a popular and controversial subject. Sales were slow right at first because people feared the possibility of poor sound quality. But, as the famous saying says, "The proof is in the pudding." The VS-880 sounded great, and word quickly spread that the data compression was not an issue. In fact, the VS-880 actually sounded better than many other recorders available at the time, and it certainly had way more features. It goes to show that there is much more to good sound quality than sampling rates and bits. The rest it history. The Roland VS series is one of the most popular products in the history of our business and still going strong. You have nothing to worry about. Many others agree that your recorder sounds great, regardless of what is going on inside it.