[78-L] R.I.P. CDs

[DAVID BURNHAM]

My recollection is that they were much more expensive than standard CDs, 
so buying them to play on a steam CD player didn't seem a good idea at 
the time. For those of us who'd upgraded from LP to CD, this was one 
upgrade too many.

      Julian Vein


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Initially they were about double the price of normal CDs!  

The SACD was, to my knowledge, the worst marketed product in the history of audio.  When they were first introduced in the late '90s by Sony, they carried the equivalent of a single LP, around 45 minutes of music, on a carrier which couldn't be played on a normal CD player.  The recordings were all from the analog days, (since you can't improve the quality of a digital recording beyond the limitations of its sampling rate and bit depth); they cost twice as much as a normal CD, (even though the DSD process is easier to record than the normal PCM method), you had to have a special player to play them and Sony had been telling us for 20 years that CD quality was perfect.  There was no incentive to explore these new discs.  In fact, Sony could have put about a half a dozen old Lps on a single SACD disc with a significant improvement in sound which would have made them really attractive and they could have charged the same amount as normal CDs for them.
  BIS did release one SACD with all of the concertos by Mendelssohn, which lasts around 5 hours and another set with the complete organ works of Bach on 5 SACDs - over 20 hours of music.

The most important turning point for the SACD came around 2004 when you could only buy SACD compatible players and a number of Mercury Living Presence and RCA Living Stereo recordings were released in the new Hybrid format.  In the Toronto area, the RCAs cost around $10 each and the Mercurys about $15 each.  These could be played on any CD player and their sound was astonishing.  Of course, since they were compatible with normal CDs, they were limited to containing the same amount of program as a normal CD.  If what I've heard is correct, Sony's nose was out of joint because the Hybrid SACDs fell outside of their original design and they lost control of the SACD market, and stopped supporting the product.  A similar situation occurred with the Compact Cassette because Sony's original patent did not cover Stereo or Dolby recordings.  There are still companies producing SACDs today - Pentatone only releases Hybrid SACDs, Chandos, BIS, CPO and several
 other small European labels still produce them but if the main producers don't return to them, I don't believe the format can survive.

db