Coping in an Age of Uncertainty

One reason I decided to get the 9000es is that I was buying a handfull of cds the other day and and was wondering how long it will be before the same titles are available on sacd. Like everyone on this site I own a lot of music on cd that I will use for a long time, but should I still be buying cds with this clearly better format emerging?

Nice thread Kelly, I know you don't need my ideas on the topic of wich format, but let me tell you why I chose SACD. I watched for three years as the talk of a "new" format bounced around in Stereophile. I held off upgrading my digitial front end in anticapation of the new digital! Last year my cd player being five years old was in my opinion dated in it's advancement so I decided it was time to move. I chose to go with SACD for the sole reason that I could continue to use and grow my "redbook" cd collection, but I could also get the benifits of the latest technology (digitial filters) and start a collection of SACD. My choice became fairly obviouse to me, for $3000 I could buy the SCD-1 wich I understood to be within the same ballpark as an upsampled $15,000 system with standard cds. With SACD the sound was reported to be better and DVD-A had another stumble getting out of the blocks. To me DVD-A was dead when it's codes were broken, and deader still when the watermark issue came to light. Upsampling is very exciting and I believe will remain a viable option. But with a system one fifth the cost achieving about the same level of proformance what was my choice? I think you face a different possition than alot of us Kelly. Your base point is a system most of us will only read about, so moving to SACD may not have the same impact as it did on my system.
The one thing I wouldn't do is sit and wait, listening to the old playback technology for the next two, three, four ... years and not getting the best proformance possible during that time! (for me, being told I had a 1% chance of still being alive today, two or three years is too long to wait. Fact is we only have today, enjoy!)Your options I would think are a digitial to digitial upsampler to at least get the best from your existing library and wait, or wait through the summer when some of the big boys come out with there machines that may provide for upgrading.
For the rest of the lower price adiophiles, I just don't see how waiting is helping you. For the price of a good standard cd player, you could have an SACD that improves over standard "redbook cd" playback, allows for the choice of SACD and improved the DVD playback (9000es). By the time something actually happens, the system you'll be listening to will be 5,8,12 ... years old based on a technology pushing 30 years.
That was my thinking, no debates or defence from me, I promise. I'm just sharing how I aproached it, it worked for me. J.D.

I'm with Garfish. I have decided to keep my Mark Levinson 37 transport and upgrade the 36 DAC to a Dodson 217 MkIID DAC (there was no comparison between the two DACS and upgrading the M-L 36 to a 360S would have cost a lot). I am not worried about upgrading to SACD or DVDA at this time, and I have much of what I like on about 1000 redbook CDs and many of these will not come out in the new formats in the near future. In the meantime, I have returned to listening to records (which I prefer). One of the real benefits of the format war has been the renewed interest in analog. There is some wonderful analog equipment out there: it is nearly as quiet as CDs and sounds much better.

If you saw the thread on my just arrived Stan Warren modified DVD player, my thinking was to give it at try. I am still breaking it in, but sounds good so far. I do not know if it will best my limited edition Rotel RCD-990, but it should be better than my old Cambridge Audio CD4 Player in my den/home office. I have a television in there as well, and now will have a second place to play DVD movies in that room if that is where it ends up if the Rotel 990 still sounds better. So at the very worst, this Stan Warren machine is a great sounding DVD player. Not much of a gamble for a little money.

No new format will succeed if everybody chooses to wait and see what happens. I recommend Art Dudley's editorial in the January/February 2001 Listener, in which he draws a comparison to the electric car. Yes, yes, I know, you don't want to spend your hard-earned money on something without a clear future. But as many here have told us, you can enjoy SACD for a pretty small investment (about what some of us might spend on one or a couple of pairs of interconnects). And you don't have to use it as your main CD playback.