Every surround and SACD fan should read this post:

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Black Elk was there.

He's a great wealth of information... and he has some cool test discs to prove it.
 
Yes, but I mean that it doesn't seem that poor sales were the determining factor in ditching SACD. Under slightly different circumstances it sounds like SACD would have been given a much larger push. Too bad.
 
...at the Steve Hoffman forum. (You don't have to register to read)

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=4939355&postcount=30

Fantastic piece of information from the inside!! Sounds like he must have gotten really frustrated over the years.

I am so glad he spoke somewhat openly about the dynamics of what made the Compact Disc a success, yet never
afforded real chances of mass adoption for the SACD format. Obviously, if the people within the companies are not
even supporting it, how can the consumers do so?

The same mistakes made at the corporate level are what inhibited Sony Electronics engineers from being the first
at developing something like the iPod, which if you really think about it was only logical for them to do first, after
having designed the Walkman™ and so many other groundbreaking consumer products. Problem being that ever
since the mid-80s merger with Columbia/Epic Records and after the SCMS copy-prevention issues on their DAT
machines, there seems to have been this constant culture of copy-protection paranoia running very deep throughout
the company, and preventing any project that would involve copying music without DRM to really take off.

So in a sense the merger of the content side and electronics was far from ideal, more like really toxic, as Sony
Electronics became an emasculated version of its former self, literally walking on eggshells trying not to offend
the music division by making groundbreaking products that would obviously help accelerate the trends towards
free-for-all copying, which were already well-known and predicted as early as mid-90's.

There are however some further technical issues which have made it really difficult to work in the DSD format
natively, and the tools that are available to do so have severe limitations compared to what can be done with
regards to signal processing working with PCM audio.

Sometimes I think that the real curse of the SACD format is that Sony made it so arcane, complex and laden
with copy-protection that it worked as planned. It was so hard to use and so well-protected that nobody bothered
with it. It appears that they never really released the spec so that any other mainstream audio software company
could actually do anything useful with it, again possibly due to the overwhelming sense of paranoid anti-copying
that shaped that company's corporate culture, from all the way high up on down.... Their VAIO laptops could
easily have played SACDs back, and so on.

The format could have really had a chance if the professional audio community was given a chance to be able to
use it in ways that were comparable to how they are used to working with PCM audio files, and with tools that
allowed a superior result.

From the way I understand it, there are still extremely few software tools available to do any kind of fancy signal
processing in pure DSD, and when this is needed most people export the DSD files to 192 kHz PCM, do whatever
processing is needed there and re-convert back to DSD.

All horribly expensive, time-consuming and counter-intuitive.

I was debating purchasing a Sonoma workstation when Sony Studios closed in NYC and auctioned off their gear,
but decided against it, because of the uncertainty of future support and updates on this....

The Korg MR-1000 is cute, but again not a very useful piece as nothing can be done natively with the raw DSD
stream it can record, only when converted to PCM.

Very sad, really..... Where is our future when it comes to superior audio standards??
 
That is a very interesting explanation of what happened from someone that was involved and saw it all happen but I believe it doesn't give enough weight to the market results for SACD. Of course poor sales, incredibly poor sales is the reason all companies have given up on SACD for popular music. I accept it is a good description of what he saw first hand. Other factors really don't mean anything, if a product sells well all other problems will be solved. SACD didn't sell well, the early efforts which in my opinion included a few hundred very good quality releases were not rewarded with acceptable sales, Sony and most all other companies moved on to something else after a couple of years of heavy losses. If Warner and Panasonic had supported SACD instead of DVD-A, things might have been much better and sales might have been enough to justify a continued effort. There were other major players absent for the SACD launch but the world's largest consumer electronics company and I believe largest music company at the time not being involved is a pretty major problem. Sony and Philips could not overcome that, even without lack of high level support within the corporations and I would expect the fractured industry support is at the heart of the lack of enthusiasm by high level executives. CD had unified support within the industry, this isn't complicated. We now see Blu-ray with support of an entire industry and it is the first of the better than CD and better than DVD formats to amount to anything in terms of marketshare, I am sure easily 10 times the sales of SACD and DVD-A combined during their peak years.

If other factors including the situation as described in that very interesting thread hadn't been in place, sure SACD could have continued to be pursued by a portion of the industry despite poor sales but why would anybody think the results would have been any different? We would have been happy to see some more very good releases but the factors that meant the product sold poorly remained in place, nothing would have changed. It is one thing to say that corporate factors meant SACD wasn't getting support it needed but it is another altogether to say that poor sales from the effort that had been made isn't the primary reason the format is dead.

Chris
 
I should add I don't think SACD was the proper choice anyway in hindsight, DVD-A was, Panasonic and Warner were right. Of course with Sony and other major players firmly behind SACD, DVD-A couldn't amount to anything either. All of the mistakes are behind us, let's hope something positive for high resolution stereo and surround music is in the cards for the future.

