Welcome! Need support, you got it. Or share you ideas and experiences.
76.181.151.161
In Reply to: RE: SACD posted by skytag on May 18, 2009 at 20:18:03
I am right with you on this one Skytag, it is nothing short of a travesty that SACD was not included with the new PS Audio digital gear, I own many SACD disc and Mobile Fidelity, Acoustic Sounds, and others continue to release remastered " classic rock " on SACD, and we SACD fans have been left holding the bag, Paul.....why not give this some more thought and I may become the proud owner of one of these.
Perhaps you could call it: " we totally screwed up the first time, but....this time for sure, The PS Audio " we got it right this time " The PM signature edition, the current edition can be for the unwashed masses and the PM Signature could be for those who truly care about the music.
Seemed like an odd strategic decision to me. I understand that Paul is saying about the ROM drive, but I also know that consumers want products that have the features they want, and technical explanations for why an obvious feature like this is missing are not the same as having the feature.
It seems to me that most people who want high-rez audio enough to pay $3K for a player would have been enjoying high-rez audio via SACD for a while now and have built a collection, small or large, of SACDs. To ignore those in favor of a new format that doesn't offer support for multichannel material and comprises an even smaller niche that SACD just seems crazy to me. Of course, I suck at predicting the future, so maybe they're getting in on the ground floor of a new technology, but frankly I have no desire whatsoever to buy DVD-Rs burned on a computer, and only offered by two or three companies when I can get professionally produced SACDs with labels on the disks and all the fixin's for the same money or less, with a much wider selection of titles, often with multichannel sound. And, in most cases they're hybrids that will play in a normal CD player to boot.
On their web site Paul talks like HRx is the ultimate. It isn't. It offers less than SACD. The strength of HRx, Linn's Studio Master format, and such is the ability to download the music and burn your own discs or download it to a server. That's the one thing SACD has working against it. You can't download DSD files and burn your own SACDs, you can't rip your own SACDs onto your computer and make "best of" compilations, and you can't put them on a server. I guess Sony wanted something you couldn't bootleg, and they got it, but there's a downside to it.
But they offer the best sound available and the ability to have multichannel SACD, stereo SACD, and Redbook CD all on the same disk. That's very cool. I have some fabulous stuff on SACD. And Amazon.com has a pretty extensive selection of them.
I also can't help but wonder what effect competing high-rez formats (HRx and Linn's Studio Master) will have on adoption. This looks like a really niche market to me.
SACD would have been nice, I agree. But it's not just the technical stuff that stops us it's the legal issues of achieving what we want.
To play SACD it takes an entirely different laser mechanism and that mechanism is only available on a standard transport module as I explained. If this is what you want, there are many fine ones out there like the Oppo. The ROM version is not available to play SACD because of licensing issues through Sony. Sony will not allow us to legally send the raw DSD data through anything but HDMI to maintain their DRM business. So I would be forced to use a standard mechanism with all the DRM restrictions required.
This limitation defeats the entire purpose of the PerfectWave series. The PerfectWave devices wouldn't be what they are if we had to use an off-the-shelf mechanism that plays all this and you'd lose all the advantages we offer for every other format. I am not willing to throw out red book and Hi Rez performance values to support SACD. It just doesn't make sense - especially since I can't support SACD the way it needs to be supported.
What you really want is the PerfectWave to do what it does AND play SACD. I agree with you, but this is not legally possible right now. We struggled with this decision and wondered if we should go ahead and build it - and hope we're small enough that Sony won't notice or care now that they've abandoned the format. In the end we figured it wasn't worth the risk.
I have no desire to build a compromised player and I have no desire to take on Sony. They could crush us like an ant.
This has nothing to do with not supporting SACD.
nt
Ah, so as I initially speculated, it does come down to a licensing issue. Thanks for the explanation.
Guess it would have been simpler to just say that but then it begs the question about how others are providing it. I just wanted to make it clear that we could have taken the off-the-shelf course and played SACD but we didn't and here's why.
Post a Followup:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2009, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
[ Go Green ]
[ Take5 ]