Can't help on the SACD question as I've never tried one - there just doesn't seem to be any albums out there on SACD that I'm really interested in so it seems a bit pointless for me (I mean that purely from my perspective, I don't mean to say SACD in itself is pointless).
As for the quality of music on the PS3, it will depend what format he rips them to. If he was interested in the sound quality, he could upgrade the hard disk and rip them to WAV which is lossless, in which case it should be exactly the same quality as the CD (possibly better in that the hard drive should provide a better transport than the PS3's internal CD drive). On the other hand, many people have said that they generally can't tell the difference between CD and 320 Kbps AAC files, so he could choose this method instead when ripping for a good compromise in quality and compression.