Don't Believe the SACD Hype
Feb 10 '02 (Updated Mar 04 '02)
The Bottom Line "The lack of variety of discs is a pain in the neck but, perversely, this could actually be a pleasure."
"It's all about money/ Ain't a damn thing funny/ You gotta have a con in this land of milk and honey."
The Message, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
"We sell the high-end Sony SACD players, but I would never recommend one as a substitute for a fine CD player. If somebody wants both, fine."
Elliot Fishkin, Innovative Audio Video*
If you own a CD player, and you're happy with it, don't be alarmed by predictions that SACD is going to replace CD. It's not going to happen anytime soon, unless Sony does a 180 and decides benefits for the consumer should outweigh profits for the company.
SACD vs. the CD
Some proponents of SACD have suggested an analogy between the way CD's pushed LP's out of record stores and the way, at least according to their predictions, the SACD, and the other new high-rez audio formats such as DVD-Audio and DTS, will replace the CD.
Deja Vu All Over Again
In one sense, this analogy is apt. The record companies used the introduction of the CD as an opportunity to jack prices 50% over what LP's had cost, even though it costs less to manufacture a CD than an LP. Take a look at what they're charging for the new SACD's. It's deja vu all over again as they use a format change to boost prices, except they're shooting for an even more extreme price hike than they got with the CD. As a side note, LP's haven't really gone away. The chain stores, like Tower, don't sell them anymore, but many independents carry music on vinyl and you can buy tons of new releases on LP.
Sony Keeps Milking It
There's another striking parallel between the LP-to-CD transition and the shift Sony hopes will take place from CD to SACD. As the inventor of the CD format, Sony gets a small royalty every time any record company sells music on CD. But the patent will shortly expire, upon the 20th anniversary of the CD's introduction, thus drying up that old reliable cash flow. It just so happens (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) that Sony is now bringing out an all-new, super-duper, Super Audio, brand-spanking-new optical disc recording format, the Super Audio CD, or SACD. Let the royalties roll, again.
The Negatives of SACD
There's no question that the SACD format, as well as the other new high-rez optical-disc audio formats (DVD-Audio and DTS) provide wider frequency response than CD. But even if we stipulate that the SACD format, in and of itself, is a positive development for listeners, Sony has created many drawbacks to your full enjoyment of the new format, almost all of which directly stem from the company's goal of making SACD their newest cash cow (and keeping it that way).
Before we talk about those drawbacks, keep in mind that SACD will not provide much benefit to people who don't have the kind of expensive audio gear with which you can discern the extremely high and low notes which a SACD player can deliver. Likewise, while SACD, on paper anyway, has a small performance advantage over DVD-Audio and DTS, you will only perceive that edge on the more high-end audio gear.
No Digital Output
The most egregious of these factors which work against the consumer, in my mind, is that none of the SACD players have a digital output. The lack of digital outputs, despite the convenience, performance, and cost-saving you would get with this kind of connection, was done to stop piracy of SACD's.
While you can't get a digital connection for SACD, plans have been announced by some manufacturers of DVD-Audio gear to have DVD-A players with digital output and new A/V receivers with the corresponding digital inputs and digital-to-audio converters (DAC's) which will handle the DVD-A datastream.
Thus far, Sony has no plans for a digital output for SACD players. Despite the many benefits a digital connection from SACD players would provide to consumers, the slightest possibility of piracy always makes Sony err on the side of safety, regardless of how that negatively impacts the product.
It's All About Copy Protection
This brings me to the next serious drawback with the SACD format: copy-protection was planned as an integral part of these discs. While standard CD's allow you to exercise your fair-use rights and make copies, whether analog or digital, of the music which you purchase, the SACD is designed from the ground up around highly effective copy protection. On top of that, the copy protection technology, which includes methods such as actually burning a watermark into the disc, can cause distortion. As of yet, though, the only problem I know of which was directly caused by copy protection on a high-rez disc was with a DVD-Audio disc. In this case, a consumer sued a record company over copy protection which had caused audible distortion on a disc.
