Will Microsoft kill DVD-A and SACD?

I argee with Garfish, CD's with or without HDCD are a low density storage medium by today's standards. For multi-channel music storage they are either too limited in resolution or running time to provide a viable high quality medium. I don't have personal experience with the "multi-channel CD's" referred to above, but every CD player I have seen has just a stereo output, meaning any extra-channel info would have to be matrixed into the 2-channel mix and decoded with an outboard device (possibly even in the analog domain), which could not provide anything near even Red Book resolution for all channels, and would presumably be running time-limited to boot. A multi-channel HDCD could hold no more, either. And I don't see how HDCD could be of any help with internet-distributed audio. Just getting the fidelity up to regular CD standards would be a feat, so whatever incremental improvement is supposed to offered by HDCD wouldn't apply here. And since MS is not a record label (yet!), I don't suppose they're going to be releasing HDCD music software themselves. There could not possibly be enough money to made in the current HDCD market to interest the likes of MS, so again, I have to wonder: What's it all about, Billy?

Several Microsoft principals are known to be deeply interested in music. When you're as rich as Microsoft, you can buy things just for the fun of it. Maybe they bought it for no better reason than that.

Perhaps Microsoft wants to deveolp better sound via PC's or at the very least lending the impression that they care about audio. Or they see license profits now that so many studios are set up for and releasing HDCD. I believe that there is about 6000 titles with more comming with this process. Geting a small piece of a large portion of every CD sold has got to have a decent return.