SACD finally taking-off? non-classical listeners

Ah, another thread of wishful thinking about the viability of SACD (and DVD-A). With due respect to CB, even a release of an old Rolling Stones recording will not make SACD a success. The reality is that, barring a major change in the market, there are simply too few serious listeners today who are willing to pay for SACD and DVD-A releases. The sales figures for CD's have been headed downward for the past two years, and given the state of the economy it will be necessary for the newer formats to provide better audio quality than CD's, at lower prices, with a significant number of contemporary artists (not just people who are either dead or getting there), and direct digital output on playback machines (which ain't likely to happen any time soon, given the recording industry's paranoia about copy protection), or they simply won't attract enough people to generate the sales volumes necessary to satisfy the major labels. The moral to this story is: don't sell your LP's and CD's just yet....

Interesting comments on Rumours and Crowded house .... my CD of Rumours is quite bright but listenable, but my CD of Woodface by Crowded House is one of the best sounding CDs I own. Which Crowded House CD did you not like, and would you characterize your system as rather bright in the first place ?
IMHO nothing will make SACD take off since the vast majority of the population listen on systems that are not able to distinguish CD from SACD. CD beat LP because of convenience ... I can't see that SACD will ever be more convenient.

Unfortunately, the digital domain is still in it's infancy. I doubt very much if the spinning disc actually survives whatever lies ahead for this format. The NASA tech briefs sometimes give a glimpse into the future of the digital world. Houston, analog has landed.

Happy listening,
Patrick

Like many others posting on this thread I too ran to my CD archives and pulled out my copy of Rumors. I have it playing right now as I type. Ok, I admit it sounds very flat and dry, see what happens when you stop using drugs :^)

It's no wonder the only Fleetwood Mac that ever gets any airplay in my system is *The Dance* on DVD. This is actually one of my reference discs when making changes to my H/T system or trying to impress friends (Track 9 & 10 are about worn out)

Despite the poor quality of this particular disc I'm still not ready to commit to another format change, Not till the war is over.

As far as I'm aware Rumours has never been remastered and it does have that typical mid-80's flat,quiet,dead sound that some early CD's have.
A friend of mine commented recently the Rumours tracks on a Fleetwood Mac greatest hits sounded a lot better than on the original CD.
As much as I'd like to see the new formats take off-I agree with my namesake Sd's post which accurately states the economic and market reasons why the odds are against them.
Interesting to note that Meridian's new state of the art digital set up,some £10k's worth ($16.5k?)totally ignores SACD-they've went DVDA with no plans for SACD...and even then the top man said he wasn't sure either format would survive