Chris
 
I should add I don't think SACD was the proper choice anyway in hindsight, DVD-A was, Panasonic and Warner were right. Of course with Sony and other major players firmly behind SACD, DVD-A couldn't amount to anything either. All of the mistakes are behind us, let's hope something positive for high resolution stereo and surround music is in the cards for the future.

Chris

Both formats had the same problems - copy protection, low sales and the majors pulling the plug when it became clear that neither would become the next CD or DVD Video.
 
Are we all reading the same thing? What I DID NOT read was that it was poor sales that doomed SACD (this is what I found surprising). Sony seemed to fully realize that if they wanted SACD to succeed they would have to give it a real chance. It was ultimately doomed by infighting between divisions and based upon personal feelings of top management. Obviously if SACD had sold well they would have found a way to overcome these obstacles, but poor sales didn't directly cause Sony to abandon SACD.
 
The Korg MR-1000 is cute, but again not a very useful piece as nothing can be done natively with the raw DSD stream it can record, only when converted to PCM.

Very sad, really..... Where is our future when it comes to superior audio standards??

There was a mention from the recent RMAF show that quoted Gus Skinas at the Super Audio Center saying that some folks are looking at a "DSD File" format where files from DSD recorders like the Korg could be played back.

Sounds like a pretty niche'y format - but could be of interest to some.
 
While the development of the Compact Disc and its acceptance and success were not necessarily a shoe-in at first,
there was a very, very different technological landscape than the one we live in right now about 30 years later.

At the root, the problem today may really be one of standards, patents and trademarks; things have changed
since then, and one could argue that keeping to the same approaches might not work the same way it did.

What would seem to make the most sense nowadays would appear to be a format that somehow would be the
equivalent of 'open-source', but this would obviously mean that no one company could reap those huge
licensing fees they deem necessary to recoup their R&D costs, as well as increase that good-ole 'shareholder
value' which is usually their primary objective when keeping everyone in their 'walled-gardens' of proprietary
and mutually incompatible standards.

If the spec and everything was released and shared freely with everyone, obviously this would be a good first
step towards having an open high-definition audio format that anyone could adopt, contribute to, and improve upon.

But then we have DRM, DMCA, and new anti-copying laws on the horizon that may even mandate that labels
would only obtain the rights to release music they license from the majors in certain formats with a similar strategy
to HDMI and only if they are using encryption.... oh!! very sticky problem indeed.

As it was pointed out in the earlier story posted on SH, the majors are not even accepting to license their titles
to third-party companies. It's like committing suicide rather than allow for people to enjoy the fruit and labor of
all these artists and producers... Scorched-earth policies.

Like it or not, the accumulation of this and similar self-centered policies (as if the only thing that was important was
themselves, rather than even acknowledging that the stewardship of all of this music is also a cultural responsibility to
all of us rather than merely a financial one)
can only mean that at some point the structure of how this content is
owned and administered will radically change, and perhaps at that time will there be a way for more high-rez audio
enthusiasts to be able to step in where these corporate behemoths have so miserably failed due to their decade-long
'deer-in-the-headlights' moment of not being able to take innovative decisions.

They would rather die than let the music be heard and appreciated, it seems to the uneducated such as myself?

I have recently heard of some true horror stories when it comes to entire catalogs of original master recordings
having been irretrievably lost due to negligence or other catastrophic occurrences, this having of course been
squashed and denied forcefully, (an admission to which might make shareholder value diminish) and only can be found out when
trying to license certain titles from those companies, only to get an ugly-ducking transfer from vinyl as the master
source.

Brave new world. :rolleyes:
 
In the "old days", 60's and 70's, music was more than just a business. Artists were given time to develop, and companies would take risks (not all of them successful) with new products and technologies. However, in these days of bottom lines, there is little time for a product or format to prove itself. The whole market is different. We used to pride ourselves on our "stereos". New speakers, new amps, that was all the rage. Today, it's all in the pocket and in the headphones. No one cares what kind of stereo you have, what kind of music format you use. It's all different.

Not a good retail climate for audiophiles!
 
As it was pointed out in the earlier story posted on SH, the majors are not even accepting to license their titles to third-party companies. It's like committing suicide rather than allow for people to enjoy the fruit and labor of
all these artists and producers... Scorched-earth policies.

Yes, the majors failing to license albums was a major stumbling block for the audiophile labels who wanted to release more titles on SACD back in the day.
 
In the "old days", 60's and 70's, music was more than just a business. Artists were given time to develop, and companies would take risks (not all of them successful) with new products and technologies. However, in these days of bottom lines, there is little time for a product or format to prove itself. The whole market is different. We used to pride ourselves on our "stereos". New speakers, new amps, that was all the rage. Today, it's all in the pocket and in the headphones. No one cares what kind of stereo you have, what kind of music format you use. It's all different. Not a good retail climate for audiophiles!

