[Andrew Haley]

Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
Andrew Haley wrote:

Audio_Empire wrote:

Sony has great ideas, but they always manage to screw the pooch
somehow. They either don't follow through with marketing the ideas
(SACD) or they stubbornly refuse to fit the product to the real
marketing demands (BetaMax).

I don't think SACD was so much badly marketed as badly timed. It
was introduced at the same time as MP3 players, and an important
feature was that SACDs couldn't be ripped. It looked to me (and to
many others) like that was the real purpose of SACD: an unrippable
medium. High-res was just a teaser to get people to buy them.

This belief was perhaps wrong, and the timing was just an
unfortunate coincidence. But with people's listening moving onto
the cloud and digital players, any format tied to a physical medium
is a relic, no matter how good it can sound. If the new Sony
players don't allow the user the freedom to listen to their music
where and how they want those players will fail, and deservedly so.

I don't think that being not "ripp-able" had anything to do with
SACD's failure. People interested in SACD wouldn't be interested in
MP3 at all.

I think you're denying my existence.

Besides, very soon after Sony introduced the format, other record
companies were producing hybrid disks that would play as regular CDs
when played on a standard CD player and would play as a SACD on an SACD
player. When the CD layer was played, that could be ripped. The first
generation of Sony SACDs were SACD ONLY, and that was Sony's marketing
error, and was typical of Sony's arrogant marketing.

Indeed. Mind you, dual-layer hybrid SACDs weren't all that easy to
make at the time, and it wasn't clear how well legacy CD players would
cope with them. Producing SACD-only discs was the safest thing to do
from an engineering point of view.

And I still think a major motivation for the SACD was to be
unrippable. If you look at the engineering effort that went into the
copy-prevention features of SACD, there's a lot to support that view.

Andrew.