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There is so much bickering going on about formats and who's gonna get the credit that it should be worth the wait.
Whenever a new format rolls out, there's always the fear among manufacturers that consumers will stop buying current models while waiting to see what happens with the new ones. Is this true for SACD and DVD-Audio?
First I want 24/96 HDCD at home, in the car, and for travel (as in Burr-Brown 1732 chips). That will keep me until these latest Beta/VHS wars are decided. I spend lots of time commuting; how come nobody has a portable HDCD player to go with my Etymotics ER-4s or Grado 325s? I just GOTTA HAVE my porta-tunes!
I bought a stand alone DAC and invested the dollar difference between that and a new CD player in short term investment type products. I'll invest that and the resold DAC proceeds in one of the new formats when it makes a little more sense to me.
Who in their right mind would spend $5000 for a machine that will only play one format of all the new possibilities when the disk the music is recorded on will be the same for them all. Talk about tossing good money down the toilet or what!
Are you kidding? SACD or DVD? I don't see either one as viable since the software prices are higher and it will take years until there could be a reasonable catalog for either format. Plus, most consumers think CDs are fine. Longer term, internet delivery and upsampling are the next big things, so to speak. But in the interim many people will buy new CD players. Hey, I just bought a painfully obsolete NAIM CD3.5 and revel in my outdated sound. And I know cheaper models are selling.
I'm in need of a decent CD player now! Not in, say, 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9 . . . years. Of course I'll consider DVD-A/SACD. But not until the second- or third-generation universal player (that is, audio-only SACD/DVD-A) is out on the market (and please give me a player that completely ignores the video-content option), and hopefully the software selection is adequately interesting.
I'm hardly going to swap my already good CD player for something that has minimal software and is still in 1st gen phase. At any rate , why bother with new optical formats when the next Audio paradigm shift is massive SS storage devices. Anything optical today doesn't offer the consumer increased functionality. As we all know , improved quality at higher prices is generally not grounds for massive takeup.
I've gone ahead and purchased a high-end CD player in the past year without any consideration of the upcoming formats because I have plenty of CDs that I'd like to listen to, and I have absolutely no sympathy for corporate diddling over how to extract more cash from the masses.
I'm very uncertain about the future of high-quality audio. It's the whole Betamax/VHS thing all over again. I suppose the real reason I haven't bought a player yet is the stratospheric prices. If the prices come down soon, I'll likely buy oneespecially if the SACD/DVD-Audio combi players come about.
Sooner or later you have to kill the engineer and get on with making the product. You can only wait so long before you need to listen. With emerging technologies, the only things to wait for are the end of the initial period of exhorbitant pricing, and to see if the format has a future. But not for the latest model.
The situation regarding SACD/DVD being what it is right now, I can not understand the people who spend thousands on a CD player. But a message to the industry : get down to earth, boys, and try to sell us products that have reality prices, and go for software ! Now !