I just purchased a CAL CL-2500 DVD player with the goal of improving the quality of my CD playback. I had heard the CL-20, and was very impressed with its capabilities as a CD player.
I was at first excited about its ability to play DVD Audio discs and HDCD. It turned out I was mistaken on the HDCD -- the CL-20 and CL-10 both support it, but on the newer CL-2500, CAL seems to have rejected HDCD support. And DVD Audio appears to have changed to an incompatible 24/192ksps format in the few years since the CL-2500 was built. No matter, there were really only about 1-2 discs I was really interested in, compared to the 400-500 CDs in my collection. SACD seems more prolific, but there are still only about 3-4 that I would buy if I had a player. Even HDCD, which is more common than DVD-A or SACD, has only a handful of titles that interest me, which I of course own since HDCD is merely a special encoding on a standard CD. None of the special formats offers enough titles or enough benefit to cause me to even consider compatibility as a factor in choosing a CD player.
You should all be concerned that the "audiophile" formats may never get off the ground, because music distribution is headed towards internet distribution -- which means lossy digital compression and lower sample rates and resolution. Not only that, but the promoters of the formats are sabotaging their own efforts -- SACD because it is proprietary, DVD-A because they changed the format mid-stream to something that existing players, and DVD-Video players, cannot play.
No, unless you are comfortable letting the published catalogue of the "advanced" formats dictate what you listen to, neither format is viable yet. I don't predict them becoming viable anytime soon.
Just look at HDCD -- it's a completely compatible format, but like SACD is proprietary and requires a license to record or to decode. It's been around for years and is still in very limited use. Personally, I hope it dies a quiet death. It does not seem to offer higher potential for quality than standard CD, but sacrifices the sound quality on incompatible players.
I am very pleased with my purchase...despite the fact that the new player recognizes neither SACD nor new-format DAD, it makes CDs sound really good. For someone like me who listens to a wide variety of (sometimes really obscure or unpopular) music, improving the sound quality of all my albums is much better than making slight additional improvements on a couple of titles.
I was at first excited about its ability to play DVD Audio discs and HDCD. It turned out I was mistaken on the HDCD -- the CL-20 and CL-10 both support it, but on the newer CL-2500, CAL seems to have rejected HDCD support. And DVD Audio appears to have changed to an incompatible 24/192ksps format in the few years since the CL-2500 was built. No matter, there were really only about 1-2 discs I was really interested in, compared to the 400-500 CDs in my collection. SACD seems more prolific, but there are still only about 3-4 that I would buy if I had a player. Even HDCD, which is more common than DVD-A or SACD, has only a handful of titles that interest me, which I of course own since HDCD is merely a special encoding on a standard CD. None of the special formats offers enough titles or enough benefit to cause me to even consider compatibility as a factor in choosing a CD player.
You should all be concerned that the "audiophile" formats may never get off the ground, because music distribution is headed towards internet distribution -- which means lossy digital compression and lower sample rates and resolution. Not only that, but the promoters of the formats are sabotaging their own efforts -- SACD because it is proprietary, DVD-A because they changed the format mid-stream to something that existing players, and DVD-Video players, cannot play.
No, unless you are comfortable letting the published catalogue of the "advanced" formats dictate what you listen to, neither format is viable yet. I don't predict them becoming viable anytime soon.
Just look at HDCD -- it's a completely compatible format, but like SACD is proprietary and requires a license to record or to decode. It's been around for years and is still in very limited use. Personally, I hope it dies a quiet death. It does not seem to offer higher potential for quality than standard CD, but sacrifices the sound quality on incompatible players.
I am very pleased with my purchase...despite the fact that the new player recognizes neither SACD nor new-format DAD, it makes CDs sound really good. For someone like me who listens to a wide variety of (sometimes really obscure or unpopular) music, improving the sound quality of all my albums is much better than making slight additional improvements on a couple of titles.