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SACD - what went wrong?


Emjay

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  I've often thought that perhaps the only thing that may save us from being demolished for a galactic bypass may be it there is an alien audiophile on board the constructor ship who hears the sublime works we have produced along with nuclear war and beheading each other over religion.  It might be just enough to give us the benefit of the doubt and get off with a warning.

I'm already here and on the job.  But just keep a towel handy in case I change my mind.

 

Thebes The Galactic Straw Boss 

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Fwiw, I think Big Screen TVs and the need for larger speakers and a sub to appreciate the multichannel aspect of SACDs and DVD-As, along with there being two formats didn't help much...This along with 9/11 happening with the roll out of these products made buyers pick and choose what they were going to spend their money on and limited the profits for companies who wanted to market/sell them...In retail, I will always remember standing in a crowded BestBuy at Christmas time and the only clear floorspace was around me in the DVD-A/SACD section of the store. :ph34r:

 

Then they started mixing these disks in with CDs while there was still a large selection of those in the stores and I got tired sifting through the merchandise until finally they phased them out....

 

I still listen to a lot of multichannel music that I've acquired through the years and will never go back to CD--The last ones of those I purchased were Sarah MacLauchlan after I feel in love with her watching her "Afterglow" concert on DVD--Those are beautifully made. 

 

Right now my situation is that my Denon DVD-3910 stopped playing SACDs but still plays DVD-As flawlessly and it will be a sad day when it finally bites the dust. I picked up the Sony S-5100 for $100 and it plays Blu rays and SACDs so I am good for now but....

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...But I go back to my first post and say most people don't care and thats why its failed imo. Sacd could be light years better and still be right where its at. To many people need to get paid to just sell them to a tiny group like some of us. 

 

 

I always thought it would've been better to sell them in High-Dollar stores that sold merchandise geared to the 'Audiophile" instead of the mass market outlets in the beginning....Now I'm not so sure but my experience was similar to yours trying to get the word out with it falling on deaf ears.

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I didn't read all the posts but the real bottom line on the rejection of SACD is simple, the market rejected it. Millions of purchasers made the choice that they didn't want SACD. It matters not what the technical advantages were, the market spoke, and it's done.

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When Sony launched the first CD player in 1982 (CDP-101, http://web.archive.org/web/20080802133849/http://www.sony.net/Fun/SH/1-20/h5.html) this was a new format, positioned as an alternative to the LP.  I bought my first player in 1983.  At the time, I had a Dual 1219 turntable, Shure M91-ED cartridge, a big Nikko receiver and Ohm C2 speakers.  I thought the first CD's I bought didn't sound as good as my records, but the convenience was so much more offsetting than the difference in sound quality I was hearing that it wasn't even a close call.  All my friends, who already thought I was nuts because of the money I'd spent on a "record player," thought the CD's were really cool, but the players were too expensive.  Now keep in mind that almost everyone I knew, if they had a stereo, had something they'd bought from Sears, or the college student union bookstore, or Korvettes or something.  These were all-in-one systems that sort of looked like a "rack mount" stereo, with a tuner, cassette deck, equalizer, amplifier and turntable in plastic box maybe 2 feet high, with two speakers connected with 24 gauge wire.  The friends that more or less cared about sound bought separate speakers, most just used the "speakers" (a little larger than a shoebox, made out of 1/8" particle board with a woofer and tweeter) that came with the system.  If you looked behind the front panel of the stereo, you'd find there were no separate components, just one big, mostly empty box with a faceplate moulded to look like separate components.  Total cost maybe $299 on the high end, usually less.

 

By 1985, CD players were getting cheap enough that my friends started to buy them.  The difference in sound quality between the "record player" that came with their stereo and even the worst sounding CD players on the market, was so great (in favor of the CD player) that there was absolutely no contest.  Add to that the lack of care required by CD's, the lack of pops and ticks and "stuck records" caused by scratches, the smaller size and the general "cool" factor, and it's no wonder that CD took the world by storm.  Sure, if you had a good turntable set up and a good system, the sound of records, particularly compared to the earliest CD's on the earliest players, was better.  Sometimes a whole lot better, depending upon what sorts of things were important to you.  But for most people I knew, the sound from their new CD player was just light years ahead of the sound they'd been listening to from their record players.

 

(Here's a thought... how many people under 30 do you think know what the phrase "you sound like a broken record" means?)

