Latest SACD News - Very Interesting.

The point everyone seems to be missing is that Universal has denied that they are switching over to hybrids. That could be smoke, but if it were they could have done a much better job of fudging. Apparently, they told Stereophile that it just wasn't true. And Stereophile ran with the story anyway.

Stereophile seems to have fanned a few industry rumours into a small flame.
Why would a major record company move to hi rez primarily to get around the copy protection problems in cd? Apart from the fact that anything can be copied in analog via an a/d and posted to the internet as a pcm digital copy, there is the question of challenging the hacker world to defeat SACD and DVD-A copy protection. At the moment SACD and DVD-A are obscure audiophile formats and probably not worthy of serious hacking, but if they become the industry's answer to avoiding copying, I'd expect an all-out assault on their protection schemes.

For me a new format is inevitable. I fought like hell to stop cassette and CD, but you know what, the big companies will do what they want and the consumer be damned. They can ignore the consumer because the average consumer is a melon head--completely, and easily persuaded by the media and Best Buy/Circuit City mentality. If you build it they will buy it.

I want SACD to win the format war even though I don't own a player. The reason? Two channel survival. If DVD-A wins out, you and every audiophile can forget about two channel. I can't afford 5.1 now or in the future. My listening room can't even fit small wall mounted speakers much less subwoofers or decent rear channel speakers. If my greatest desire was a front channel speaker I couldn't do a damn thing about it--no room.

DVD-A is totally motivated by gimmicky and non-musical values. DVD-A is a threat to everyone who loves music. Not only that, SACD pounds the crap outta DVD-A. I have 2000 redbook CDs but I wanna die having purchased at least 20,000 titles--ain't gonna happen with evil DVD-A. I want to get off the hardware carousel and start buying music again. It's music I love--not amps and line conditioners.

99% of people who own DVDs wouldn't know a quality recording if it bit them in the ass--and if we do nothing as an audiophile community, then these DVD owners, the lowest common demoninators, are gonna dictate the future of our music. It scares the hell outta me. In about six months I'm gonna buy me a new Sony 777 (been saving for three years now) because it still supports two channel and sounds great, it beats the Mark Levinson redbook player I auditioned--so analogue like. How analogue like is DVD-A? I've only heard the Toshiba and I wasn't impressed.

Good points all. I believe that SACD is a path to keep performances digitally locked up without copy codes/protection. If no chip set and no player can copy the disk digitally, or output the bit stream (other than big $$$ players like Accuphase or through heavy license fees), then the media companies can skirt the freedom of copy issues in court. Eventually CD players and music CDs will be phased out - there will no longer be CDs except for data copy and legacy. The big media companies are attempting to put the genie back in the bottle. I guess I will have to dust off my Nak 700II for car-tunes!

I started another thread on the subject on 5/27, take a look on the points that have been made them to complement the ones here that are also very interesting.