Sony & Universal to cease CD production in favor of Hybrid SACD?

Insert new "Oh, Jeez, not ANOTHER format I'll have to buy Loveless" Answers here.

Regular cd's are already way overpriced. At $23 a pop, I'll never buy new music again. I'm already hitting the used bins as often as possible, and that generates no monetary cut for the artist, anyway. I may as well just start downloading everything while I have the opportunity.

The Vinyl Anachronist was right -- Vinyl will outlast CDs! Amazing.

This may be a good opportunity to mention the fact that CD's are cheaper to produce than cassettes, yet the majors get away with charging more for them. Presumably once the SACD pressing plants gear up to full production, SACDs will be no more costly to produce than regular CDs, yet does anyone doubt that the majors intend to charge a premium for them?

No doubt in my mind at all. I worked one summer in a RCA/BMG cd pressing facility, and during our orientation they told us that each cd costs $0.26 to produce. That INCLUDES labor, artwork, packaging, and all the other related necessities. I wanted to vomit. Even with all the other things (recording, royalties, promotion, videos, etc.), no cd should ever break the $10 barrier.

each cd costs $0.26 to produce

Hm, and I currently buy blanks at $0.50 -- so they're still overcharging even there! ;-)

I won't pay $23.00 for a new release. Seriously; I just won't do it. I'm sure most people will bite the bullet and just give in, and I suppose there will be some releases I'll just have to have, but in general the number of CDs I'll buy will go way, way down. This price is just out of control.

These glowing prognoses for SACD are all pretty surprising to me. I haven't been monitoring this very closely, but I got the distinct impression that it had completely failed to take off (in the UK at least).

Clearly the initial niche market was audiophile (a nice little marketing campaign in which Sony rubbished the PCM-digital format they helped develop 25 years ago, gave some very misleading information about what DSD actually was, which they later contradicted). Whereas CD (leaving aside debates about sound quality, sabotage of the vinyl market, etc) at least offered something new to yr regular record-buyer (random access, portability, convenience), I'm not sure SACD does. It's multi-channel capable but I don't know how many titles are anything other than stereo. "Where are the pictures?".

From what I know of the medium, to take full advantage of the 1- bit/2.8MHz format, stuff has to be recorded in DSD (Direct Stream Digital - high-speed delta-sigma without the filtering). How many studios are geared up for this? Is there even editing hardware available that will work with DSD? Sony have been a bit sketchy on this (and on how multi-track DSD recording actually works). Sony have also (as indicated in the original article) not produced a single hybrid disc themselves.

I guess this all means the format war is underway (the DVD-A consortium bods will have nothing to do with SACD and vice versa, even though [I *think*] SACDs are physically DVDs with a different data organisation). Affordable 'universal' players on the market just now seem to play CD/DVD-*Video*/SACD -or- CD/DVD-A (could be out- of-date on this).

I almost bought a SACD while I was in Sydney a few weeks back.

Misha Mengelberg's Four in One. Released on the 'Songlines' label, I listened to the cd in the store, and the quality was quite amazing, but the price tag $40 AUS ($20 US) was a little too much, so I want for a Ground Zero album that was supringly just as expensive $38 Aus instead, well the Ground Zero is much more rarer.

Misha Mengelberg's Four in One. Released on the 'Songlines' label, I listened to the cd in the store, and the quality was quite amazing

A hybrid disc? Were you listening to the CD layer or did the store have the capability to play the other layer? I've still never heard one...

Live recordings direct to 2-channel DSD seem to be the ones getting the rave notices. The editing and processing involved in making a contemporary pop record seems beyond the DSD system at the mo'.

It was one of the SACD playable on normal players.

i guess it's kind of sad that the past decade or more has seen everyone recording their albums on crap 44.1KHz digital equipment, eh?

i think the labels' interest in the format is, as always, to shuffle us onto a new format where copy-control will be designed right into the format - yay!

$23 per cd, where the hell are you people shopping?! new zealand?!

These glowing prognoses for SACD are all pretty surprising to me. I haven't been monitoring this very closely, but I got the distinct impression that it had completely failed to take off (in the UK at least).
Good point. My local record store has 2, count 'em, 2 SACDs in the whole store.

Good thing most of the music I listen to these days isn't put out by Sony & Universal.

They can keep wishing that the lid never came off, but it is done. People are going to be able to copy music at will.

I'm sure those new players have a digital output, so all one has to do is route that to a soundcard or recorder with a digital input, and volia, copy is made.

I think this is just a major karmic payback to the major labels for screwing music fans and artists since the dawn of their biz.

Is this perhaps a neat sidestep by Sony/Universal - Philips (not Sony's corporate chums anymore?) threaten to refuse to licence the 'Compact Disc' logo on CDs copy-protected in such a way that normal playback is hampered, so Sony/Universal *replace* the CD with a different disc format which won't play on CD-ROM drives. Yes, there's a CD layer, but it's not really a compact disc - it's a two- layer DVD.

As far as I know, the digital outputs on SACD players give you a 16/44.1k signal from the CD layer (if present), but access to the raw DSD datastream is not possible. The S/P-DIF output will no doubt be SCMS-protected (=you can make a digital copy, but you can't make a digital copy of that copy). I don't think the industry is terribly bothered about real-time dubbing to CD-R (which SCMS allows but restricts proliferation), but super-fast ripping/burning in PCs/Macs (and distribution as MP3) is the target.

The main feature of SACD copy-protection is Pit Signal Processing - a kind of physical watermark which apparently doesn't survive even bit- perfect copying. Allegedly, the reconstruction of this 'key' would be pretty labour-intensive even on a fast computer *and* it's different for each title (so no global cracking like with DVD-A's scheme). The descrambling algorithm is in the player hardware. Oh, and there's a visual hologram watermark on SACDs too (like banknotes).

Somehow I doubt Sony's motivation in pushing SACD is to bring the joy of 120dB dynamic range and 100kHz bandwidth to the regular punter.

Not to mention that hearing the difference between 96 dB and 120 dB response would mean listening to music at jet-engine-from-ten-feet volumes. 20 dB noise floor + 96 dB = 116 dB. 20 + 120 = 140 dB.

Not to mention that hearing the difference between 96 dB and 120 dB response would mean listening to music at jet-engine-from-ten-feet volumes. 20 dB noise floor + 96 dB = 116 dB. 20 + 120 = 140 dB.

I'd agree with that, especially as we can now approach 20-bit resolution in the areas in which the ear is most sensitive with regular CD dithered and noise-shaped from high-res masters.

What interests me though is the near-Damascene conversion to shiny 5" discs from hardcore vinyl audiophiles who've taken the plunge with SACD. One could speculate all day about the reasons for this, but the lack of aggressive filtering could at least be something to do with it (or just the fact that most 'pure DSD' discs are straight to stereo live recordings, no doubt engineered with great skill, which would probably sound great on CD).

Some folks have speculated that the Fourier/Nyquist model for sampling musical signals is inadequate - that certain transients inherent in live music are aperiodic in nature and just having a sample rate that's at least twice the highest frequency is not good enough.

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