Will SACD get hyped like vinyl? Very unlikely. Physical media itself is doing ok, but a more fair comparison to vinyl would be CD. It’s more reasonable to wonder if CD will one day get as hyped as vinyl. That’s entirely possible as the casual vinyl listener who’s fueling the surge grows tired of what a pain vinyl is to maintain and the absurd prices, and will look to CD for a physical media alternative. Vinyl had its hey day, followed by cassette, and then CD. SACD never had a hey day, it has been extremely niche since day one. To put in context, there are millions upon millions of CD titles on the market. SACD has only had something like 10K titles total - ever. And why would the masses ever care about the benefits SACD provides???? They have not ever cared, and it’s very unlikely they ever will because on the average system, SACD provides zero benefits over the less much expensive CD version. SACD will be doing well to exist as a niche audiophile market. I do not believe streaming will do in SACDs because the audiophile SACD buyer will continue to prefer the sonic advantages and material connection that only a physical SACD can provide. Even as a SACD enthusiast myself, the fact remains that a well mastered redbook CD on a high end CD player can sound every bit as good as a SACD.
I can say that the quality of the CD player makes a huge difference. If you had an $18K Luxman CD/SACD player, you might have a different conclusion.
Hey, I’m an SACD enthusiast. But when a format has only ever had about 10,000 titles in its 23 year history, it’s delusional to think it’s poised for a vinyl like revival. SACD will do well to continue to exist as a niche audiophile medium. I certainly hope that it does. Though I’m growing bored with the typical SACD new release titles. Almost entirely old folks music.
Well, yes and no. If you want to feed a SACD DSD signal directly from the player to the receiver, bitstreaming is an option. But usually you can't hook up a PC to the receiver and get bitstreaming. Unless you have some reasonably esoteric equipment and even then usually only stereo is available not 5.1. So a DSD file is usually sent to a receiver as PCM which somewhat reduces the value of DSD. Playing back in stereo on a digital audio player is another matter of course.
It is true that a well produced / mastered CD can sound very good. But in my experience not only can a SACD improve upon that, but (heresy coming, warning!) in my view provides a better medium for listening to a reproduction of the original tape than vinyl. I really don't like surface noise.
Well, except you can't lose your SACD in a hard drive crash (which is much more likely than, say, a house fire or theft of your discs).
Agreed. The simple fact that there are WAY fewer SACDs out there to fuel a resurgence compared to vinyl. It's not even close. Throw in SACDs that were only sold in Japan, HK, etc., and the supply gets even smaller.
An SACD can have a non-zero resale value, and be perceived visually and physically. It is also less likely to have audible watermarking. That said, I would welcome and prefer non-watermarked files with the same masterings as an alternative.
Definitely, but that can get pretty pricey. So can fireproof storage for physical media (if one wanted to). A big rabbit hole to potentially go down, for sure.
backups are not optional. and if you're ripping SACDs instead of buying dsd downloads you're not selling/destroying the SACDs generally afterwards anyway, at least I'm not. having both discs and files is handy for flexibility, but no matter what backup your irreplaceable files! <edited for clarity>
I agree, but it seemed like originalsnuffy was talking about buying DSD downloads instead of SACDs. That's why I was making the point about hard drives. I also rip all of my physical SACDs for computer playback as I've got a nice DAC hooked up to my computer.
maybe I'm an outlier but I've been sending DSD as DSD to my very-not-esoteric onkyo receiver since like . . .2010? at that point it was a little unusual to support DSD natively on the receiver but looking at AVRs again last year, every single one I considered from denon and marantz supported DSD natively. the weird thing here is assuming you'd need to hook the computer up to the receiver to do this- i can send dsd to my AVR either via the network or by connecting a HD directly to the receiver or my blu-ray player. but anyway, even a computer these days wouldn't need anything esoteric, just an HDMI output and those are super common these days.
After 14 years of files on a hard drive, I’m all about physical media these days. It sounds better and is more fun to collect and organize.
If there is an SACD resurgence it's only due to hybrid layered SACD's coming into prominence. Even as a huge digital media enjoyer I really dislike SACD's 1) it's super anti-consumer locked behind DRM 2) The SACD's are rarely ever the best mastered versions available and often times quite underwhelming unless it's jazz 3) I can't actually hear the difference between my SACD rips when I knock them down to 16/44.1.
I did a bunch of SACD collecting when I got my Marantz player about five years ago, but hardly any recently. I’d rather have vinyl