SACD availability

IMO Sony ONLY introduced SACD to stall DVD-A because they had Bluray in the works, and did not want the HD-DVD camp to have the DVD-A support..
Once Sony totally killed any hope for DVD-A, Sony basically abandoned SACD. This is my impression. Sony made players for awhile, but the Sony music never did really get behind SACD. IF Sony had really wanted to make SACD important, they would have made ALL releases on the Sony label in the dual format.
Now, the main supporters of SACD are small independent labels of classical and Jazz, which do not get carried in major mass market stores like Best Buy.
My personal assumption, is Sony may possibly go for Blu Ray music, If they thought it would be a winner. I think they will NOT do it because of hi rez downloads being more likely to take off. And becase Blu Ray has not dominated the market as DVD did when it came out. Plenty of folks (including myself) are just not impressed enough to go Blu Ray over DVD.

If you are primarily a classical and jazz listener there is plenty of music out there on SACD as well as new releases coming out. IMO I would not consider a player without SACD capability. But I listening primarily to classical and jazz so I have no problem finding music to purchase. And as Elizabeth points out it appears that only the small / medium size labels are supporting it.

Sony plans to start selling their new SCD-XE800 SACD player on August 21 for $430. Now that you have that information, go out and buy the Oppo BDP-83 SE and cover all your bases. Disclosure: I have a BDP-83 SE and I had the first entry level Sony SACD player which went 86 just months out of warranty. I still have the complimentary Rolling Stones SACD that they included with their first SACD players (to bad I could care less about the Stones). I've had only good experiences with Oppo and their customer service is excellent. Sony customer service? Expletives come to mind.

I personally dislike a lot of things Sony has done of late and believe their products to be lacking in quality. But I think Elizabeth's comments are totally wrong about Sony's intentions for SACD. I believe Sony thought SACD was the superior format. I think if the public had supported high resolution audio and there had not been a format war, Sony and Philips(don't forget them) would have been more inclined to release more on SACD. Keep in mind there were only a few factories capable of mastering SACD discs and they were running at full capacity and Sony was very stingy with their licensing. Sony has not abandoned SACD entirely as they are still making players. But I would like to see Sony build a true universal player that plays DVDA in addition to everything else but it's not likely to happen.

SACD is not very popular for many reasons. It was very expensive at the beginning, could not be copied to provide backup and could not be used with computer server system. Sometimes I think that all schemes (SACD, DVD-A, HDCD) were only for copy protection where they loose a lot of money. It is very difficult to compete with established standard (redbook CD) while a lot of people switched to servers. I would not buy SACD for that reason alone.