Is SACD a dead format?

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

There were all kinds of them @ CES with several companies selling them.

I think some mistakes are being made in the above statements.

One has to accept that many people interested in Audio didn't find the sonic differences in SACD. Yes,maybe some of our systems aren't revealing enough,maybe some of the discs didn't do the format justice.
But this is not just the average Joe this is people INTERESTED in audio.
Failure to capture them has been more of a problem.

Anyone can make their own value judgement but my $800 SACD/DVD through my $3000 amp into my $3000 speakers left many a listener baffled as to what the advantage SACD gave over CD on the same Sony machine.
Play a normal Redbook on my $3000 CD player and it was no contest.

I said it at the time and got laughed at-you couldn't even find a SACD player in the same price range as my Ayre CX-7 to even try and adopt the format here in the UK's third biggest city and arguably 2nd biggest hi-fi city.

DVD's success was down to an instant improvement in replay and met mass acceptance-now if SACD could have made even a smidgen of that impact it might have survived too.

It didn't pass the basic test because Sony didn't make sure the early discs revealed it's superiority.

Nobody would turn their nose up at superior sound if it was realistic to enjoy it.
And for those of us more interested in the music than the reproduction then SACD never got out the starting blocks.