 

SACD never offered that kind of dramatic, Oh my God degree of change for the average user (let's leave multi channel out for the moment.)  It was a physical media that looked the same, cost more, and wouldn't play on the CD player they had, except for hybrid discs, and of course hybrid discs didn't sound any different that regular CD's, because you were listening to a CD.  Add to that the competeing DVD-A format, which originally required a different player, and the fact that salespeople typically had no clue what you were talking about if you went to Circuit City and said "SACD?"  The only people that cared were us (audiophiles) and early adopters of multi channel music systems (as opposed to video.)  Not enough to make it a success.

 

BUT... the times they are a changin'...  Now, physical media is pretty much passe.  DACs with chipsets that'll decode every known format, even 4X DSD, are less than $300, and will plug into your iPhone or Android and your laptop.  I think SACD has the potential to be resurrected in the form of DSD downloads.  More and more online retailers offer PCM up to 24/192 or higher, and they're starting to offer DSD.  I just bought a Geek Out USB DAC and I'm using an old Toshiba laptop running AP Linux with the DeadBeef player, total investment maybe $600 between both, and the sound quality is FAR better than my not-so-old universal player (Cambridge Audio.)  I think the future for the poor old SACD looks pretty bright, actually... in spirit, anyway.  Just as the ghosts of CD's live on as 16/44 files on hard disks and SSDs and thumb drives, DSD files will rise from the polycarbonate ashes of the SACD to take their place in the boundless musical future just beginning to open before us.

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SACD never offered that kind of dramatic, Oh my God degree of change for the average user (let's leave multi channel out for the moment.)  It was a physical media that looked the same, cost more, and wouldn't play on the CD player they had, except for hybrid discs, and of course hybrid discs didn't sound any different that regular CD's, because you were listening to a CD.  Add to that the competeing DVD-A format, which originally required a different player, and the fact that salespeople typically had no clue what you were talking about if you went to Circuit City and said "SACD?"  The only people that cared were us (audiophiles) and early adopters of multi channel music systems (as opposed to video.)  Not enough to make it a success.

 

 

 

I totally agree about the salespeople in the stores not having a clue to what SACDs and DVD-As were, as well as having two different formats and either an expensive player or two different ones to appreciate both to be a deterrent...That said, the vast majority of potential buyers would be the multichannel aficionados who enjoyed watching movies in 5.1 not realizing how awesome their old albums could sound in multichannel--This audience never got tapped.   

Edited by tkdamerica
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I'm not sure I agree that the folks really into well set up home theaters overlap much with folks into high fidelity music reproduction.  Of the circle of audio guys I'm part of, none of us has anything that would remotely be considered a halfway decent home theater setup (not even talking dedicated "movie room", just multi channel sound with big screen.)  Me, for example, the only teevee I watch is a 27" flat screen hanging on the wall in my kitchen.  If you did a Venn Diagram of the multi-channel video guys and the high end audio guys, I expect the overlapping area would be really really small.  I know there are some - a sizeable percentage of them are members of this forum - but out of the general population, not so much.  I know some people who're really into watching movies with impressive surround sound setups (one of them has a system built around P-39F fronts and the Oppo BDP-105D), and a couple of times I've brought something with me (DSOTM SACD, GBYBR, etc.) and when I play it, I'm sitting there totally mesmerized and they're like "...yeah, that sounds good, thanks, but can we get back to a movie now Please..."

 

Course, I could be totally wrong... that's why I'm not in marketing...

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... If you did a Venn Diagram of the multi-channel video guys and the high end audio guys, I expect the overlapping area would be really really small...

2 channel only for me, I only have movie audio through my 2 channel rig because it's just one pair of cables and my pre-amp had room for a pair.

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I'm not sure I agree that the folks really into well set up home theaters overlap much with folks into high fidelity music reproduction.  <snip>

 

It's interesting that you should say that, because my experience is the opposite, and a big part of what prompted me to post this question in the first place.

 

I know this is straying from the "2-Channel" forum that I posted in, but the majority of guys I know who have investigated in surround-sound for movies are also music fans.

 

Not that I know anyone who has built a dedicated theatre room, but people I know who have invested in 5.1 also appreciate music

 

In my case, my initial Klipsch investment was Quintets, then Synergy F3/C3/S2, again for HT. One of the things that prompted me to upgrade to the Reference line was that I was not satisfied with the F3s for music.

 

Having said all that, I really enjoyed multi-channel SACD despite only having Synergies, and I wonder why the people I know (myself included) who invested in HT never got the multi-channel SACD bug.

 

This seems like a failure in promotion of the format.

Edited by Emjay
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 I wonder why the people I know (myself included) who invested in HT never got the multi-channel SACD bug....

Because two great channels sound better than 4/5/7 good ones.

 

 

Doesn't make any sense in the context of what I'm saying

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