RE: The elephant in the room...

"if there is music on these high rez formats that is not available on CD or vinyl then Peter may have some interest. Pretty sure Peter hates the entire notion of downloaded music"

Not many industrialists can influence the habits of the markets with their products. Steve Jobs is the obvious example but he influenced markets with innovation of "new better ways" not "old better ways". I certainly understand the problem with upsampeling a rbcd or the inconsistencies of SACD's but I wonder if there are viable (meaning acceptable to AN philosophies) hi rez applications like Blue Coast and Linn offerings and digitizing one's analogue software. If the process of recording is a pure process what makes 18 bits such a magic number? The sound quality of the 1865 chip?? Well... maybe, but I have to think there are other circuits out there that could be suitable.

"One of the best Hi Rez rooms I heard was from the people at Usher but in a strange way it sounded amazing and hi-fi but at the same time it sounded like a synthesizer - there is something spectacularly accurate and pin point about everything - hyper detail - that is very impressive but something oddly artificial about it at the same time."

I agree in general with your observations. I am sitting on 100 sacds which are gathering both dust and value. There are some real stand outs, though, like Beck "Sea Change" and even some old school Jazz like Kenny Burrell's "Midnight Blue". Both of these among others sound spectacular on SACD.

Somewhere along the line I had to make a strategic content decision and SACD just didn't do it for me, overall. If I was going to live with Redbook as my main diet, then AN was "it". Since then, the only digital products that peek my interest are upstream AN DACs. But, I am also hoping that Peter is going to surprise us with something "insanely great" and provide definitive proof that the terms "Audi Note Digital" and "Luddite" aren't synonymous.

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