Hi, Trelja: As usual, you've hit the nail on the head and fairly described the dilemma that many of us are facing. I've been delaying a buying decision for the past 6 months, thinking one format or the other will emerge triumphant. From the technical articles I've read, SACD appears to be the better format (rather like Beta vs. VHS). Sony is certainly trying to induce us to buy SACD by dropping its prices, but from a practical viewpoint, the REAL issue that will decide the victor is software. Right now, there is precious little software in either SACD or DVD-A format, and much of what is available is re-releases of older recordings. Given the enormous amount of older, 2-channel recorded material (LP's and CD's) that forms the collection of most serious listeners, it's unlikely that multi-channel will predominate the market for quite some time. Given what you and I have said, the situation has forced me to give much more serious NEAR-TERM consideration to an alternative solution: buy a really good upsampling / DAC unit, such as the Perpetual P-1A and P-3A units. I had a long phone conversation recently with Walter Underwood (Underwoodwally), who is one of the owners of Perpetual Technologies (and former owner of Hi-Fi Buys in Atlanta, which closed about 5 years ago). Walter had a number of very interesting comments about the ability of a really good upsampler, which requires very sophisticated interpolation algorithms, to almost match the playback ability of SACD. Perpetual Technologies is selling their two units via Internet, so the prices are very reasonable. Their systems currenty for speaker correction (code is available for a limited number of speakers, with more to come), and will soon have room correction capability as well. To provide room correction, they will rent you a calibrated CD and microphone, which you use to record about 1 minute of music. You then upload the sample to them over the Internet, and about 3 hours later you come back to their site and download the room correction code into your Perpetual Technologies unit. Slick. The total cost of their system, with the additional cost to get customized room correction code, will be under $2000. It's got me thinking really hard about doing this as a first step to get the most from my large collection of LP's and CD's, and deferring a decision about SACD or DVD-A for another 1-2 years until the market shakes out. What do you think?
New formats, same old story?
OK, we continue to be inundated by advice to upgrade to a new digital format. Most say SACD, the rest tell us that DVD-A will be the ticket. My thing is that I would be ready to buy if things were sorted out. They are not yet. It doesn't look any clearer to me than it did a year ago today. Am I blind? Neither has taken precedence. More importantly, neither has had the major influx of software we have been waiting for. A major determinant as to which one wins out in the end. Yes, SOFTWARE. Where is it? Sure, there are some titles out there(how many currently???), but new albums are still more often than not released CD only. The people at the record stores still have not heard of either of the new formats. Yes, I know Sony keeps dangling the influx of new players(even cheap ones) at us, but I am still in the same mindset I was last year. That I don't want to invest in a new player that won't be a REAL step up in terms of CD playback(which would make it worth it) until one of the formats emerges as the future path. And, once the players come, will they be obsoleted by a new twist a couple of years later? As in multichannel - which I am not interested in, or by offering a digital output of the new format's signal. Are my feelings correct, or do I need the way I see things corrected? Thank you.