Is Sony dropping SACD?

[MarkSJohnson]

Any new news on whether or not Sony is dropping SACD?

 

[JoeE SP9]

If they are it's news to me.

 

[Colonel_Tomb]

I hear this rumor from time to time, but I wouldn't give it much weight. I think it stems from the fact that, since the Bob Dylan catalog last year, Sony has been very slow to issue any SACD titles. But they continue to support SACD on most (all?) of their CD and DVD players.

Hell, look how long Sony supported Beta and Mini-Disc. You think they're gonna pull the plug on SACD without having some kind of alternative ready to hit the market?

 

[MarkSJohnson]

I hear this rumor from time to time, but I wouldn't give it much weight.

I thought I read it here a month or two ago... not as a user's post but from the "news" pages?

 

[mtrycrafts]

I thought I read it here a month or two ago... not as a user's post but from the "news" pages?

I read the same as well. It was an accounting of some pro audio conference, if memory serves me well.

 

[Leprkon]

should be this one (sent it to some freinds and retrieved it from e-mail)

http://www.audioholics.com/news/pressreleases/EHXsurround2004conference2.php

 

[MarkSJohnson]

That was it!

That was it... Thank You!

I tried searching for it but was coming up empty-handed!

 

[Dessayfan]

Get ready for Blu-Ray

Been doing a lot of reading - and last week 20th Century Fox said it's going with Sony's Blu-Ray technology for DVD movies - making it the second huge company to embrace Blu-Ray. Sony, remember, just bought another huge movie company!
Sony is, according to one source in the broadcast business, "re-thinking" the SACD hybrid disc, as there are many reported problems with them. First, they are more fragile, and second, they tend to skip in some players. HOWEVER, check this out: http://www.sa-cd.net/shownews/31.
Plus - where do you see them? Aha! On the Internet - but try to find them in stores selling "regular" CDs. I get mine from Amazon or ArkivMusic, and have given up on the likes of Barnes & Noble, Borders and Tower locally.
The blu-ray disc holds 25 gigabytes of info - about the same as five regular DVD video discs. What this means for AUDIO nobody is quite sure, because the blu-ray has so much capacity it overwhelms regular CDs to the point where you could put a half-dozen symphonies on one disc! Talk about marketing problems! And cost? And buyer acceptance?
The fact is that blu-ray will probably make DVD-A obsolete, and may eventually kill off SACD as well. Stay tuned, as they say!

 

[Rob Babcock]

If BluRay itself survives, that is. Sony is behind it, but Microsoft is backing HD-DVD, as are a lot of other manufacturers. I think (from my limited knowledge) that BluRay has more promise, but if I had to bet on one of them, I'm afraid my money would be on HD DVD.

I have had a couple hybrid SACDs that wouldn't play on a couple of my CD players, but most of them have worked. It will be interesting to see if SACD can survive.

IMO by case would be ONE FORMAT to come along and unify all our software under the banner of one medium. Whether it's BluRay, HD DVD, or something we haven't seen yet, I'd love to see one carrier for everything.

 

[Colonel_Tomb]

should be this one (sent it to some freinds and retrieved it from e-mail)

http://www.audioholics.com/news/pressreleases/EHXsurround2004conference2.php

Yeah, I know, but then there's this from Sony's own SACD web site, dated October 5:

http://www.superaudio-cd.com/news/newsitem.php?id=37

The noteworthy part would be . . .

"[Sony Chairman and CEO] Nobuyuki Idei restated Sony’s commitment to SA-CD and asked for further co-operation from the entire audio and music industries in promoting this high-resolution, high-security audio format."

But who knows about corporate priorities?

 

[Mort Corey]

If it becomes HD DVD, and is promoted by Microsoft, I wonder how many patches it'll take before you can play your disc?

Mort

 

[keenan]

If BluRay itself survives, that is. Sony is behind it, but Microsoft is backing HD-DVD, as are a lot of other manufacturers. I think (from my limited knowledge) that BluRay has more promise, but if I had to bet on one of them, I'm afraid my money would be on HD DVD.

.

The MS codec has been approved for both formats, and with Sony et al's purchase of MGM, BluRay now has a massive list of titles to use for the format. At this point in time I think BluRay has the momentum..

Jim

 

[Rob Babcock]

One can hope. I'm still pissed that we get yet another format war!

 

[WmAx]

One can hope. I'm still pissed that we get yet another format war!

Another format war? Yippeeee.... uh, I mean ..... oh darn, that's terrible......

I just hate to argue over these things.

-Chris

 

[Rob Babcock]

Man, Chris- you picked an awful time to develop a sense of humor- if you have. For my part, I can't wait! Lion King? Oh, that's on format 'A'. Casablanca? Oh, you need format 'B'. One can continue that with every movie you like, til time's gone.

I'm not an "industry guru," but then again, WFT? Pretty much every decision the "industry gurus" have made has been taken off at the knees by reality, so why bother? My WAG is that if one format reigned (one format to bind them, and rule them all) you could simply sell movies to a lot of fans. Yeah, you'd miss the nickle of royalties on the 1,000 copies per year of a failed format- or you could join in on the feeding frenzy that would be created if everyone could finally justify HD to their wives by bring home "When Harry Met Sally" on an HD video disc format.

Divx delayed the DVD by at least a year, according to industry insiders, maybe more. And that was with a format that was based on existing NTSC standards; how hard a sell will a format war be with a new video standard that only 10% of Americans own? Yeah, about like you'd expect.

Another classic case of chasing nickels rolling on the ground while dollars sit on the table.

 

[WmAx]

I was trying some humor -- but apparently I failed!

I can only agree with you about a single format. It would be awesome. Especially since I believe a single format would result in extremely low cost playback equipment for varying uses. Imagine the consolidation and resulting reduction in cost for the main chipsets, cpus and transports!

But then you realize the things that would prevent such a thing: DRM could not be allowed on the audio data for example -- otherwise it is useless and less versatile than an ordinary CD! I can not concieve that the majority of mp3 player users would want to give up their freedoms(protected under fair use) in this regard. Add to this the same issue on video content. The video mp3 players are dropping in cost(gaining popularity?) -- but they are not very useful if you can not rip the video data as one does with cd audio data in order to load it on the hard drive. Why would I( or anyone who thought about it) want something to replace DVDs or CDs that LOSES one of the most important features(rippable for personal use)?

A main guilty party for the retardation of the potential progress of theoretically highly versatile technologies are the content providers. In my opinion, they are the greedy and frankly not very smart people behind this problem. Remember, they opposed everyone of these things with verocity(and with NO strong evidence) as it was developed/introduced to the market: radio, cassette tape recorders, video cassette recorders, mp3 players.

-Chris

Man, Chris- you picked an awful time to develop a sense of humor- if you have. For my part, I can't wait! Lion King? Oh, that's on format 'A'. Casablanca? Oh, you need format 'B'. One can continue that with every movie you like, til time's gone.

I'm not an "industry guru," but then again, WFT? Pretty much every decision the "industry gurus" have made has been taken off at the knees by reality, so why bother? My WAG is that if one format reigned (one format to bind them, and rule them all) you could simply sell movies to a lot of fans. Yeah, you'd miss the nickle of royalties on the 1,000 copies per year of a failed format- or you could join in on the feeding frenzy that would be created if everyone could finally justify HD to their wives by bring home "When Harry Met Sally" on an HD video disc format.

Divx delayed the DVD by at least a year, according to industry insiders, maybe more. And that was with a format that was based on existing NTSC standards; how hard a sell will a format war be with a new video standard that only 10% of Americans own? Yeah, about like you'd expect.

Another classic case of chasing nickels rolling on the ground while dollars sit on the table.

 

[Rip Van Woofer]

The whole kerfuffle almost makes me wanna go back to vinyl and Super 8

 

[Colonel_Tomb]

Divx delayed the DVD by at least a year, according to industry insiders, maybe more.

Um, no, I doubt this version of the story. Competing formats, if anything, will bring a product to market faster, because the first format to market (for better or worse) has a natural advantage.

I did consulting work at Circuit City in the late '90s (though not on the "Zoom" project, their code name for Divx), and I had a good feel for what was going on there. I don't think Divx held up DVD at all, although I don't doubt Circut City used whatever influence it had to delay DVD's introduction. One of the recognized failures of Divx (other than it was a stupid idea on many levels) was that it didn't debut until the summer of '98, well after "open" DVD was established in the marketplace. If Divx had any chance of sucess at all (which it didn't), it had to be available from Day 1. Also, Divx wasn't a "format" at all; it was an add-on "feature," if you consider pay-per-view of your own disks to be a "feature."

By the way, you wouldn't have believed the corporate culture at CCity. Throughout the rank and file of the worker bees, they all really believed that Divx was a big winner in the making, whether they were involved in the project or not. I know people who will still argue that Divx was the way to go!

 

[Rob Babcock]

I was just givin' you crap, Chris! Geez, you finally crack a joke and I have to get on you for it!

God, Divx! What a stinker that was. Goes to show you what happens when lawyers create a format instead of engineers & film lovers.