24.144.104.233
In Reply to: RE: SACD posted by stator_99@yahoo.com on May 19, 2009 at 16:39:28
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.
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