Is SACD a dead format?

The bottom line is the vast majority of people don't really care enough about sound quality to embrace something like SACD. Think about it. Where do most people listen to music? In their cars! SACD is superior to conventional CD, but I suspect less than 5% of the population has equipment good enough to appreciate the difference.

Sony should also be blamed for the way they marketed SACD. In the early days of the format most of what they did was reissue titles that already existed on CD, in many cases LP as well. SACD has the capacity where Sony could have combined two titles one on disc, for a one disc price. Instead they release Walter's Brahms Symphony #4 all by itself and charged $20 for it. Why didn't they put the third symphony on the disc as well? Why didn't they offer bargin pricing to get the format going? They sure weren't having to pay big licensing fees! The Mercury classical CD issues got it right. They added more music, in most cases, and didn't limit themselves to the exact same form as the original records. Why should they, CD has about thirty minutes more capacity. Mercury used it to their advantage and charged a low price. Sony could have filled up the entire disc with music and charge $12.99. Instead they chose to gouge the early converters.

An alleged dead format as in vinyl, last year sold more than SACD and DVD-A combined. We as Audiophiles kill our own formats. When CD first came out they sounded like crap and most of the Audiophiles were dumping turntables for pennies on the dollar. Twenty years later, some of them are re-purchasing analogue front ends. With todays technology state of the art will last months not years. Wait the Sonys of this world out, and don't jump on their ever changing format flavor of the month bandwagon and maybe some loyalty to the Audiophile community will be generated. Those of you that have invested in SACD or DVD-A, very shortly you will be able to purchase top of the line used SACD hardware for pennies.

Sony has several divisions. the Music division seems to be giving up on SACD to some degree. The hardware division seems to be still embracing it. It will survive, even if only as a niche product from smaller labels (Which is fine, that's where the best music often is anyway). There's over 2500 different SACD's available so no real shortage of music per se. It clearly is a superior format over Redbook. Anyone who can't hear a difference just doesn't have a system that is resovling enough. ;-)

Not to create a big spark B-U-T:
If you don't hear the high-rez difference with the SACD of Orff or Beck "Sea Change" then you really should sell-off your system or atleast get speakers that go up to 35KHz. I only test to 16KHz but there still is a HUGE difference.

I know this doesn't change SACD's death but atleast get a good listen before it goes. (p.s. I only have a 963SA too).

Sony is a lousy company. They are only interested in selling throw-away electronics for the massess. Anyone who is surprised that they dissatisfy the true enthusiast should only look to the last several decades of their marketing. They are like that fabled crow who sees his reflection in the stream and ends up dropping everything in his beak because he wanted what the other bird had.

No, let me tell you how I really feel. Why they think we need a new and improved Walkman or Clio every 3 months is beyond me. Their prices are outrageous, and you are buying into a host of incompatibilities and end-user parts problems.

Look to their music division when they had some of the best orchestras under their label, and you could see that they ruined that as well. In addition, their recordings from the golden-age of classical music are among the worst and the noisiest in the industry.

I bought a VAIO notebook from them about 2 years ago. I paid a little over $2000. The screen was crushed on a trip, so it is essentially unusable. A replacement screen is $800! A double-life battery is $500! A powercord is $150! If you lose their little proprietary connector so that it can plug into a projector, I couldn't even imagine what that would cost. I recently bought a dell notebook. Now I'm not going to say the quality or support of dell is better than sony, but at least it is 1/2 the price.

Rob