This is really an accomplishment considering the founding company gave up the gauntlet over TEN YEARS AGO.
Imagine if they put forth just a little bit more effort after the RS500 issue. I think SACD would have negated subsequent DVD-A, DVD-V, and BDA releases over the past 10 years.
YESSS!!! It is amazing!!! They wrote the death notices' too soon!! :yikes
..When you look back, it was a pretty ballsy move by Sony, a whole new optical disc based music delivery format designed to kill off CD.. and ahead of its time, one could argue it is maturing now as a technology.. well kinda..
Tbh, it put me right off when they first announced SACD, to a poor kid it meant getting another new expensive disc player... and I'd just leveraged my ass to get a fancy new LaserDisc player that would do both sides of the disc so I wouldn't have to drag my carcass off the sofa unless it was a trick play CAV job or the film went on too long for 2 sides of CLV.... DOH!!.. but I missed the point, that was the point! They wanted you (me.. well... all of US!!) to buy a new Sony SACD player and new Sony discs - they had a whole setup where they controlled. made and sold both the hardware and software and they were ready to rape and pillage unwitting consumers like little old me!!! :yikes
...I've been told by someone who "was there" that Hybrids were an elastoplast to fix a haemorrhage to Sony, they wanted to introduce the single layer as the only layer to kill off CD.. but then hastily had to work with Phillips on perfecting hybrids and rushing them to market when their plan to take over the world with SACD didn't go to, umm, plan...! I don't know how true that all is/was?
I remember it was stereo only in What Hi Fi's first report on it too.. (SACD I mean).. and that was a bit of a turn off.. I was already well into Dolby Digital (with my little outboard decoder and AC-3 RF demodulator!) and just on the verge of getting into DTS.. so 2-channels were already starting to feel a little, shall we say "underwhelming" maybe.. time passed, i forgot about SACD and after a few DTS experiments it became apparent that with DVD-A I could do that fancy surround thing SACD did but all on my regular DVD player in Dolby and DTS.. YEAY!! :bounce:
..and so even more time passed and it took little old Sir Elton to get me to even buy an SACD disc..! :yikes
...by which time I was a dyed in the wool DVD-A man! (I had already got a neat little collection of DVD-A's and a few DVD-V/DTS things together..
but it was several more years after that even, before Universal disc players became cheap enough over here to have both DVD-A and SACD in one player.. and that, as they say ladies and gentlemen, was "IT".. which was about 18 months before I signed up here and drove you all to distraction and the rest is history, or her story.. well its my story!! Haha...
Sorry for the rambling on (what's new eh
) I imagine this will get moved to a thread "rambling bullshit hazy crazy memories about SACD that nobody will ever read"..
Oh I do love a Xmas brandy! HIC!
Cheers to all my friends at QQ! Here's to 10,000 more years of SACD!
:friday: