Sony gets serious about high-resolution audio, again
On Thursday, September 19, 2013 6:09:53 AM UTC-7, Audio_Empire wrote:
In article ,
Scott wrote:
On Sunday, September 15, 2013 7:44:56 PM UTC-7, 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.
Andrew.
I don't think that being not "ripp-able" had anything to do with SACD's
failure.
Failure? SACD is alive and well in the audiophile market. Lot's of new SACDs
coming out each week and many of them are really well mastered. SACDs are
about as dead as vinyl. IOW they are the rarest of beasts, physical media
that is on the rise.
Yes, of course SACD is alive and well in the "audiophile market", but,
then so is vinyl. saying that a product is successful in the audiophile
market is sort of a left-handed complement.
No, it's simply stating a fact. Again, this is an audiophile forum. I was assuming we are all audiophiles who care about sound quality here. I would think the "audiophile market" would be the one we actually collectively care about.
CD sold millions of players
and billions of CDs, SACD has sold, probably, THOUSANDS of players and
perhaps hundreds of thousands of discs.
And McDonalds has sold billions of burgers. So what?
Were it not for the audiophile
market (and the dual-layer, hybrid SACD disc) the format would be as
dead as a doornail, and nobody would be doing it any more.
yeah! Thank goodness for...us....I guess. Not sure at this point. Am I the only one here buying SACDs?
SACD was envisioned as a replacement for the "flawed" and
less-than-audiophile-quality CD. It turned out that the for the vast
number of music buyers in the world, the CD was "good enough" and the
general market essentially ignored SACD and other high-definition audio
formats. The truth is that few consumers have equipment that will
resolve any difference between regular Red-Book CD and SACD or any other
so-called hi-res format for that matter. In fact, there are
knowledgeable people who post here all the time who regularly state and
restate that there is NO audible difference between these formats and
are quite willing to cite studies that purport to prove that assertion.
Again, so what? When I get a new SACD that is beautifully mastered and it sounds amazing I really don't care about what people here state and restate. I don't care what studies say. I care about superior sound and better mastered SACDs are a great source for that.
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