Like the cavalry charging over the hill to save the day, the Super Audio CD was poised to rescue the ailing music industry five years ago. It promised far better sound quality than standard CDs, surround sound capability, and best of all, the Hybrid SACD could also play in standard CD players. In 2002, the Rolling Stones' classic '60s albums were all reissued in the Hybrid SACD format, to glowing reviews. The next year, Bob Dylan's catalog was upgraded. The sound quality blew away listeners. It seemed only a matter of time before the people who had replaced their LPs with CDs for the last twenty years started replacing them again with SACDs.
And then ... nothing. Today, Dylan's catalog has been re-reissued, this time on standard CDs. The expected flood of SACD remasters has slowed to a barely noticable trickle, mostly consisting of jazz and classical releases. If you can even find an SACD section in a record store today -- and that's if you can even find a record store -- it'll be a row or two of obscure titles on audiophile labels that the average consumer could care less about. What happened?
It didn't have anything to do with the quality of the product. With a sampling rate of several times that of a standard CD, SACDs deliver the kind of sound that the compact disc had promised but generally failed to deliver since 1982 -- rich, full and smooth, without the digital harshness found on many CDs. And their "backwards compatibility" meant that Hybrid SACDs could be played on standard CD players as well.
What did the SACD in was a combination of bad timing and bad marketing. Almost since the inception of the compact disc, customers had been teased with new remasters of CDs they'd already bought, and promises along the lines of "Oh man, this is going to blow you away. Remember how good we said the 20-bit remaster sounded? Well, this 24-bit remaster sounds so good, it's like you're in the studio with the band. You can almost smell the singer's beer breath, seriously. And the Super-Mega-Deluxe Edition is only $20!" By the time the SACD came along, the record companies had cried wolf, sound-wise, enough times so that nobody cared that this product actually lived up to the hype.
At the same time, a whole lot of music lovers had started to listen to music in MP3 form on iPods. Cool as it is to carry your entire record collection in your pocket, MP3 files sound, to put it in technical terms, like crap. And iPods themselves don't exactly deliver audiophile-quality sound, either. But when most non-geeks weighed the choices -- cheap (or free), convenient, and acceptable sound, versus costlier, less convenient, and once I convert it to MP3 it'll still sound like crap -- it was a no-brainer.
The powers-that-be in the music biz didn't help matters any by marketing the DVD-Audio at the same time. DVD-As also promised, and delivered, fantastic sound in 5.1 Surround. The problem was that you had to listen to them on a DVD player, something that's generally hooked up to your TV. I own plenty of DVD-As, but arranging to listen to them is almost like making dinner plans -- I have to sit in my little chair that's been arranged in my TV room so that I get the full effect of the Surround Sound, yada yada yada. If I just want to throw one into my Discman when I'm going to the store, no can do.
To further confuse matters, there was the DualDisc, which featured a CD on one side and a DVD on the other. Nice in theory, but the discs wound up being too thick to play in a lot of computers or CD players. The DualDisc died faster than you could say "Customer Return."
In the end, competing formats and a lack of any real attempt to inform consumers of what, exactly, a Super Audio CD was, doomed it to oblivion. (Makers of Blu-Ray and HD DVDs take note, for cryin' out loud!) So has the SACD's day come and gone? Not necessarily.
There are still a lot of audiophiles out there who aren't being served by the iPod and downloadable files. Record companies tried to turn all of us into sound quality freaks with those endless CD remasters -- don't alienate the listeners who still care about it.
And for all those people who still buy discs, or those who think about it but still think CDs are overpriced, the SACD really does give you your money's worth (assuming record companies don't charge more than the current $15-20 for 'em). This is a product for mature, quality-conscious, and most importantly, affluent music fans.
The product is there. The right marketing could make it work. Now all we need is someone to step up to the plate. Anyone have the guts to try?
Follow Tony Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RetroManNYC
I don't understand why this didn't catch on.THEY SOUND AWESOME.
