[Andrew Haley]

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.

Andrew.