Why Super Audio Failed? Really?

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Why Super Audio CD Failed
By Garry Margolis | December 30, 2016 4:38 AM

Super Audio CD (SACD) was introduced in 1999 by Philips and Sony, its co-inventors, as the next generation of consumer audio, featuring six channels of Direct Stream Digital (DSD), the highest resolution then available to home listeners, and backward compatibility to existing CD players through its hybrid CD layer.

My Sony and Philips colleagues and I demonstrated DSD surround recordings of classical, jazz, and rock music to several hundred leading recording engineers, musicians, and reviewers, using top-quality playback equipment in acoustically treated environments. We received almost unanimous praise for their transparency. Reviewers exulted over its lack of digital harshness, and one well-known engineer told me that while 96/24 PCM sounded good, with DSD he heard the output of his console, not the output of the recorder.

Interestingly, one major artist A/B compared this engineer's simultaneous 96/24 PCM and DSD recordings of her music in his control room and told him, "We can't go back."

Consumers could buy SACDs before they bought surround systems and their purchases wouldn't be obsolete when they upgraded. The same discs would play in their cars, their portable players, their children's boom boxes, and the surround systems in their listening rooms.

Further, DVD-Video was making significant progress in homes, helped by low-cost but low-quality "home theater in a box" surround systems. One might assume that surround audio on a CD-sized disk would be an easy sell.

So why was SACD not a commercial success?

First, there was a format war. The DVD Forum, headed by Toshiba, refused to pay patent royalties to Sony and Philips, and they launched a competing format: DVD-Audio, which couldn't be played in a CD player. Ironically, the royalty for an SACD was the same as for a CD: $.10 per disc, while the royalty on a DVD-Audio disc was around four times higher.

Record labels chose sides. The Warner group, part of the DVD Forum, went with DVD-Audio, and Universal and Sony chose SACD. Consumers are understandably reluctant to choose one new format over another -- they remembered the Beta vs. VHS format war -- so neither SACD nor DVD-Audio gained significant traction.

Then came the bombshell. Like Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected the iPod. While there were MP3 players that preceded the iPod, they were clunky, difficult to use, and thus had limited success. Steve Jobs and his crew put a simple, straightforward user interface in an elegant package that was a huge hit. Never mind that it used MP3 files (although it could also play PCM files).

The mass market fell in love with the iPod. Consumers didn't care that its supplied earbuds were poor quality and that its MP3 files didn't sound as good as CDs, let alone high-resolution. Then Apple released its iTunes software, first for the Mac and then for Windows, and they started selling music at $.99/track through the iTunes Music Store. Apple made it easy for the average consumer to buy music and carry it in a convenient package.

The money that consumers would have spent by on high-resolution surround sound instead went to portable music, and the demand needed to establish a viable high-resolution format never materialized.

When we look back, we see that acoustical recordings, which started around the turn of the century, were replaced by electrical recordings in the mid-1920s. The LP and the 45 replaced those in the late 1940s and evolved into stereo records in the late '50s. The CD took hold in the early 1980s. SACD and DVD-Audio may have been too early, as they were introduced in 1999 and 2000, respectively, but the iPod's introduction in 2001 sealed their fate.

By about 2007, DVD-Audio was a dead format. Some audiophile labels continued to release SACDs. 2L and a few other labels are releasing high resolution recordings on Blu-ray discs, but with the wide availability of high-speed internet connections and relatively low-cost, high-capacity digital storage, the market for music on disc is vanishing.

Garry Margolis is an independent consultant based in Los Angeles. He produced and engineered analog recordings and supervised their mastering and pressing, then joined JBL Professional and UREI, where he was involved in the specification and voicing of studio monitors and high-end consumer systems.

He was Philips' North American liaison to the motion picture and recording industries for technologies including MPEG Multichannel audio, Super Audio CD, and Blu-ray.

He is a Past President of the Audio Engineering Society and currently serves as its Treasurer.

 

Lets also consider that the general public are not audiophiles, and can't tell the difference between a crappy MP3 file and a CD. They will even listen to XM satellite radio and think it sounds "great". DVD audio, SACD, are just too esoteric for the general public to care enough to buy into it. Too many formats confuse the average Joe.

 

It was the format war nonsense that kept me from investing heavily in either. Also, surround mattered a lot more to me than higher resolution and most super audio CDs were not surround.

 

Mediocrity prevails. Convenience trumps quality. Sad.

 

That's True, many of the early SACDs were just stereo. I remember seeing them in Best buy, on a small rack in the CD aisle. Nobody else was checking them out but me. I say they said "stereo" and already had some 5.1 DVD audio discs, so I was like "so whats the big deal"? I wish I had bought them though, all of the early CBS titles like micheal jacksons thriller on SACD sell for big bucks now.

 

SACD failed mostly because DSD is a ridiculous audio format, technically inferior to PCM, failed to be differentiated in blind tests against redbook CD, and the fact that surround never caught on as a music distribution, mastering, or consumption medium. The sooner we can all go back to focusing on CD, the better.

 

A) stereo-only SACD's. What was the selling point? It had viability as a surround format, but that wasn't really marketed, like they ceded that ground to DVD-A.

B) 99% of people can't tell the difference between redbook and SACD stereo. Those that can, and have some sense, probably still wouldn't claim that it's a massive difference, in the way going from VHS to DVD or LP to CD was. People expect those kind of massive upgrades when someone's trying to sell them expensive software and a more expensive player. It was always going to be a longshot.

