"Lawrence Leung" wrote in message
news:tIURb.45668$U%5.239850@attbi_s03...
I believed that all the posts started from "Is the war over yet? DVD-A
vs. SACD"

Why on earth everyone talking about the technology difference between
DVD-A and SACD?

You know, whether a product will be success or not, majority is not
because it is better than all the other competitors, it is because of the
marketing skills!

When we were talking about VHS v. Beta 20 years ago, the marketing vs.
actual performance issue was a legitimate one, as Beta wasn't merely
technically better, it was (and continues to be) clearly the better format
as realized by the consumer. In that case marketing clearly won out and
Sony learned many hard lessons. This is clearly not the same as the DVD-A
v. SACD war, wherein while DVD-A might be technically superior to DVD-A,
there is no verifiable audible difference between the two formats (as
opposed to the clear qualitative difference between Beta and VHS) so the
winner will be the better marketed technology as they are sonically
indistinguishable. In this case, I'm betting that Sony learned its lesson
well and won't make the same mistake twice.

Take McDonald as an example, I refuse to accept that they have the best
hamburger in the world (I can make hamburger ten times better than them),
or the best french fries in the world. But why they are the most success
fast food chain in the world? Marketing! The Ronald McDonald clown is
almost as famous as Santa Claus...

So to determine or to guess which format will win the war, we need to go
deep into their marketing skills rather than their sonic difference.

As I said before, given that there is no sonic difference, you're correct
here.

Tell me why can CD take over the dominance place of LP 20 years ago? Is
it because CD is so much better than LP? No!

Well, actually it was. CDs don't wear, have a better signal to noise ratio,
lower distortion, more extended undistorted bandwidth, and are portable to
boot. The CD takeover of the recorded music world 20 years ago actually had
very little to do with marketing. It was all about infinitely better
technology.

Everything is marketing my
friends, and if you can't accept it, I'm afraid you will be very
disappointed!

So unless somebody start talking about how DVD-A and SACD promote their
products, I think all other discussion will be pointless, forgive me to
say that!

Just think of that, who are the "main stream" music CD buyers? Some
audiophile tech. geeks like all of you here reading RAHE, or someone
don't know anything (or know very little) about sonic? And what can drive
them to buy?

What drives them to buy is portability, shareability and convenience, so
long as it doesn't sound really bad. When I sit in my office and listen to
a web radio broadcast at 128 or even 64 Kbps, and I'm listening through my
Altec Lansing sub-sat computer system over the din of the fans and noise of
my pc, it sounds fine. When I listen to low bit-rate mp3's on my portable
while on a bus or subway, it sounds fine. When I plugged the same mp3
player into my cheap living room system for background music during a
cocktail party a few weeks ago, nobody noticed. Of course it sounded like
crap over my main system, but most "main stream" buyers don't have a real
system. The possibilites for recorded music are no longer driving main
stream audio. Those are being driven by the home theater market.