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Is Sony Abandoning SACD? (1 Viewer)

Chris Gerhard

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There are many hundreds of millions of commercial CD's in this country. Worldwide, surely over a billion. Not sure what you are asking.

Chris
 

dany

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Just like LP's,8-tracks,cass, DVD-A,SACD,some sound good and some dont,its not limited to cd's. Show me a format that sounds good every time and i'll check it out.
 

Brian Little

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One of the biggest problems with SACD is that the marketting in general for the format was poorly done. Think of the iPod in comparison to SACD. You see ads for the iPod on TV all the time. Its featured in the weekly flyers for the major electronic chain stores EVERY WEEK. Yet I rarely saw a mention of SACD even when a major release like "The Dark Side Of The Moon" was released.

In today's world of people's attention span being shorter and shorter and companies trying to keep people's attention for more than 10 seconds (a lot of that is their own doing)... well.... SACD is yet another victim of our modern society. Something has to be shoved into Joe Six Pack's face over and over which is one of the major reasons why the iPod has been successful. Sure Joe Six Pack has NO idea what mp3 is or what it does or how it works... but HE knows that an iPod is "a portable music player that can have ten gazillion songs on it all at once." Then again a LOT of these are the same ones who still have their VCR blinking 12:00 at them. ;)

Of course it never helped SACD (or DVD-Audio for that matter) when the major electronic chain stores has the demo units tucked away in a distant corner most of the time not setup correctly. Or employees who think that mp3 is better sounding than SACD which did happen to me in fact. Or a store like Best Buy who's SACD/DVD-A selection has more misplaced CDs there than SACD/DVD-A titles (most of which is by lazy Joe Six Packs who are too lazy to put 50 Cent back where he found it - and even more lazy employees who are too lazy to clean up the area). Or that even one store that abandoned SACD/DVD-A just when *GASP* the demand for the product started to pick up a little bit (name withheld but we ALL know who it is).

So yeah I'm not shocked that Sony is abandoning its own format. Don't get me wrong I'm ticked off since I supported SACD and DVD-A myself. But in today's world of "64k WMA plz kthx" I'm not surprised looking back that both of these formats were bound for failure due to what I wrote in this post.

And in regards to DualDisc its on life support already. Most people don't seem to care about it as the sparse extra content on most of the discs have been pathetic at this point. Its sad when the best disc I have seen to date on the format is NIN's "With Teeth" which in essence is an overglorified DVD-Audio disc (in fact the DVD side has a MLP track). Too bad Alan Parson's "A Valid Path" DualDisc release is Dolby 5.1 and DTS 5.1 on the DVD side. That album is RIPE for an MLP 5.1 track.

*steps off the soapbox*
 

Chris Gerhard

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Sony still has SACD players in their current product lineup to play the soon to be approximately 4,000 SACD titles so abandoning isn't the correct term. If SACD started selling by some miracle, then I am certain Sony would release more music. As pitiful as the sales are now, I don't expect many new titles from Sony, although we should see some.

Chris
 

dany

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Oh good. I dont want them to stop until i can sell my Sony Player.
 

Jesse Skeen

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The biggest mistake they've made with SACD is not making all discs hybrids. That would encourage everyone to buy them now and be able to play them, then take advantage of the SACDs when they get a player. They should put out some high-profile titles ONLY in SACD hybrid- lots of hybrid titles still have the same title out on a regular CD-only disc, what's the point of that??

What was the reasoning for dropping the SACD on the Depeche Mode reissues in the US? I would have bought all of them if the US versions had the SACD hybrid discs, but since they don't I probably won't get any of them- the DVDs that come with the imported SACD hybrids are PAL format, which I don't like even though I can still play them.

Dualdiscs have so much more potential than what they've been doing with them. Who wants to listen to the album in PCM while watching a still picture on the screen? If they don't want to do a multi-channel mix for the album, don't bother putting it on the DVD side and instead put more VIDEO content on it! Those "We Are The 80s" discs sounded interesting, but they decided to make those just regular CDs at the last minute so I'm not bothering with them.

I'm surprised the average person knows how to put music on an IPod.
 

LarryDavenport

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Because, unlike the UK, if you have an album with 10 tracks, have a redbook layer, a hi-rez stereo, and a hi-rez 5.1, you have to pay the copyright holder three times, making the record companies take a loss on hybrid discs.
 

Danny Tse

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That's because Depeche Mode is signed to Warner Music in the US. As you know, Warner is the chief proponent of SACD's rival, DVD-A. This is the same reason why the SACDs of Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler and Bjork are not available in the US.
 

dany

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Oh i'm thinking they could sell a disc for 5 bucks and not take a loss.
 

Jesse Skeen

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OK, then why didn't they include DVD-A since there are DVDs included with them anyways, which just have audio in DTS and Dolby Digital instead??
People who run record companies are just plain retarded. Sony shouldn't have even bothered doing Dualdiscs (unless, again, they actually had worthwhile VIDEO content on them) unless they included DVD-Audio on them. Of course they didn't, since it's the competing format to SACD, yet they won't put those titles out at all on SACD!
 

Danny Tse

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Hi-rez, especially SACD, is more accepted overseas (from an American perspective). If you look at recent pop/rock SACD releases such as those from the Moody Blues, Dire Straits, Depeche Mode, or Bjork, these are always released in Europe on SACD first. We Americans have to import the SACD through places like Amazon UK in order to purchase them.
 

JediFonger

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that's my point exactly. why not "sucker" people into it by releasing SACD hybride ONLY. then start marketing you already OWN SACD's without knowing it! not just buy a SACD player and you can enjoy the same discs in 5.1! or somn. =). heck we would've had about 5x more SACDs by now if that happened.

 

Danny Tse

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The catch with that is the added expenses of recording in multi-channel, not to mention the expenses of pressing M/C hybrid SACD. Single-inventory releases have been done before and I think companies such as Sony should do more of them. I always say that the current album from The Dixie Chicks, released by Sony, would have been a major opportunity to push SACD if released as a single-inventory disc. I believe the cost to press hybrid SACD have come down so much that even an independent label such as Telarc can release a single-inventory title, such as the recent Randy Brecker SACD, that it only charge $15.99 as the MSRP. Just imagine a Dixie Chicks SACD title with its potential sales....the cost of pressing and production would have been very little in terms of total sales.
 

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