Price, the Mother of All Deal Breakers
For most people, though, the biggest problem with SACD's is their price. In today's marketplace, there appears to be precious little appetite for a greater-than 50% price jump in the cost of music. The retail price of CD's is around $14 to $17 while the newer-format DVD-Audio and SACD discs generally sell for about $22 to $25. With people around the world uneasy about their economic well-being (to say the least), the market could probably barely support a single newer, far more expensive audio format, much less two or three competing high-priced formats.
The basic question is, are you so unhappy with the sound of your $14 CD's that you want to pay $25 for a SACD, DVD-Audio, or DTS disc? Thus far, the public has responded with a resounding "no." The popularity of Napster, and the successor file-sharing services, proves that people are not even that happy with the $14 CD.
It's Not Just the Discs that Cost Big
In fact, the high price of the SACD discs is only the beginning. To the $25 per disc, you can add
the outlay for a new SACD player, a minimum of $300. Also, you can't connect the SACD player to a pre-pro or A/V receiver with just a single digital cable or the pair of analog cables you'd use for a standard CD player. For multichannel playback, the SACD connection requires six analog RCA-plug cables (eight if you don't already have a pair of stereo cables in your current A/V receiver setup).
If you believe what most of the advocates of SACD will tell you, which is that you need premium audio cables for the connection (as pointed out in most of my electronics reviews, I do not subscribe to this myth), then you're talking about dropping at least another $240 just for cables, and that would be for the cheapest of the premium cables. It's common for premium cables to sell for $50, $100, or even more. I'm sure you can do the math. If SACD had a digital output, only one cable, not six or eight, would be needed for the connection. Don't be confused, by the way, if you see a SACD player that lists a digital output. This will only work when you're playing a standard CD on the SACD.
You Didn't Know You Needed a Super-Tweeter?
Due to the wide-range nature of its signal, SACD makes great demands on A/V gear. With a potential frequency response of up to 100 kHz (versus a max of 20 kHz for today's typical gear), SACD might well mean that manufacturers will push for us all to replace all our current equipment. Already, you see receivers advertised as having the capability of putting out a signal at up to 100 kHz.
This is a ridiculous capability, by the way. Most people cannot hear audio above 17 kHz. As we get older, our high-frequency hearing capability drops, meaning that nobody who can afford all this fancy new gear is likely to be able to hear the signal it outputs.. It's kind of like the way you always see the young family of five crammed into a Catalina 22 while the well-padded oldsters relax on their Swan 38 (a little sailboat comparison there).
This is also bad news for audio enthusiasts. As well as pushing new receivers and amps, the manufacturers will no doubt soon tell us that we need "supertweeter" speakers which can make it up to 100 kHz. There is a theoretical reason to have a very high frequency response. One theory holds that the high harmonics, above 20 kHz, which we can't hear, affect the quality of the original sounds, below 20 kHz, which create those harmonics. However, the Nordquist theorem states only a doubling of the maximum listenable frequency is necessary to cover the very highest possible harmonics. Thus, we really don't need to go over 40 kHz, and even that is fairly outlandish.
See my conclusion for an illuminating quote on the ridiculous equipment-escalation race which SACD might trigger.
Miniscule Variety as Compared to Standard CD
If you buy a Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) player, you'll only have a few hundred discs from which to choose. However, many stores don't carry any of those discs. So, depending on where you shop, you might have zero SACD's to browse through. It's lonely at the top.
I checked at several popular independent record retailers in New York, and asked them all the same question: "Do you have any SACD discs for sale?"
They all had the same answer: "No."
A large chain store likewise responded negatively on SACD, though they did have a very tiny selection of DVD-Audio discs.
