CD format war and resultant music players

The SACD & DVD-A market is essentially dead, thanks to our friends at Sony. The major difference between them and CDs is they have lots of memory space to store digital information. Well, somebody else would take advantage of the upcoming video-formated disc, when its market is secured, and utitlize it for audio. Given such major improvement over CDs, it might fly. No I wouldn't buy a copy of the same thing if it's an incremental improvement. We are talking about huge result here.

On the other hand, this hard drive concept is something to chew on. I don't hear about hard drive sound superiority if any. Even computers are suitably design to slip into family room audio-visual arrangement these days. And the mp3 market is booming. This computer stuff is much more mature than your blu-ray and hd-dvd. Perhaps it would only take 2 versus 5 years for the audio chip to fall into place.

SV:

"Perhaps it would only take 2 versus 5 years for the audio chip to fall into place."

But who would care? Yes, SACD was an improvement over Redbook CD, but not that major and not to the point that I was willing to own a duplicate music library. At the time that I purchased my SACD player five years ago (SONY SCD 555ES), I did so because I needed a new CD player ... otherwise I wouldn't have done it ... well, the good price helped also. To date, I have maybe 10 duplicate SACDs/CDs.

It would have to be one hell of an audio chip to get me to bite. The promise of additional video information is meaningless to me ... I prefer listening to my music, not watching it.

As I said previously, perfecting the hard drive interests me ... but because it would result in a hardware purchase, not a software one.

Regards, Rich

""Perhaps it would only take 2 versus 5 years for the audio chip to fall into place.""

"But who would care?"

Just a thought, or two. First point is the speed at which computer related technology advances, and second is a glimpse of the (not too distant) future where audio recordings could be downloaded onto a server or small storage devices of some type that are portable and connectable to home systems, boom boxes, I-pods, HT and automobile systems and the buyer is charged electronically at the time of purchase. I doubt we will be buying discs forever. In the meantime, I am not selling my CD/DVD player.

1. a well-engineered CD often sounds better than a SACD and there seem to be more and more well-engineered CDs. Barring some serious marketing (Beatles on SACD for example), I think the high-rez formats will go nowhere...
2. hard drive storage linked to good DACs seem to be the logical next step. And why not? Computers/chips keep getting better and cheaper while good CD/SACD players are still extremely expensive.
3. vinyl STILL sounds better than all the digital formats and is alive and well!

I haven't heard any CDs that sound better than their SACD counterparts. I have heard CDs that sound much better than their DVD Audio counterparts.