SACD availability

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.

Why does it matter Kijanki? As long as they are hybrid discs you can still rip them and still have the high resolution disc for playback when wanted.

Rwwear - part that I can rip is red book only - rest is useless to me since I use only server. I don't mind buying SACD if it is not too expensive.

some cd hardware is prefereable to sacd hardware. that is, some cds may sound better on some dac/xport combinations than some sacd discs played on some sacd players. one needs to find a high quality sacd player to appreciate the advantages of an sacd disc. i suspect there are some older sony players or modified sacd players which bring out the best in sacd.