Every surround and SACD fan should read this post:

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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.

True. To QQ members, they're tops and we all have their discs. However, the "man on the street" has no idea who they are. It's a shame, really.
 
True. To QQ members, they're tops and we all have their discs. However, the "man on the street" has no idea who they are. It's a shame, really.

Agreed. I'm sure SACD Surround led a number of people to discover singers like Jacintha and David Elias via their excellent hi rez audio, surround sound releases!
 
Is it wishful thinking to imagine that after abandoning a particular format, the company that did should just donate
that intellectual property to the community and 'open-source' all of its specs, so that further work can be done on
it by volunteers or other motivated souls for whom profit isn't the only motive for doing something?

sg
 
Is it wishful thinking to imagine that after abandoning a particular format, the company that did should just donate
that intellectual property to the community and 'open-source' all of its specs, so that further work can be done on
it by volunteers or other motivated souls for whom profit isn't the only motive for doing something?

sg

Sometimes it does happen. It happens a lot for online FPS games.
 
Is it wishful thinking to imagine that after abandoning a particular format, the company that did should just donate
that intellectual property to the community and 'open-source' all of its specs, so that further work can be done on
it by volunteers or other motivated souls for whom profit isn't the only motive for doing something?

sg

I'd doubt it. Too many Millions of Dollars at play here.
 
When everyone else in the world use PCM at various degrees it would not make sense... DSD editing tools are scarce (== pricey) and usually it's going back and forth pcm-dsd. So... why bother with DSD at all? I'm not arguing about the sonics (that's another story) but only from the technical standpoint of the entire workflow, from MIC1 to DISC REPLICATION.
Let's face it: if we can still enjoy MCH it's thanks to DVD-A: while companies are sleepy on that matter, the basic fact that it's possibile to do a hi-rez quality disc - mch too - in house gave birth to many "private" productions, especially on repurposing old quads or doing hi-quality stereo transfers. This is becoming a vital part of the DVD-A breath, no way to do such a thing on SACD.
 
Well, if Sony aren't using DSD anymore they might as well make it open source. They could use the goodwill.
 
Well, if Sony aren't using DSD anymore they might as well make it open source. They could use the goodwill.

Exactly. If they had let anyone create and author SACDs, then maybe the market would have flourished. They can't have it both ways.
 
If you'll notice, missing in his list of factors was marketing/consumer education. the consumer had no real say in this. And don't tell me the consumer spoke by not buying. The same thing happened to the electric car 9 or 10 years ago. the consumer got blamed for not buying them, but 9 out of 10 people never even knew such cars were available, let alone viable.

I've been harping on this for a while now and am totally convinced that if consumers had been marketed to properly, sales could have been enough to keep SACD or whatever going.. It was a balance of factors and this factor might have made the difference.
 
If you'll notice, missing in his list of factors was marketing/consumer education. the consumer had no real say in this. And don't tell me the consumer spoke by not buying. The same thing happened to the electric car 9 or 10 years ago. the consumer got blamed for not buying them, but 9 out of 10 people never even knew such cars were available, let alone viable.

I've been harping on this for a while now and am totally convinced that if consumers had been marketed to properly, sales could have been enough to keep SACD or whatever going.. It was a balance of factors and this factor might have made the difference.