I like DTS,I think it sounds better than Dolby 5.1,my best friend bought SACD,he was very disapointed.I hate that Pink Floyd chose this format.When my younger brother"turned me on"to DVD audio,Floyd was the first band I thought of."Dark Side"and"Wish You Were Here" would sound great in DTS.
I've gotten a couple of SteelyDan DVD Audio disk,they sound incredible,so does The Eagles"Hotel California".
EVERYONE I have ever played these for,WAS VERY IMPRESSED.
Multichannel music is fun, and in point of fact should've been a leap forward, but most people in the music industry don't have the foresight for this. I attended a seminar in 2000 with Tomlinson Holman (The "TH" in THX) where Herbie Hancock was the special guest. Herbie had done some music for Holman in his proprietary 10.2 format (12 channels of audio) and it was effing amazing. Seven years later music being recorded and released in multichannel is a dream yet to come true.
SACD and DVD-Audio had an identity crisis from the get-go, because nobody was sure if it should be a high-end two channel format or a multichannel format. Ultimately SACD was mostly two channel and DVD-A was almost exclusively multichannel, which was stupid because DVD-A sounded better than SACD as a two channel format. SACD had the Sony marketing machine behind it, but that didn't save BETA, either.
The author mentions iPods but apparently is unaware that Apple has used not only AAC (MP4) for downloads from the ITMS for a few years now but also Apple lossless format, which is the same audio quality as a CD but with a smaller file size.
Even MP3s at 190 kbps sound CD-like through my Klipsch Pro Media system, not "like crap" as the author says, and I've compared RIPs side-by-side with CDs.
SevereTireDamage is severly in error. I know of at least two companies (Toshiba and Sansui) that also made Beta machines. Licensing wasn't the issue with VHS over Beta, it was simply marketing. Familiar American names like RCA and GE used VHS machines, nearly all made by Matsushita. As crappy as they were compared to Beta, consumers aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Also, Betacam is high speed Beta, a special format that achieves high bandwith. VHS had a similar format, called Mark III I think, but it never gained any traction.
The best sound I ever heard was from a CD played in a very high end CD player that had a weighted mat that was placed on top of the CD to ensure accurate tracking, connected to a Crown power amp (can't remember what pre-amp was used) which drove $11,000 Eggleston Works speakers. It truly sounded like live. CD players and sound systems that most people use are cheap, cheap, cheap, and can't begin to extract the information on CDs accurately, but it is there. You just need expensive high end audiophile equipment and speakers. Even an NAD amp and KEF speakers will blow your socks off, and is not out of reach of most budgets. Also, a well digitally mastered CD is better than a not so well mastered SACD. The mastering is where it's at.
They have reissued many great LPs if you can't find a good used copy. Basically if it was recorded before 86 it was analog.There are exceptions .
Unfortunately people want convenience more then sound quality...MP3s at standard 128 bit rate are less then a third of the fidelity of CDs and CDs are still incomplete numerical representations of sound not the actual vibrations from the musician as vinyl LPs are.
Soon there will be a digital equivalent to analog ...untill then I will stick with my vinyl and travael with cassettes and CDs.
Corollary: You can't sell people something better if they're already pleased with what they have. Example: George Dubya's 2nd term.
What the music moguls oughta try now is changing colors: Examples: Pink Floyd in Kelly Green. Red Hot Chili Peppers in Lavender.
As any marketing expert will tell you and in the words of General Petraeus: WHO KNOWS?
Don't you get the feeling these days that nobody has a handle on anything?
I went looking, a few weeks ago, for a Sony-branded SACD player. I noticed that my ($120) Sony DVD player also plays CDs, VideoCDs, DVD-As, MP3 CD, every CD- and DVD-based format I could think of -- except SACD. I could not find a current SACD player at BestBuy or Circuit City. The only thing I could find was a Denon SACD player that listed for $350.
Sony is notorious for this, for introducing a format but screwing up it's market acceptance by stingy licensing policies. Remember MiniDiscs (a portable, recordable, optical audio disc)? They're still around, but I defy you to find any current hardware. They screwed up Betamax the same way. All the opinion I saw at that time preferred Beta over VHS (indeed, professionals stayed with Beta for quite awhile), but Sony wouldn't let anyone else make a Betamax player, while the RCA-JVC consortium agressively licensed VHS; we saw how that turned out.