The Even Tinier Selection of Multichannel Titles
One of the much-touted benefits of SACD is that, like the other new whiz-bang high-tech high-rez audio formats, it sports multichannel capability. The SACD format does allow for up to six wide-range channels. While a few of the players on the market are two-channel (stereo) only, most have both stereo and multi-channel playback. But just try buying your music on a six-channel SACD. At present, the Sony Web site lists a total of 19 titles in the multichannel format:
http://www.sonymusic.com/sacd/
Sony's Marketing Plan Could Work -- in a Parallel Universe
Since the hybrid variety of SACD discs also includes a downmixed stereo version of the music in standard CD format, some have speculated that SACD's will take over the market using a Trojan Horse strategy. The idea is, people with CD players will buy the hybrid SACD's so they can play the CD track. After a while, they'll reach a critical mass of hybrid CD/SACD discs and they'll be seized by an uncontrollable desire to run out and buy a SACD player.
It's an interesting theory. Unfortunately, this prediction is based on the assumption that owners of standard CD players are going to plunk down an extra ten bucks just to own a disc that maybe, someday in the future, will let them spend a few hundred dollars so they can replace a perfectly good CD player.
Tempting You with Cheap Razors, Slashing You with Costly Blades
Sony started this whole ball rolling by milking all the early adaptors of SACD, beginning in 1999 with players which sold for a few thousand bucks a pop. Now that they've bankrupted all the audiophiles, they're going to start in on us regular people. Basically, they're more or less giving away the razors in order to make people have to buy their very expensive blades.
Currently, Sony has a variety of relatively-inexpensive machines with SACD, including a single-disc DVD/SACD player for $300, the DVP-NS500V and a five-disc SACD changer for $350, the SCDCE775. Again, the basic approach is to almost give away the players while leaving you needing their high-priced discs.
Audiophiles may scoff at the wisdom of mating a high-end datastream with inexpensive front-end electronics, such as you'd find processing the analog signal in these low-cost SACD players. If that bugs them, they'll really hate Sony's new home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) systems which include SACD players.
You want tiny, one-driver satellite speakers and plastic subwoofers? You've got the new Sony HTIB's, including the DAV-S500, the DAV-C700, and the DAV-C900. These so-called Dream Systems, such as the DAV-S500, give a rather striking example of this mating of high-density signal sources with low-quality system components.
The S500, which has a combination SACD/DVD player, comes with extremely petite plastic-cube speakers. The front L/R speakers have 2-7/8th-inch "mid-range" drivers and 5/8th-inch tweeters. The center and surround speakers just have the 2-7/8th-inch driver. Sony claims a frequency response of 150 Hz to 50 kHz for the L/R speakers and 150 Hz to 20 kHz for the others. I believe their bottom end would only reach 150 Hz, but as for the claimed high end, hey, we could all use a good laugh. On their best day, these speakers would be lucky to hit 10 kHz. The DAV-S500 system sells for $600.
The bottom line is, if you've got a $200 receiver and a $100 pair of speakers, sinking cash into a SACD player is not your best move. Unless you have a decent pair of speakers, you're not even hitting the playback quality limits of the current CD standard.
The Bass Management Debacle
On the technical side, there's an additional problem with SACD players: some models have no bass management. Bass management is a feature found with A/V receivers which process Dolby Digital or DTS datastreams, usually from the soundtracks on a DVD-Video. When you have limited-range speakers, such as the small satellite speakers which are now very popular as part of sub/sat surround-sound speaker systems, the bass management keeps the receiver from sending a full-range signal to one of the limited-range sats.
The bass management problem with SACD is a side-effect of the lack of digital outputs. Without a digital output, you are forced to connect the SACD player to your receiver's six "5.1-channel" analog inputs. Currently, no receiver on the market has internal bass management on audio sources which enter via the 5.1-channel analog inputs. You can easily blow out a speaker if you send it a full-range signal which it can't handle, such as the signal which can result from using a SACD player which has no bass management.
It is true, Sony has introduced bass management on all the 2002 SACD players of which I'm aware, but there are still some older models, such as the S9000ES (I wrote a review last Spring pointing out how overpriced this unit is for the features you get) which are quite expensive, selling for over $1,000, and lack bass management:
http://www.epinions.com/elec-review-5485-25A9EAED-3A3994E3-prod2
Sony is not the only company selling a SACD player without bass management. There's also a very expensive model from Philips which has no bass management. Philips, by the way, is Sony's partner in both the original Redbook CD standard and in development of the new SACD standard.