To elaborate on what you’re saying, it was California that mandated a small percentage of cars be made electric, because the technology was there around 1999 and California needs to find ways to lower gas emissions as the air get’s so bad here you can’t even breathe it at times. The air hangs like a toxic cloud of fog, especially on certain days in the summer. So it's common that we have “Spare the air" days in the San Francisco Bay Area where people are encouraged to take public transportation. I wanted to give a little background here so those with great air understand what we’re dealing with here. Anyway, as far as the electric car around 1999, I’d say the public (at least in San Francisco Bay Area) was quite aware about electric cars as it was on the news all the time. On the news it was reported that there was even free electric chargers made specifically for these cars at BART (our train/subway system) and many locations. Yes, the public was blamed for not buying the cars when in fact GM refused to sell them. You could only get a 4 years lease and when it was up they wanted their cars back where they promptly took them to the junk yard. Many people signed up for the cars and there were long waiting lists for cars at many dealerships, but GM dragged its feet and essentially killed the car because they were making too much money with Trucks and SUV’s with cheap gas. The oil companies do not want electric cars either and had their hand in this matter as well. People who plug their cars in at home do not go to gas stations. Now GM is bankrupt and has lost its technological edge. Toyota very smartly filled in the void with the hybrid gas/electric Prius. The same people that bought or wanted electric cars 10 years ago now own Toyota’s Prius. And that model is in its 3rd generation selling quite successfully.

So it sounds like SACD and DVD-Audio went through a similar thing. The early adopters did their part by buying the technology when it first came out, but all the ducks were not in a row. And if new DVD players won’t do SACD and you can’t buy the latest titles (or old releases) in Hi-Rez Stereo, let alone Multi-channel and the tools aren’t there for content providers to create SACD titles inexpensively as well as disc manufacturing cost – especially when the tools are already there for regular CD’s, with no promotion, it’s no wonder the format failed to reach a broader market. Sony one year is just starting to promote SACD, then the next year pulls the plug on its own titles. It sounds like not enough time was given for SACD to sell. After all it took so many years for people to go from cassette / records to CDs. I wonder though if it’s possible that DVD-Audio and SACD are now more popular than they ever were by the high prices certain titles go for. I’m also curious in what quantities titles were manufactured in and what their sales were.
 
The thing that got me was that the manufacturers, Sony included, invested the cash to create players that could play SACD, DVD-A, and some both. Yet, they had the market pulled out from under them by the very people who got them to create the players in the first place.

Companies like Sony Electronics, Pioneer, & Denon made the players. Not to mention that once the universal players began to show up in the market, Sony had already decided to bail, and the DVD-A group got side tracked with DualDiscs and the whole thing crashed.

Just a really bad tale of bad planning and ship jumping.
 
To all reading this thread.

I feel that maybe some of what I posted previously went a bit overboard, so apologies in advance for
forcing anyone to read through all of the verbose crap I wrote, which should have been condensed into
a few simple sentences.

But this is a real hot-button issue for me, as I feel that DSD was really our best chance at currently
getting ourselves out of this rut (16-bit / 44.1 kHz)...

Does it take an M.I.T. education to listen to a proper open-reel tape and notice how much more musical
and ear-pleasing the experience is than Red-Book audio, even with flaws like wow, flutter and hiss?

That CD format was fine 25 years ago. But how about making real progress towards something that
overcomes all of the weaknesses of dividing one second into 44,100 slices, which when you think of
it isn't a lot, especially when trying to reproduce frequencies around 12,000 Hz (such as the upper
harmonics of a sizzling Hi-Hat)

In all fairness, there is no question that DSD was a real positive step in that direction.

Things that may have helped: like if Sony had bothered to release the DSD spec so that recordings could
be done in that format using third-party software, and making their laptops read and write SACD? And
obviously this standards infighting between the majors, with ulterior motives. (thanks WMG, that truly
was a classy move. Is there poetic justice in the fact that your stock valuation went down 500% when
compared to 4 years ago? I don't wish badly on anyone, but there are "Things That Make You Go Hmmm")

And we're still not one bit closer to being able to do anything with that format, except with those Korg
boxes, but no way to go on from there.... Or is there?

Might we be hearing faint sounds of cavalry in the distance?

Stay tuned.
 
Remember hopw long the record companies supported the balky compact cassette? It first appeared in about the mid sixties, and didn't really catch on until the mid seventies. It then had a run of about ten years, until Compact Disc overtook it and the LP. Even quad was supported for about eight years. These people just give up too soon, especially since they didn't really promote the products. Are they going to give up on Blu Ray too? Who knows? That seems to be our luck.

