SACD - Another year and ...

SACD looked & sounded nice at the shows, but afraid to say there's not much available; may never be. Stereophile wasn't too keen about the DSD; justifiably so. I "settled" for HDCD instead. More software to offer, & enhances standard 16 bit playback to boot. Discs are the same prices as 16 bit RedBook too. InfoLink: http://www.hdcd.com/

I have been impressed with the sound of the Sony SACD players. Have yet to hear the Marantz, but $7500 is more than I'm willing to spend on a player anyway. New and cheaper Sony is supposedly just around the corner. And I have also read about a new Philips $2000 unit. The thing that would drive me absolutely nuts with the Sony players I checked out was the ungodly long time it took to initialize a disc. Strangely enough, I don't hear much negative feedback about this. I'm sure that is going to irk many people out there. I hope the upcoming players don't follow suit in this regard. I have now been waiting for three years to move on a new player. Thinking in vain that the format war would have shaken itself out by now. As hindsight is 20/20, I can say I was(and am) the fool for not picking something up by now. I kind of think that CD will survive much longer than anticipated. Perhaps even remaining the dominant format for some time(5 years???). SACD being a niche, along the lines of DAT, DCC, and MD. DVD will continue on up, but it's use might continue to be primarily non-audiophile based. Who knows? I think I might just jump into a great new 24 bit/96KHz CD player. After all, I certainly am NOT getting rid of my thousand or so CDs(too much of my heart invested there).

I have owned DVD since '97 and here were not a lot of titles for that format in the beginning either. I believe SACD will come of age as it is vastly better than CD regardless of what some people submit concerning HDCD and the such. I have owned the top Sony for about a year and I am happy with the steady stream of titles that are becoming available. My new Accoustech mag had many new SACD titles including Sades latest "Lovers Rock". I sometimes wonder about what audiophiles really want..? We complain and complain about CD, get a better format, then want to kill it because X thousand titles don't show up overnight. I use my player for CD as well as SACD playback and there is NO WAY I am ever going to forego a SACD title to go back to Red Book. I am glad Sony didn't listen to the same nay sayers regarding the first playstation which only had a few games released with it as the PS2 now follows with very few titles. At least SACD is real and not vapor-ware as is DVD Audio. Also note that some of the larger cd websites are now offering SACD's (cdnow.com) thus the masses are being introduced to the medium. Happy Turkey Day :) Mike

In either case,...SACD or DVD audio, any of the new, or upcomming, players must address playback of current CDs better than the first generation units have. I have talked with people that have one of the first two Sony units..and have added Bel Canto DAC-1's or someother outboard unit to improve the sound quality of standard Disks. All of us will have many, many more standard CDs for a long time...so the quality of the playback of these is as important as the playback of any advanced format.

The Dec 00 Stereophile has several articles that really muddly the water. Seems the technical discussions are saying two things. The watermarking of the DVD-audio format sucks and does leave audible artifacts. Second, the DVD-Audio is a better format then SACD...presumably without the watermarking. Figures.