Fly in the SACD Ointment?

Makes sense to me Sol: I have been listening to some recordings tonight on CD "The Tiny Powell Gospel Collection" that were originaly recorded in 1949 and 1950 and had to take it to the mini system to make it listenable.

Guessing the future of SACD has about the same positive predictive value as picking the Stanley Cup winner in the first round of the playoffs. Too many variables and entropy to make anything but an educated guess. In real estate, it's location, location, location. In audiophilia, it seems to be source, source,source. High level, highly resolving systems and front ends are a double edged sword, bringing out the best in a good source and revealing a poor source for what it is.We spend a lot of money and effort to essentially put together a system that stays out of the way as much as possible, and let the recording through as unencumbered as possible. This has proven rewarding and painful. Some 50 y/o recordings on vinyl sound spectacular, some brand new CD's sound like crap. SACD is an attempt to get the listener a step closer to the source, and it stands to reason that, well, garbage in/garbage out. I hope, as noted above, that Sony, Telarc et al put out DSD recorded SACD's, they do indeed seem to sound better than many of the PCM based recordings. But some of the older recordings, obviously done right, re-released on SACD, such as the Walter Columbia recordings mentioned by Rcprince, are astounding sonically, as are many others. Much better than CD (IMOP), and arguably as good/better than vinyl. The fly in the ointment is real, and appears to have been hatched from the original source, and to somehow blame and discount the technology is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If the goal is to get closer to the live recording, SACD is perhaps a step in the right direction of building a better fly trap.

All very interesting comments and makes me enjoy my vinyl that much more.

Remember when CDs first came out? They were only analog recordings "AAD". Then a while later the big hype was All digital "DDD". Well the same has to happen to SACD and it might even take less time than before.

Jkoestner, I think you're right, although I'm certainly hoping that DSD doesn't sound as bad as those early DDD recordings did! Actually, there are a lot of great analog recordings out there which could sound equally great on SACD, there just aren't that many of them, at least for classical, in the Sony/Columbia/CBS catalog. Mes, excellent post; actually, there is at least one pcm based (I think) SACD that sounds stunning, the Delos recording of the Mahler 2, which seems from the literature to be a 20-bit recording but is clearly better than the good sounding CD version, and the Sony Goldberg Variations (the Perihia version) is a 24-bit pcm master that sounds very good on SACD as well. Seems to me the higher bit pcm recordings can translate well to SACD, although the all-DSD recordings I've heard from Telarc and Lyrinx make me hope that more DSD machines will become available and utilized.