Is SACD really this lousy?

All right, you asked.When I say listeners are manufactured I mean that most "music lovers" are in fact nothing but consumers gobbling up everything in their path.I find it difficult to understand how anyone can like Beatles and Dead Can Dance equally.These people are gatherers and nothing more.As LPs are inconvinient compared to any digital format,the analog records will most certainly die out since no one (including you) is going to pay for LPs five times the price of digital.If Miles Davis was influenced by Armstrong,then Paco de Lucia is influenced by Russian folk balalaika music and John McLaughlin by Bill Clinton.

You are definitely entitled to your opinion, but I will accept the facts at an established music site over a person who is amused by silly comparisons. My effort was sincere, it appears you are following another agenda.

Albert, I wonder if this guy is even worth the effort? He sure seems like an angry personality, feeling the need to bash important musicians and the like. Must be sour grapes on his part. One other observation, he does love number sequences, heh heh.

Listen to the new Accuphase 77V 24/192 playing Red Book CDs, particularly remastered 20-bit, XRCD, etc. Then tell me how great the SACD-1 sounds.

SACD has the POTENTIAL to rival or surpass analog for sound quality but will it. The mastering may still be the weak link. Base on many CDs that came from 96/24 masters, they sounded good unless you compare them to the originals. The so called remasterd CDs generally have 2 qualities to make them sound "better": 1 Less dynamics, (eventually we'll have monotone signals called music) and 2 less trebble. Take the RVG series from Blue Note. They had a small fraction of the dynamics and very little if any real highs of the previous versions of the CDs, yet at first people sucked them up like crazy. Eventually everyone dumped them. (Tower has been selling them for $7.99 each)The best CDs are those mastered using XRCD and HDCD. I prefer HDCD because they're much less expensive and contrary to popular belief, you don't need an HDCD player to get the major part of the benefit. (I have HDCD gear Spectral). That's another issue, Really inexpensive CD playback is just greatly lacking in being able to reproduce what's on the CD. Any recording studio software will allow you to analyze the output of a digital transport. If you think jitter is the only problem or the biggest problem, just analyze the output of a digital sine wave over 10kHz, and it gets worse as the frequency goes up. At home I'm 80% vinyl. (It was 95% until I got the Spectral). In the car and at work, I'm 100% digital. (It's hard to find a 57 Dodge with a record player, besides they only played 45s)