If you do plan to buy a SACD player and you have non-full-range speakers (such as the small satellite speakers in one of the ubiquitous sub/sat surround-sound systems), make sure the player has integral bass management. The same goes for DVD-Audio players where it's hit and miss on finding a model with bass management. With DTS the signal will enter you're a/V receiver through the digital connection, allowing it to be processed by the receiver's integral bass management.
When shopping for a SACD machine, try to find out the crossover frequency used in the player. The Sony SACD players are reported to have a fixed crossover frequency of 100 Hertz. This is not ideal, as even most satellite speakers can put out significant bass down to 80 Hertz, sometimes even a bit lower. With the crossover up at 100 Hertz, it's necessary for the sub to fill in up to that frequency. When the sub gets up that high it becomes directional, thus defeating non-directionality, which is one of the advantages of a subwoofer and is the reason that you can more or less place it anywhere within your speaker array (within reason, of course).
It is possible to add bass management, previous to the six-channel analog inputs on you're a/V receiver, by using an auxiliary bass controller. But these processors are pricey, starting at about $250 (the Outlaw Audio ICBM). At the moment, SACD players with built-in bass management have been limited to the Sony models only. Sony uses a particular DSP chip to perform the in-player bass management and they won't share the chip with any other company. That's not a particularly encouraging sign for the SACD format, but probably explains why some retailers, such as Crutchfield, sell only Sony SACD players.
Will You Pay to Be a Soldier in Sony's Format War?
We won't even get into the VHS vs. Beta format war which appears likely to break out soon with these formats. There's an eerie resonance between SACD, which in terms of theoretical performance capability has a slight edge on the other recently-introduced high-rez formats (DVD-A and DTS), and the Betamax video format which Sony marketed at the dawn of the home video-cassette age.
A consortium of VCR makers, led by the Japan Victor Company (JVC), got together behind a lower-resolution video format, VHS. Hoping its superior format would let it hold the exclusive patent to the dominant home video format, Sony pushed hard for the acceptance of Betamax. Considering the odds against it, Betamax didn't do so bad. There were still stores renting Betamax movies right up into the early 1990's. But the more common, though lower-quality, VHS format eventually won out, proving that consumers value variety and economy over resolution quality.
Just as the company pushed Betamax, Sony is pushing the SACD format. Part of that push includes the slew of relatively-inexpensive SACD players which they have dumped on the market this year. Sadly, while the technology exists to have one player that will handle both SACD and DVD-Audio discs, Sony's players are all SACD-only (as well as regular CD). That shows how determined Sony is to force acceptance of their high-priced new format.
Unlike the Betamax vs. VHS conflict, the high-rez audio fight is shaping up to be a three-way war, between CD, a current, fairly accurate format with which many people are satisfied, DVD-Audio, and SACD. Actually, as mentioned above, there is also music out on DTS, one of the soundtrack formats used with DVD-Video discs, so you can make that a four-way war. If you already own a DVD player, you can probably play DTS discs and, for you, there would at least be no hardware issue with music on DTS. Look for the DTS logo on your DVD player. Of course, the DTS format will confuse consumers because they associate it with DVD-Video soundtracks, which is its main use, but what good would it be to have a format war if it didn't confuse consumers? A few companies have created disc players which will handle DVD-Audio, SACD, and DTS, but, thus far, Sony has stuck exclusively with SACD-only players.
Unfortunately, the first company to hit the market with one of these multi-high-rez format players was Apex, which is a little like a great new auto technology coming out and only being available on Yugos.
Why CD is Pretty Good -- the Fun Part for Tech Weenies
If you are fairly happy with your current, standard CD player, not to mention the ability to walk into any record store, or surf to any music Web site, and find a decent assortment of titles, there's a reason for that. Despite the many complaints about it, especially at the start, in the early 1980's, when recording engineers had limited mastery of the art of digital recording, CD is a fairly high-quality recording process.
