CD format war and resultant music players

SV:

If you take my comments to the next logical step, purchasing top flight equipment makes total sense. If you know upfront that you will not be replacing your music collection anytime soon, if ever ... all these format wars become moot. You should then purchase the equipment that will allow for as near total enjoyment as possible with your current choice of media. In fact, buy an additional back-up player, if you think that your current choice of media may not survive another twenty years. Given my listening habits, how much time I have available, my declining hearing, saving for retirement, my wife's love for cruises, etc. ... plunking down sizeable cash to get a marginally (and debateable) better version of the Byrds singing "Hey Joe" (multiply this by 2000, btw) is not occurring.

A new format may make sense for new releases ... but you will find that as you get older you are not buying all that much from new artists. Same argument holds for video ... how many copies of the ultimate Godfather collection can one own?

Regards, Rich

what Rar1 said...

The war is over, audiophiles lost. Many have been killed but most have been taken prisoner by insane prices.

Given the niche mkt. status of SACD & DVD-A, what prompts your thinking that there is ANY impetus for a new hi-rez format?

The SACD & DVD-A market is essentially dead, thanks to our friends at Sony. The major difference between them and CDs is they have lots of memory space to store digital information. Well, somebody else would take advantage of the upcoming video-formated disc, when its market is secured, and utitlize it for audio. Given such major improvement over CDs, it might fly. No I wouldn't buy a copy of the same thing if it's an incremental improvement. We are talking about huge result here.

On the other hand, this hard drive concept is something to chew on. I don't hear about hard drive sound superiority if any. Even computers are suitably design to slip into family room audio-visual arrangement these days. And the mp3 market is booming. This computer stuff is much more mature than your blu-ray and hd-dvd. Perhaps it would only take 2 versus 5 years for the audio chip to fall into place.