Latest SACD News - Very Interesting.

The rotel 855 is very easy to listen to. I owned one and a later model that Bruce Armstrong[peak audio] did mods on. Then he tore the analogue section out of a Kenwood[handfuls of cheap parts, and completely rebuilt itthe way he thought it would sound most analogue. He actually did a lot of listening to changes he made [he sold 4 of them and built one for himself....they are all still working fine and are making good music to this day..the new gear is better but I'm waiting to see where all this lands. My nephew is still using my rotel 855 and he was surprised when his new panasonic dvd did not sound nearly as good on cds....maybe Bruce will mod a sacd player for me someday when I feel safe with their reliabilty.

Let me get this straight. Universal/Sony is going to produce all SACD's with only on pressing plant. Doesn't sound like they have the capacity to produce very many disc. And, in the mean time they are going to screw all those consumers with standard cd/dvd players. Sounds like suicide to me.

So, how many cd (dvd/cd) players have consumers purchased since cd became available? A hell of a lot more than 1 million units. Personally, I own 7 cd,dvd players (2 person household, including cdrom and car unit). So, universal is going to forget about all those hundreds of millions of cd players to concentrate on 1 million sacd players. Again, the numbers don't add up.

Universal is hoping to charge about $23 per disc. Key word is hoping. A bet anybody that those disc hit the shelves for $30-$40. So , let me get this straight; I go out and buy a $300 sacd/dvd/cd player and have to pay $30-$40 to buy one disc. In my professional opinion (27 years in the audio industry) a customer that comes in and buys a bargain cd/sacd player is not looking to spend even $23 on a cd. The only customers who buy bargain cd/dvd players fall into the "I don't care how it sounds-I just don't want to see it and make it easy to use crowd" commonly refered to as custom installation.

Finally, Sony says that they are committed to high quality audio. In the last 6 months I have purchased 4 cd's distributed by Sony that had nothing but MP3's on them. When I called to bitch at Sony they told me this is a way for them to control illegal copying. So, you put the CD label on a disc (which means that it has to conform to red book cd audio) and fill it with MP3's and pass it off as a real CD. Looks to me that Sony is really interested in quality audio. BTW Sony did replace them with real CD's.

Phillips has said they would no longer let anyone use that "CD" label on non-redbook CDs. There are some already out there has Prpixel notes.

I agree that 1 million is not a lot of SACD players (even 13 million). Since we all have different taste, no SACD is going platinum on billboard anytime soon. I count Ten CD players we own when you add in boomboxes, walkmans, and the cars; not even counting the computer's CD (2 more, plus work). And there are 290 million people in the USA alone. The number of CD/DVD players must be in the multiple billions worldwide.

The point everyone seems to be missing is that Universal has denied that they are switching over to hybrids. That could be smoke, but if it were they could have done a much better job of fudging. Apparently, they told Stereophile that it just wasn't true. And Stereophile ran with the story anyway.

Stereophile seems to have fanned a few industry rumours into a small flame.
Why would a major record company move to hi rez primarily to get around the copy protection problems in cd? Apart from the fact that anything can be copied in analog via an a/d and posted to the internet as a pcm digital copy, there is the question of challenging the hacker world to defeat SACD and DVD-A copy protection. At the moment SACD and DVD-A are obscure audiophile formats and probably not worthy of serious hacking, but if they become the industry's answer to avoiding copying, I'd expect an all-out assault on their protection schemes.