With music on a CD, the analog musical waves are translated into digital representations of those waves. In terms of playback from the disc itself, each snapshot, or "sample" of the audio is described with a 16-bit binary number, also known as a 16-bit word length. Each bit is either a 1 or a 0, represented on the disc itself by either a bump, or the lack thereof (known as "pits" and "land," respectively). Thus, one particular moment in the audio wave might be represented as 0000111100110110. This creates 2 to the sixteenth possible combinations which, if you care to pop down your calculator and hit the multiple key a few times, means 65,536 possible combinations. Since audio waves, in their pure form, consist of sine waves (shaped like a series of s's, on their sides, joined end-to-end), which run from zero, to a peak positive value, back to zero, to a lowest negative value, or trough, back to zero, and then repeat the cycle, there are actually 32,768 positive values and 32,767 negative values.
The disc reads one of those numbers off the disc 44,100 times per second, meaning a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz has been employed. That's why CD is called a 16-bit/44.1 kHz format. As you can see, while it's possible to use higher numbers, and different fundamental recording approaches, the CD format is not exactly lo-fi. This approach to digitizing, storing, and playing back audio is called Pulse Code Modulation, or PCM. The same approach is used with the new high-rez DVD-Audio format, but the resolution can be as high as 24-bit/192kHz (for two-channel audio). DTS uses PCM also, at a somewhat lower resolution than DVD-Audio.
The Technology Behind SACD
Rather than the CD standard, which samples the audio 44,100 times per second (i.e., 44.1 kHz) and uses a 16-bit binary word length, SACD uses a one-bit approach with a sampling frequency of 2.8 Mbps (the single bit recorded 2.8 million times per second). If you are familiar with the standard 16-bit approach to CD, SACD's one-bit format might seem like it would strangle dynamic range, but it works by using each of those many bits in each second to indicate either an increase or decrease in the audio amplitude (level). Thus, a 1 indicates an amplitude increase from the previous bit while a 0 signals a decrease from the previous bit.
Although SACD gets closer to the shape of the original analog audio soundwaves than the 16-bit/44.1 kHz approach with standard CD, it is still, like any digital representation, an approximation. It is said to be closest to analog of any of the current formats, but this doesn't change the fact that it's still digital and requires analog-to-digital conversion at the recording end of the process and digital-to-analog conversion at the playback end.
By comparison, the LP record is a completely analog format. Analog audio is converted to analog electronic waves. The waves control the cutting of a vinyl record (I'm simplifying the whole process, but this is essentially what happens). When a phono-cartridge needle passes over that record, the movement of the needle induces an analog electrical waveform in a coiled wire. This waveform is an identical analog reflection of the original waveform which came from the microphone in the recording studio. The waveform has remained in the analog domain throughout the process, whether it's been soundwaves in the air, reflections of the soundwaves on a plastic disk, or soundwaves coming from a speaker at the other end of the process.
Like all digital formats, SACD can only provide an approximation of the original analog waveform. However, it is a very close approximation, resulting in a 100 kHz frequency response for the format.
CD, Really Pretty Good Quality in the Real World
While SACD offers a technical improvement over standard CD, many people are satisfied with the CD format. This is because a system which samples the audio on each of its two stereo tracks 44,100 times per second, and describes each sample with a measurement system allowing up to 65,536 combinations, offers a high potential for audio fidelity.
Another factor contributing to satisfaction with the CD is that it has been in common use for more than 15 years, meaning all the techies in the production process (studio engineers, mastering engineers, pressing-plant supervisors) have had an ample opportunity to squeeze the best performance possible out of the format. Based on initial reports, some SACD's realize the format's performance much better than others. The engineers still face a learning curve with SACD. Finally, there is the issue of source material. While the SACD format uses less digital processing than CD, this isn't going to make that big a difference if the audio on which the SACD is based was heavily digitally processed in the recording studio in the first place.
