SACD

No you are not right.

Recording and mastering quality varies according to the provenance of the Master tapes used. Earlier generations are usually better, but a lot depends on aging and wear and tear, alignment issues etc

Then it's down to how they were mastered and by whom and what equipment they used. A lot of recordings since 1990 have suffered from too much radio friendly compression and are revealed as victims of the loudness wars when played on a full bandwidth system. They often sound lifeless and have squashed dynamics. Hence the use of sites like Dynamic Range Database.
http://dr.loudness-war.info

Last but not least the format of choice (vinyl, CD, SACD, Download).

Luckily you shouldn't have to worry too much about a recording unless it's a particularly bad recording. Steve Hoffman Forums is a good place to start but beware that even there consensus is often hard to find.

This is strange seeing how we audiophiles normally agree on most issues. Sorry.

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/music-corner.2/

The real problems begin if you want to hear Elvis or the Beatles as they sounded originally! 

The great news is that there's never been a better time price wise to buy CDs.

 

I wouldn't crawl over broken glass to get an SACD player.  I have one and, as others have commented, can say from experience SACD sound isn't automatically better.  If you find an affordable CD player that also does SACD or, better yet, a high value universal player (Oppo?), sure get it - but if money is tight, don't go out of your way for the SACD capability.

Did the flood ruin your gear and library or just your gear?  I'm wondering if you can clean and thereby save your CDs.  If rehab/recovery is possible, consider getting something that will let you rip them to hard drive and playback via DAC.  Cocktail Audio has something that is all in one.  Unable to comment about sound quality.  I find playback of ripped CDs via an Auralic Aries Mini sounds better than playing the actual disc.  There are other options than the Aries Mini too.  Good luck.  Sorry to hear about your losses.

I have an expensive player that does both SACD and Red Book CD well, but while some SACD are good, very little of my music that I like the best is on SACD, so I use the SACD part very seldom. Hope this helps.

SACD solves my two complaints with CD and most other digital formats: 1) it restores the flow to music, and rids that sense of the music sounding chopped up, and 2) it provides the sort of low-end foundation and solidity to the music missing in those other digital formats.  Yes, I have some poorly recorded SACDs, but they still do not commit the two aforementioned faults.

My biggest problem with SACD is the same thing as my biggest disappointment with SACD - the format flopped.  And because of that, very little SACD content exists.  Had the record companies stayed on board, I would have likely triplicated (already vinyl and CD) my library with SACDs.  And oftentimes, what content does exist costs a lot.  Content's enough of a reason not to worry about whether your player supports the format.  If the machine you buy plays SACDs, that's certainly not a negative.  But sadly, it's no longer one of my top priorities in a machine I'd buy

I am a person who has tried a lot of tweaks over the years. Some didn't help or made things worse; and yet most have found a place as a permanent part of my system(s). I have a fair number of SACDs and they sound really good, but not necessarily better than my standard CDs.
I also had a high end analog set-up which blew away early CDs, but newer ones have come a long way and there are a lot of things that can be done to improve these red book CDs and bring them to a very competitive level with high end analog rigs.