Will the HDCD format survive

Contrary to what most folks assume, DVD-A will never catch on because no retail space will be allocated to it. Retailers are not going to replace CDs with DVD-A since no consumers have DVD-A players and the discs won't play in current DVD players. Moreover, where are the discs? There aren't ANY, and there won't be ANY for some time. As a final nail in DVD-A's coffin, the watermarking to be used in DVD-A is audible. As such, no audiophiles will buy it, even if it ever becomes available. As to the original poster's question about HDCD. Forget it, HDCD isn't even a format.

There are 20 times the number of titles in HDCD as in SACD, and they aren't restricted to the Sony/Columbia/subsidiary catalog either. I'd call that dominant...SACD will never catch up to the number of titles mastered with HDCD. SACD will never catch on with the general public (they're priced too high), and HDCD already has. SACD's will never play their SACD layer on a CD player, and HDCD has always been compatible with all CD players (don't require the HDCD subcode to be decoded, in order to play). Wake up and smell the cauffin...

DVD-A has a long way to go regarding the watermark issues. Once that is solved. I believe that that format will prevail. Sony has a great sounding product but as I have seen Sony do they charge too much. Look at the case of the mini disk. Anyone remember these debuting in the early nineties? Sony produced prerecorded versions of their catalog to put the minidisk in competition with cds. What happened? The minidisk failed. Sony gouges the market. HDCD will survive but only until DVD-A solves the watermark issue

HDCD is a band-aid and sounds like it. Hope it disappears.

I think HDCDs are already becoming obsolete because recent non-HDCDs are mostly well recorded, and much better than the recordings of even a few years old. I own an HDCD player, and though I can still tell the difference between HDCD and non-HDCD encoded CD's, the margin is slimming all the time. If you don't have an HDCD player, playing HDCD encoded disks that aren't properly decoded by the HDCD filter tend to sound worse than non encoded CD's, so there is a slight sonic penalty to be paid by not owning one.