C) The vast majority of the music the vast majority of people listen to isn't the kind of stuff that needs hi-res. I remember CD's for horrifically mastered new releases at the time (Springsteen's Live In New York, Journey's Arrival, Bowie's Heathen), what was the point? (from a stereo listening perspective). It was probably great for classical music and vintage jazz reissues, but a format wasn't going to live solely on niche genres.


If all the labels had gotten on board with the format, and issued everything as hybrid discs with surround sound mixes, basically allowing people to build an SACD collection without trying, I think it might've had a chance. But it was a niche product marketed as a niche product, and that was always going to fail.

 

I hear a difference for the better in my Dylan and Stones SACDs.

 

There's the answer! SACD and DVD-Audio were too expensive, too complicated, and required new equipment. We had become a transient society and people wanted their music on the go. They didn't want to buy whole albums with one or two songs they liked, and they didn't want to rebuy, yet again, their collections. Small digital files were the way to go.

 

What?? How is DSD inferior to PCM? How is CD better than SACD when it's a low sample and word bit rate? I'm all ears....

 

For it's purpose - sure, but I think my biggest issue now is with storage space being so big you can easily have hundreds of lossless albums on your Android phone, not even going into the size of HDDs in PCs where it's substantially higher you can get complete original no nonsense lossless audio, just excluding a physical disc. Obviously every album can't get that treatment, but even then anything not on these formats aren't difficult to rip, save for SACD which I can't imagine has any exclusive albums, and if it does well you probably have a modded PS3 ready to go then. DVD-A is no problem and LP record dubbing is super easy.

 

DSD is superior to PCM in every way. It's not samples of the waveform, it's a constant stream of data. As a full time audio engineer, I think it sounds as true to an analog source as you can get!

 

The problem with both formats is that you have to get compatible hardware to play the high resolution audio. I'll never forget how bummed I was when I got my first DVD-Audio disc (Deep Purple Machine Head) and discovered that I was never going to get the hi-res audio on my then-current 5.1 system. I thought DVD was DVD, but quickly learned that there was "DVD-Audio", and that not all DVD players supported it. Same with SACD - I bought a few SACD's before I had an SACD player and that was kinda sad. I passed on a lot of really good and now pricey DVD-A and SACD discs because I knew I didn't have the hardware to play them properly and didn't know if I ever would. If there wasn't a hardware gap, I would have loaded up on all the hi-res discs I could carry. Now my system is compatible with DVD-A, SACD and Blu Ray, stereo and multichannel, but the journey would have been a heckuva lot easier without the format war between labels.

 

DSD cannot be edited, for one. Any digital editing has to be done by converting the DSD signal to analog or to PCM, which means virtually no modern music will ever be "pure" DSD, if that ever mattered in the first place. It has massive ultrasonic noise that has to be filtered out above 30 kHz, which is ridiculous. And most damningly, every attempt to blindly differentiate DSD between good old redbook audio has failed. You would think when people say there are "night and day" differences, they would be a little more obvious.

 

Be that as it may, SACD-hybrids tended to be sourced and mastered noticeably better, and were more times than not (in my experience at least) left with greater dynamic range than their standard redbook CD-issued counterparts.
Whether or not the format, in of itself, actually delivered a better result "ounce-for-ounce" so to speak, at least the engineers who undertook the preparation of the source material were likely to take greater pride in their work and tended to aim for the audiophile market.

 

That's why I listen to lots of SACDs regardless of my opinion of DSD. The mastering speaks for itself every time. It's also why I tend to prefer 80s CDs in almost every case, sometimes even when a later audiophile label reissue is available. People love to complain about the Sony PCM 1600 series, but I like the sound of those things just fine.

 

Thats right! Especially early CDs because the A/D converters were very harsh sounding, and inferior LP cutting tapes were often used. Redbook cd can only go up to 22khz, which is the hearing range of most people. However, on an analog tape master or high resolution digital, there is plenty of audio information above that, and it effects the sound stage. If I transfer a 15 IPS audio reel to 44/16, and compare to the original tape, you can hear the difference. The sound stage collapses in, and the audio sounds gritty and mechanical. If I transfer to DSD, I can't hear the difference. SACD sounds smooth and open, like analog but without the tape hiss, distortion, print through, dropouts, etc etc.

 

Only speaking for myself, I was oblivious to that particular format war because I always found the relatively inexpensive CD format more than adequate when it came to sound quality.

I was peripherally aware of SACDs, but looked upon the format as a cash grab by Sony. Hell, CDs had only come out a decade earlier and I'd already re-purchased my record collection once already. I wasn't about to do it again.

 

I need to be somewhat careful what I say here... when I used to work in the 'Silicon Fen' area of Cambridgeshire, there was a company locally who produced a workstation under contract to Sony in the SACD and DSD sphere.

Let's just say there is a very good technical reason why Sony abandoned their own format.

PCM actually has less technical flaws than DSD. The folks who went with PCM initially were right, and the folks who went with DSD later hoping to correct a perceived or theoretically problem they think they saw with PCM were wrong.

That how science works, you come up with a solution, sometimes its the right, sometimes its wrong. That is actually how progress is made.

 

I believe it Steve! Most large corporations don't have a clue whats going on. Too busy counting money, going to lunch, and gossiping at the water cooler.

 

Really, what were the flaws? I think 192/24 bit PCM sounds pretty fine too.

 

I wonder if there ever was an option/plan of a SACD-like disc but with hi-res PCM content on the layer instead of DSD.

 

Well DVD audio is like that, They have both 5.1 tracks and high rez PCM tracks. Blu Ray audio discs too. And then there's HD tracks. So yeah, it exists.

 

Some Blu-ray audio disks already have this. My Blu-ray of Karajan's 9 Beethoven Symphonies is all hi-res PCM stereo.