Fly in the SACD Ointment?

CW, splendid thoughts as usual. They make my hair stand on end but you may well be right and hence we will never get out of this rut. Being steamrolled by Mannheim again, no matter in what format, is hardly a pleasant prospective. So I suggest we take it all philosophically and hope for pleasant surprises all the same.

I have an LP frontend, which manages very well to separate the music from the noise. Much of my LP playback, inspite of excellent highs, is practically silent. That said, you can perhaps understand that I was never really taken in, even by the better recorded CD's, though I utilised a rather ambitious playback gear. I borrowed a well broken in Sony 777 this weekend and used the special high frequency output setting with good effect on my stators. For ic, I used a MIT Spectral 350. I was amazed at the resolving powers of the Sony and SACD. Even with bad recordings, it resolved the inner melodious and rythmic web of music down to fairly tiny details, in a way I had never heard from CD's, but was accustomed to from the better vinyl recordings. Also depth and with of the soundstage, the delineation of individual instruments was excellent, though here my CD playback isn't a slouch either. And yes, as Rcprince has pointed out, finally I could enjoy the Bruno Walter recordings, where SACD definitely betters the old LP's, which partially were plain awful. So from my very first experience, I would spontaneously say, that SACD is better then the rb cd, but hardly better than vinyl. I shall have to do direct comparisons to find out more. What I somehow did not like in many SACD recordings was the hiss, which more often than not in LP playback is just not there, also the blackness between notes, though obviously much liked by some, though not as bad as with CD's, is something which I find unnatural and disturbing. So I suppose, I will remain a LP freak, but I'm thinking of buying the 777. Cheers,