The Quadfather
 
Remember hopw long the record companies supported the balky compact cassette? It first appeared in about the mid sixties, and didn't really catch on until the mid seventies. It then had a run of about ten years, until Compact Disc overtook it and the LP. Even quad was supported for about eight years. These people just give up too soon, especially since they didn't really promote the products. Are they going to give up on Blu Ray too? Who knows? That seems to be our luck.

Blu-Ray is a different animal since the content owners are the movie companies - not the record companies.

What we see there is Toshiba, the last HD-DVD holdout, is now making BD players and the BD companies are introducing follow-on products with more storage capacity and now 3D content.
 
Does it take an M.I.T. education to listen to a proper open-reel tape and notice how much more musical and ear-pleasing the experience is than Red-Book audio, even with flaws like wow, flutter and hiss?

If you compare a reel tape with the same signal going through a proper red-book A/D/A loop you will not be able to hear any difference.

... how about making real progress towards something that
overcomes all of the weaknesses of dividing one second into 44,100 slices, which when you think of
it isn't a lot, especially when trying to reproduce frequencies around 12,000 Hz (such as the upper
harmonics of a sizzling Hi-Hat)
It is not enough to "think of it", you have to understand as well. All sounds and events below 22 kHz are reproduced in red-book.

In all fairness, there is no question that DSD was a real positive step in that direction.
It is now very obvious that DSD was a dead end.
 
The thing that got me was that the manufacturers, Sony included, invested the cash to create players that could play SACD, DVD-A, and some both. Yet, they had the market pulled out from under them by the very people who got them to create the players in the first place.

Companies like Sony Electronics, Pioneer, & Denon made the players. Not to mention that once the universal players began to show up in the market, Sony had already decided to bail, and the DVD-A group got side tracked with DualDiscs and the whole thing crashed.

Just a really bad tale of bad planning and ship jumping.

And a tale of disc sales that represented a niche market, not a brand new one.
 
"So, all the (Sony) money that should have gone into developing SACD titles suddenly went into Dual-Disc, and some titles that were scheduled to be released as SACDs eventually appeared as Dual-Discs. Dual-Discs, of course, turned out to be a giant dud."

Everytime I see a DualDisc, I think of how this idiot bastard of a format essentially nailed shut the coffin of SACD and DVD-A as they existed in the early 2000's. What a total disaster.
 
"So, all the (Sony) money that should have gone into developing SACD titles suddenly went into Dual-Disc, and some titles that were scheduled to be released as SACDs eventually appeared as Dual-Discs. Dual-Discs, of course, turned out to be a giant dud."

Everytime I see a DualDisc, I think of how this idiot bastard of a format essentially nailed shut the coffin of SACD and DVD-A as they existed in the early 2000's. What a total disaster.

Another case of the major record labels wanting to try something new (Sony Music moving from SACD to Dual Disc and Warner Music moving from DVD-A to Dual Disc) to see if that format would hit a home run vs. SACD and DVD-A. It didn't. And now SACD lives on as a Classical and Audiophile format.
 
You can really pin the blame on Howard Stringer who took over the newly formed SonyBMG merger. Howard came from the movie & TV side. At the time of the the merger, Sony Music ( sidebar: Sony Music & Sony Electronics did not play well together - Sony's SACD team was only two people) was already sour on SACD. BMG was the conquered nation and had to relinquish their participation in DVD Audio. Howard brought in a team of people that had absolutely no passion for music - of any kind or format - they were, like many music executives, there to exploit the company's assets, and in this case, it meant video content. Of course, this was a miserable failure from the start. Paranoia reigned supreme during that period and being in charge of a dicey new format was not the most secure position - so the team involved in DualDisc was to say the least, looking to get out from the start. Some of the more oily execs were able to parlay the failure to a better position while others simply we're sent to Siberia. Ah, life in the Music Biz!


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