DVD-A in denial?

I guess my main point was that there are a handful of very well-defined variations of SACD discs. Once a production manager decides on one of the variations, the course is pretty much set.

With DVD-A being a completely open-ended format, there are a virtually infinite number of permutations that may emerge. That's all well and good but the bottom line is that this has led to a high level of consumer annoyance and outright rejection of the medium.

 

Given your accession to the fact that preferences are still what matter most to nearly all consumers, one should not be taking the pedantic view that customers A and B need to be making fact-based decisions as the entirety of your posting suggests; nor should it come as much of a surprise to you that I couldn't give a fiddler's f@rt what reasons A & B use to come to their decisions about what they buy - or even that they need to be identified as two types of buyers.

Be assured that I don't have some sound-measuring device connected to my head my means of a cranial implant (heaven forbid that one would have to argue the merits of balanced versus unbalanced connections in such instances) to guide me through the process of making a correct decision about superior sound.

 

Unless something changes quickly, neither of these formats is going anywhere anyway. I don't think that average Joe Listener is going to pay a premium for SACD. I don't think they are selling a lot of SACD players - which is why some of the current prices are so good. And the DVD-A camp shot themselves in the foot by taking so long to get it together that most homes already have a DVD player that won't play the format.

The sad fact is that the average consumer does not care enough about sound quality to invest in either the equipment or the discs for these formats, and the audiophile market has been shrinking rather than growing. CD may have been a shot in the arm for the music industry in 1984, but it has completely changed the way most people listen to music. Most CDs have the most UNINVOLVING sound I have ever heard, and the better your equipment is, the worse it gets, until you get to real $$$. Even the best players available in the mid-80s to early 90s sounded pretty DIGITAL, and poorly mastered discs played on cheap players are the norm today. People used to LISTEN to LPs - you couldn't help it, they were absorbing even on cheap record players - but CD pretty much killed that. CDs are something you play in the background or in the car. And many people are happy with MP3.

I don't think anyone is going to convince the public that a new hi-res format (which supposedly restores a lot of the musicality that CD supposedly didn't take away in the first place) is worth the money, unless cheap combo-players become the norm and the cost of the discs comes WAY down. Like CHEAPER than CD maybe. Otherwise the labels are going to have to institute a massive campaign to educate the public WHY hi-res is better, which means they are going to have to criticize their own product (CD) as being NOT the perfect sound forever people were promised, but rather very IMPERFECT sound. Otherwise, how can you sell hi-res as an IMPROVEMENT?

That leaves multi-channel as the main selling point. And since MOST multi-channel setups are home-theater setups, and most home theaters setups these days are Best-Buy cheapos, that doesn't bode well for hi-res multi-channel. DVD-A, with all the DVD bells and whistles might have had a shot at that market, but as noted before, most of the DVD players in homes today won't play DVD-A.

So, unless these formats can hold on until players are CHEAP, discs are abundant, and people's current cheapo players start wearing out, I doubt either will make it. The only real hope I can see for SACD is if Sony releases EVERYTHING in SACD and abandons CD altogether. Which might be an expensive proposition, because charging a premium for an SACD layer most people can't use won't work.

 

I didn't mean to suggest that -- the only thing I have recommended that people *should* do is keep in mind the existence of biases when making claims about how their components sound in comparison to others, so as not to overstate what they can know.

But it was you , IIRC, who wrote of what the 'ideal world' case would be, and made the distinction between two types of buyers in the first place.

If something sounds better to *you*, *you* have made the 'correct' decision about the 'superior' sound. The quibbling starts when one equates ones perception of what sounds better to you, to statements about objective differences between the sounds of components.