It might not be that big a deal for you to go out and spend $300, plus whatever you decide to allocate for the eight necessary connecting cables, to buy a low-end Sony SACD player and connect it to you're a/V receiver. It is a big deal for recording studios to suddenly replace all their gear with new equipment designed to produce the kind of wide-range signal which will fully exploit the SACD format. And that's just looking at new recordings. With any reissue, and reissues presently make up about 99.9% of the SACD releases, the final audio fidelity of the disc will be no higher than that of the tapes from which it's mastered. But the master tapes are the master tapes. The same ones that made all the back-catalog standard CD's will be used for the SACD reissues.
Boycott SACD, Fight the Man, Support Local Bands
If you place a great emphasis on variety and innovation in music, you will probably not be fond of the SACD format. Clearly, SACD, at least until it becomes much more common, gives the advantage to the big name, established bands. With the discs selling for $25, it's much easier to see a copy of Dark Side of the Moon selling than the latest work from a cow-punk band.
The SACD format is likely to make consumers less adventurous. It's one thing to drop fourteen bucks to check out a band that you've read a couple of reviews on, heard about from a friend, or maybe heard one or two of the band's singles on the radio. When you get up to the $25 price point -- that's $100 every time you buy four CD's! -- you might not feel quite as inspired to take a chance on something new.
Of course, this speculation on how much people will check out new music on SACD is completely hypothetical at this point. Of the few hundred discs, total, available on SACD, the bulk are sure-fire hits like Dark Side of the Moon. There are new releases, and maybe even one or two new bands, out on SACD, but they're as few and far between as Olympic swimming pools in the Sahara.
This is not to say that the SACD is a useless format. Personally, I would not invest my money in a product with all the drawbacks of SACD. I'm just not that dissatisfied with CD that I would be willing to deal with all the negatives that come along with SACD's high performance capability. I also have no interest in being a market-research guinea pig. If I were to invest in a high-rez audio player, I would purchase one with the newer chips that can decode both SACD and DVD-A. I would also wait for the new DVD-A players with digital output and the new receivers that can decode this high-rez datastream and have integral bass management.
Invest in Solid Audio Quality Before Upgrading Your CD Player
It's important to keep in mind that, while SACD can provide a high-quality audio signal, you will waste all that response if you play it through mediocre speakers. Let's say you have a system built around an average A/V receiver, one that sells for $300. You will get better audio performance using a decent ($250) single-disc CD player and a high-quality pair of bookshelf speakers (something like $200 to $400 per pair) than you would get with a SACD player (of any price) and a $100 pair of speakers. An audio playback chain is only as strong as it's least-accurate link. The best source in the world is not going to overcome the results which will be imposed upon your ears by really cheap speakers.
SACD, Manna for the Gadget-Happy
On the other hand, maybe there's just a gee-whiz, super-fantastic, latest-and-greatest aura about the SACD that you simply can't resist. Maybe, no matter how modest your speakers, it gives you an undefinable, but very real feeling of satisfaction to know that on you're a/V shelf there sits a gadget that will assure you of the very latest version of man's quest to achieve "perfect sound forever," as Sony described the original CD 20 years ago.
Because of the lack of a digital connection, and the bass management issues, I would definitely not recommend SACD for people who are interested in multi-channel surround-sound. Obviously, if your goal is to set up a home theater, you will just want a DVD-Video player with the capability of passing the DD or DTS soundtrack from a video DVD to you're a/V receiver.
If you want surround-sound for music only, and you already have a home-theater and surround-sound speakers, you can go with the DTS music discs and you won't have to buy any additional equipment.
There's nothing inherently wrong with SACD (or DVD-Audio) for surround-sound multi-channel music. But with the extra analog cables alone adding a few hundred bucks to the cost of your system, you should really give Sony some more time to figure out the best way to implement multi-channel SACD (i.e., don't buy a player until they come out with SACD players and receivers that will work with a one-cable digital connection).
