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.
Andrew.
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.
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. They lost the
Betamax Vs. the VHS "war" for exactly the same kind of arrogant
marketing.
Sony demonstrated Beta to RCA who wanted to license Beta as their home
recording format. When RCA told Sony that they liked the format EXCEPT
that they needed for Sony to modify Beta so that it could record 120
minutes (the original BetaMax format was 90 minutes of record time
maximum). Sony responded by telling RCA that what they demonstrated was
THE WAY BetaMax was and they had no intention of changing it. RCA then
said thanks but no thanks and chose VHS over Beta because it could
record 120 minutes. Eventually, Sony came out with Beta 2 which was half
the speed and would give 180 minutes on a standard tape, but by then, it
was too late. Likewise, Sony never made hybrid SACD/CD discs initially
and by the time they decided to allow it, the audio world had decided
SACD was too limiting. It''s the same arrogant marketing stance and it
seems that they never learned that Sony NEEDS to follow the market, not
try to force the market into following Sony.
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