In an open market, non-proprietary (or broadly licensed) standards will always become dominant. Think Ethernet, AudioCDs, USB, CompactCassettes (audio cassettes), DVDs (compare with the DVD HD situation current), the WWW (compare with the clent-server model)...
Oh, and BTW, does anyone remember Quad?
Actually, what the pros used was Betacam. It used the same shell, with a different (metal particle) tape formulation when it became Betacam SP.
The original idea was to let the stranded camera guy find tape at the local Target store. Never really panned out that way. Still, the format had one of the longest runs of any pro video acquisition format, and is still in use in some quarters today. Me? I'm glad there's miniDV - it's a lot smaller and lighter. And the tape is available everywhere - except at my nearest Target store, damn it...
But my main point is to suggest the real reason for the SACD format’s near extinction. It’s a familiar one: entertainment/electronics industry arrogance. When SACD technology entered the market, there was a large and growing base of surround sound home theater systems that could have been capitalized on. So what did the industry decide to do? They decided that SACD-compatible receivers must have five analog inputs. Only high-end equipment had such. Offer a digital connection like that offered by DVD-A which could be used with existing equipment? No way, people might be able to easily pirate the content.
But the great majority of music consumers had already amply demonstrated that convenient/cheap-free/accessible mp3 was plenty good enough. For the most part, the consumers of pirated content could care less part that they couldn’t duplicate SACD music in its pristine digital format.
Nevertheless, to “defeat” piracy, the industry chose to release a format that required a not-inexpensive equipment upgrade to a receiver that was probably purchased quite recently to begin with (and of course a new CD/SACD player was already a necessary part of the upgrade path).
If I weren’t so fond of the stunning sound and stimulation of surround sound of the SACD, I’d be taking considerable delight is watching the industry suffer from its own greed and stupidity. But sadly, they have disappointed more than a few of us who truly love what this technology brings. Ah, what might have been?
Ever wonder if this is why SACD failed? Because for all the purism and elitism espoused by a subpopulation of music fans, many of us are content with 372 kbps MP3s? I still remember reading an interview with Neil Young a long time ago (back when people were flipping out over napster). It was my first exposure to people being clueless like that when he said "Who cares? CDs sound like crap, MP3s sound like crap and Napster sounds like crap."
If your major premise is "CDs sound like crap" then you need to recognize that sales will be low.
1. DVD-Audio came out *before* SACD; Several music companies were commited to releasing DVD-Audio and had titles out in the martkert before SACD was available.
2. The first iteration of SACD technology didn't support surround sound.
3. SACD never supported video, which many labels felt was crucial for a future-proof physical format.
4. Neither DVD-Audio nor SACD had much traction beyond the audiophile community. (I have seen the sales numbers for both formats.)
5. Both formats were expensive to produce. Stereo-only SACD recordings did not do well, and surround sound mixes are expensive. Hybrid SACDs that were successful were so because of the CD layer.
The sad truth is that both of these formats attempted to address a problem that the *majority* of the music-buying public didn't believe existed - namely, the lack of quality or fidelity in music reproduction.
When the market was given a choice of perceived higher quality (DVD-A, SACD) or perceived lower quality but with portability (iPods, MP3s), we know which way the market decided.
This is not to say that there is not a niche market in releasing music in these format, but if you do the math, it's hard to make any money selling 20K units of an audiophile format. Given the limited resources available at music labels, they would much rather put the effort in selling a format that will generate 10 or 20 times the sales.
The conclusion is that both products (DVD-A, SACD) were fundamentally off target in what the music-buying public wanted. Both formats were created more to solve a problem for consumer electronics manufacturers (Sony and Philips' CD patents were expiring) than to address the music-buying publics' needs.
Physical music formats started their long slide when MP3s and portable (i.e. transmittable) music became available. For the majority of the public, music became a *consumable* rather than a *collectable* and this trend continues to this day.