SACD, Who's It Good For?
From my perspective, the current form of SACD is best suited for serious equipment fanatics who are into two-channel (stereo) playback. It comes back to the old (LP days) definition of the difference between an audiophile and a music lover: the audiophile plays the record and hears every single scratch; the music lover is too busy enjoying the tunes to notice the scratches.
For somebody who already has either a very good A/V receiver, or a stereo pre-amp and amplifier, plus a pair of really good speakers, a SACD player would be a pretty tempting addition to their system. As long as they didn't mind the tiny selection of discs and the giant prices, there's no reason they couldn't bring in a SACD player as an auxiliary disc player. I suppose music lovers might also enjoy a SACD player, though it's hard to imagine anybody being all that fond of music and at the same time wanting to straight-jacket themselves with the severely restricted selection of SACD discs.
The lack of variety of discs is a pain in the neck but, perversely, this could actually be a pleasure. For example, people who own home-theater surround-sound audio systems with 6.1-channel (as opposed to 5.1-channel) DTS-ES capability, know that they have very few DVD titles with DTS-ES soundtracks from which to choose. When a new DVD with DTS-ES comes out, such as Gladiator, it's a big deal and many home-theater enthusiasts, who might not even be that inclined to see Gladiator just for the movie, will want to have it just to show off the extra rear-back-surround speaker in their DTS-ES system.
The same phenomenon is at work with HDTV. While over 200 TV stations now broadcast HDTV programming, reaching over two-thirds of the households in the country, the actual hours per day of HD broadcasting are limited. For example, on NBC there is only the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and ABC has barely just begun to broadcast in HD. Via satellite HD, and a few cable systems, it is possible to receive HBO, but most of the movies shown are just standard 480i resolution bumped up to 480p. However, from time to time HBO or ABC will have an HD broadcast of a movie in full-scale 16:9 at 1080i. When they do this, it's a big event for people with HD tuners and HD-ready displays.
Likewise, I could see how, for the owner of a SACD player, the relative rarity of material might make it an enjoyable treat when a new title is released on SACD. It's that thrill of being an early adopter, feeling like you are blazing new trails. But this rosy little metaphor breaks down when you observe that, while the single HDTV broadcasting standard for the U.S. has been fixed for years, there are still several different formats vying for market supremacy in the battle of high-rez audio reproduction.
The Tyranny of the IF's
Even if you do decide you like the idea of the SACD's performance potential, you will still face what I call the tyranny of the "ifs." It's a great idea if you don't mind only having a few hundred titles, worldwide total, from which to choose (make that less than 100 if you want multichannel titles). It's a great idea if you don't mind spending $25 every time you get a new disc. It's a great idea if you don't mind hunting all over town, or ordering from the Internet, just to get something that will play on your new machine. It's a great idea if you don't mind being stuck behind one format in what's shaping up to be a three- or four-way format war for the hearts and minds of high-rez music buyers. It's a great idea if you don't mind paying for eight analog connection cables where a standard DVD or CD player can connect with a single digital cable. It's a great idea if you don't mind blowing out your satellite speakers. It's a great idea if you don't mind being denied your right to make copies of the music software which you buy.
Hey, if you really sit down and think about it, maybe SACD's not such a great idea after all.
Let me finish here by quoting from a Stereophile Magazine interview with a man who has been in the high-end audio retail business for many years, Michael Kay of Lyric Hi-Fi & Video (1221 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY). This is his comment on the outlook for SACD and DVD-Audio:
"In two-channel you have two "problems," in surround you have five problems. Let them make up their goddamned minds. What is it—four, five, six, or 10 channels? Finish it—the concept has to be finalized so we know what it is, so we can tell the people. The copyright issues are also holding them back. In another five years, maybe. They're going to have to come up with new ways of recording and mixing surround. Till then, I'm staying with two-channel at home."
*You might wish to read the entire interviews at Stereophile's Web site:
http://www.stereophile.com/fullarchives.cgi?507
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