Why HDCD did not become a dominant format?

The major players could not agree on this format. DVD-A and SACD formats were under development. Pacific Mircosonics was a tech company, not a marketing company. The majors development of the high end audio formats was interupted by Apple's introduction of the Ipod, downloading of music, and a generation that values convenience over the quality of the sound. Hopefully, technology will catch up and give us both convenience and sound quality...until then...I will remain committed to spinning vinyl. By the way, have you ever listened to JVCs XRCDs? Vastly superior to standard CDs...nearly equal to the new formats in quality...and gone from the U.S. market due to high costs and flagging sales.

Joman that's interesting as Billy G. certainly could have handled the 'marketing' of HDCD. I wonder what he's done with it? I hope Keith Johnson was well paid for it; he has certainly contributed much to my listening enjoyment via cassettes, Spectral and HDCD and Reference Recordings(maybe even Avalon Acoustics?(anyone know). Maybe it from that some of that income Keith decided to continue Reference recordings and bought it back??

Mcpody I understand the majors couldn't agree; I just don't understand why, given the marked superiority of HDCD? Sure DVD-As and SACDs were on the way-but neither was as easily backwards compatible. In fact,it seems virtually all manufacturers could have made money selling new machines had they fully adopted HDCD.

Given the amount of compression applied to most recorded music by the studio mastering engineers - I am not sure HDCD was necessary even if it was better on paper...

There are more HDCD recordings available than SACD and DVD-A combined. It was widely used, but lost momentum when Pacific Micro was bought by Microsoft. Many, if not most, HDCD encoded recordings are not even marked as such.