Latest SACD News - Very Interesting.

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.

For me a new format is inevitable. I fought like hell to stop cassette and CD, but you know what, the big companies will do what they want and the consumer be damned. They can ignore the consumer because the average consumer is a melon head--completely, and easily persuaded by the media and Best Buy/Circuit City mentality. If you build it they will buy it.

I want SACD to win the format war even though I don't own a player. The reason? Two channel survival. If DVD-A wins out, you and every audiophile can forget about two channel. I can't afford 5.1 now or in the future. My listening room can't even fit small wall mounted speakers much less subwoofers or decent rear channel speakers. If my greatest desire was a front channel speaker I couldn't do a damn thing about it--no room.

DVD-A is totally motivated by gimmicky and non-musical values. DVD-A is a threat to everyone who loves music. Not only that, SACD pounds the crap outta DVD-A. I have 2000 redbook CDs but I wanna die having purchased at least 20,000 titles--ain't gonna happen with evil DVD-A. I want to get off the hardware carousel and start buying music again. It's music I love--not amps and line conditioners.

99% of people who own DVDs wouldn't know a quality recording if it bit them in the ass--and if we do nothing as an audiophile community, then these DVD owners, the lowest common demoninators, are gonna dictate the future of our music. It scares the hell outta me. In about six months I'm gonna buy me a new Sony 777 (been saving for three years now) because it still supports two channel and sounds great, it beats the Mark Levinson redbook player I auditioned--so analogue like. How analogue like is DVD-A? I've only heard the Toshiba and I wasn't impressed.