more major players jumping on the sacd bandwagon

Audiophile support alone will not keep the SACD format afloat, but Sony along with other important music producers (like this article points out), is making it more of a reality every day .

I support it's success, and hope for its continued acceptance. it's the first significant improvement in digital since the release of CD, twenty years ago.

Well I just went to HMV and browse the entire catalog of available SACD and only found two I would buy even if I owned no CDs currently. However I happen to own those two on CD already and one of the two on LP as well. The redbook versions are excellently engineered, so how much better are we talking about?? I listen mostly to classical and some jazz. 99 percent of the classical listings are historic recordings, mostly by Szell, Ormandy, Bernstein. Must have been chosen because their names sell. Can't be because they are the best performances. I guess it will be a long wait for me before I upgrade.

Ordinary folks which make up of 99.99% of music buying population will continue to buy their favorite CD. They don't care about the SACD or DVD-audio. They are very happy with the CD performance. The remaining 0.01% which make up the audiophile population are just sitting and watching. Out of those 0.01%, may be 0.0001% had gone out and bought a few SACD players and a few SACD. That all folk! In my audiophile club, none of the member make a move into SACD! For myself, I even go back to vinyl and love it very much. In my opinion not even the latest SACD can rival it! Whatever breakthrough in SACD or DVD-audio are making no differences since most of the best recording engineers are gone anyway.

I saw that article along with another that stated that some chip maker was coming out with very low-cost SACD chip sets - ie, Discmans with SACD capability. More publishers' support coupled with getting the price down to the "normal" CD price, in exchange (implicitly) for corralling the CDR phenomena - it might just take hold. -Kirk

As far as the Betamax comparison and the Stereophile article; most to all major films were available on Betamax. This did nothing to save it. So more record labels producing SACD may prove nothing. It really comes down to whether Sony will share the technology to all comers. Sony keeping Betamax technology mostly to themselves, was one reason it never took off.