Let's think about it from the perspective of the record labels. What do all of these names have in common?:

Seymour Stein (Sire)
Chris Blackwell (Island)
Daniel Miller (Mute)
Berry Gordy Jr (Motown)
Jerry Moss (A&M)
Jim Stewart (Stax)
Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic)
Art Kass (Buddah)
Jerry Wexler (Warner Brothers as a small label) and even John Hammond II to some extent...

They were all heads of smaller labels that managed to sign an incredible amount of original and unproven
new artists, in turn managing to successfully develop them into superstars with lasting talent and a recorded
output that is still revered and cherished today. In order to do so they had to put their everything on the table,
and more often than not took incredible personal risks to accomplish what they did, with little idea that they
were ever going to make a penny back, but they so dearly loved what they were doing that it felt worth it.
But over time, they all got bought out by majors and cashed their chips out a very long time ago. Just
as on the hardware side, companies like Sony were driven by certain men with passion such as Akio Morita.
(And it could be argued, Steve Jobs today)

(You may notice that the two Clives are omitted from this list, that is Clive Davis and Clive Calder, as they were far arguably much more profit and
hit-oriented than anything else.... men of great caliber of course, but arguably with a different passion than just music)


Name just one such executive today.... (yeah, Rick Rubin @ Sony LOL) Here's the crux of the problem.

Our now-consolidated four major music content owners have become governed by bean-counters and
pencil-pushers that only think of A&R and artist development as little more than following a one-size-fits-all
formula, sort of like Army-style haircuts. But they are all incredibly skilled at surviving mega-mergers and
boardroom battles, and geniuses at climbing their corporate ladders. So logically, they are who's left in that field.

I believe that a correction is in order, and it will inevitably occur as the stock valuation of those entities stops
being high enough to push those who are after profits first to look for greener pastures, once again motivating
those with the love of it to take these risks, rather than the fruitless exercises in corporate governance devoid of
any deep feelings we have been witnessing for a while now.

It well may be that Google, Yahoo or a similar entity will find it lucrative to acquire these catalogs and may
have much more open attitudes towards allowing some of those gems to come out, in formats that may
finally sound better rather than only catering to the lowest-common-denominator rung of the ladder?

Time will tell. Sorry for the rant... It gets heavy sometimes thinking about all of these missed opportunities.

sg
 
Let's think about it from the perspective of the record labels. What do all of these names have in common?:

Seymour Stein (Sire)
Chris Blackwell (Island)
Daniel Miller (Mute)
Berry Gordy Jr (Motown)
Jerry Moss (A&M)
Jim Stewart (Stax)
Ahmet Ertegun (Atlantic)
Art Kass (Buddah)
Jerry Wexler (Warner Brothers as a small label) and even John Hammond II to some extent...

They were all heads of smaller labels that managed to sign an incredible amount of original and unproven
new artists, in turn managing to successfully develop them into superstars with lasting talent and a recorded
output that is still revered and cherished today. In order to do so they had to put their everything on the table,
and more often than not took incredible personal risks to accomplish what they did, with little idea that they
were ever going to make a penny back, but they so dearly loved what they were doing that it felt worth it.
But over time, they all got bought out by majors and cashed their chips out a very long time ago. Just
as on the hardware side, companies like Sony were driven by certain men with passion such as Akio Morita.
(And it could be argued, Steve Jobs today)

(You may notice that the two Clives are omitted from this list, that is Clive Davis and Clive Calder, as they were far arguably much more profit and
hit-oriented than anything else.... men of great caliber of course, but arguably with a different passion than just music)


Name just one such executive today.... (yeah, Rick Rubin @ Sony LOL) Here's the crux of the problem.

Our now-consolidated four major music content owners have become governed by bean-counters and
pencil-pushers that only think of A&R and artist development as little more than following a one-size-fits-all
formula, sort of like Army-style haircuts. But they are all incredibly skilled at surviving mega-mergers and
boardroom battles, and geniuses at climbing their corporate ladders. So logically, they are who's left in that field.

I believe that a correction is in order, and it will inevitably occur as the stock valuation of those entities stops
being high enough to push those who are after profits first to look for greener pastures, once again motivating
those with the love of it to take these risks, rather than the fruitless exercises in corporate governance devoid of
any deep feelings we have been witnessing for a while now.

It well may be that Google, Yahoo or a similar entity will find it lucrative to acquire these catalogs and may have much more open attitudes towards allowing some of those gems to come out, in formats that may finally sound better rather than only catering to the lowest-common-denominator rung of the ladder?

Time will tell. Sorry for the rant... It gets heavy sometimes thinking about all of these missed opportunities.

sg

I think you've nailed it there.
 
Actually, that sounds like almost all industries right now. I guess we're just in that part of the capitalist cycle.
 
Yes, the majors failing to license albums was a major stumbling block for the audiophile labels who wanted to release more titles on SACD back in the day.

Luckily, this does give other labels/artists an opportunity to get noticed. I'd of never known of Porcupine Tree if they hadn't released their albums on DVDA.
 
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