State of HDCD and SACD

You'll be happy, the Marantz SA-11 is a great machine....now send it to Underwood Wally for the Ultimate tube mod and..........

John

I don't understand the motivation for tubed output stages on CDPs. It's an "additive" mod - the tubes are used as buffers after the SS output - so what's the point, other than impedance matching, which shouldn't be any issue with an active linestage at least?

I'm not saying this particular mod package doesn't improve the unit - I'm sure it does.

When I had my Shanling, I preferred the SS output to the tubed, and believe me I'm a tube guy (SET).

Several posters to this thread seem to have already answered your question regarding the future of SACD and HDCD - namely its all but completely dead and buried. But you seem not to want to hear them so instead I will tell you what you have been waiting to hear - namely that the furture is very bright indeed for these formats. The music buying public is just about to wake up and realize that this is exactly what they have been yearning for. They will abandon their MP3 players and Ipods in droves and rush out to buy all the best megabuck audiophile SACD and HDCD players they can get their hands on. Record executives will suddenly realize the enormous potential of these formats and decide to reissue the entire Classic Blue Note and Prestige, Riverside, Verve (etc. etc.) jazz catalogs with tens of thousands of titles which have never been reissued on Redbook let alone SACD with its paltry list of a few hundred Jazz titles (including some of the same tired top 50 titles which they have be recycling for the past 30 years.) Rudy van Gelder will of course, personally oversee the monumental remastering effort and we will finally achieve perfect sound forever.
P.S. You are free to wake up now and return to your previously scheduled programming.

Here's my analysis, for what its worth.

The inventors of HDCD are on record as saying that they only intended for it to be a transition technology until higher resolution formats came on stream. Remember that HDCD is relatively old now. It was before SACD, DVD-A, etc. On that basis, therefore, I would say it's done. However, the rights to HDCD were bought by Microsoft. I think the plan was that they had designs on it as a possible format to deliver music sold online. But it seems to be forgotten and is sitting on the shelf now. Realistically, I think that it's just been overtaken by advances in digital. Unless Microsoft give some indication of doing something with it, and putting their considerable muscle behind it, put HDCD in the museum with the eight track casettes.

In all likelihood, I would say that SACD is in the same boat, at least in the longer term. However, it may have a little more staying power. SACD was championed by Sony, but it's not a priority for them now. Partly this is a reflection of their new CEO's strategy of rationalization of the company's products, as evidenced by some of their corporate moves over the last year. But mostly, I think, that it too is a transition technology. Now that Blu-ray, (and HD-DVD)are in the marketplace, there is no need for Sony to push SACD any more. They certainly seem to have lost interest in it. Sony's new Blu-ray can be used for high definition audio if the desire is there to do that, as well as for all the video stuff. So there is simply no need for SACD now. It would be a duplicate for audio purposes only and that's not how Sony seems to be moving now at a corporate, strategic level. However, Sony do own a large music catalog and many of their hardware products do have SACD. So it may be around for a while. Sony are something of a pit bull with their products. They don't let go until they absolutely have too. It was only two or three years ago that they stopped making beta players, if you can believe that. And they stood by minidisc for a long time.

So I think that SACD has a little more staying power than HDCD. How long it lasts will depend upon whether Blu-ray wins the current DVD war, and whether it does double duty for audio. If that happens, it will accelerate the end of SACD.

Regarding equipment selection, the posts above make some good recommendations. I'd go with the SACD option.

You're right Paul, it is a tube buffer stage, not a tube output stage. Maybe the sonic difference is the better caps and diodes, who knows? I certainly cannot explain the benefits of a tube buffer stage, though I do know that Musical Fidelity made a lot of money selling outboard tube buffers.
It does sound pretty damn good though.

FWIW, I was joking. Simply enjoy your Marantz SA-11.

John