Sony (and other labels) felt that the best way to get SACD to catch on was to initially trget the software to established audiophiles. Let's take the Stones for example. I think SACD's thinking was, "A lot of audiophiles are middle aged males. They can afford to invest in a new format like SACD. So let's give them the music they've always loved, along with the promise that they can hear that music with a level of fidelity they never could have imagined possible [My comment: at least with digital]." Hence, reissues of music that audiophiles are likely to enjoy.
The second point is, they deliberately made the Stones reissues as hybrids; that is, they contain both a CD layer and an SACD layer. As a result, tons of owners of regular CD players bought these discs, but Sony can claim them as "SACD purchases." The idea is, labels will see people buying SACDs, therefore those labels will want to *put out* new SACDs...
And then new music will be recorded using the pure DSD technique, rather than analog remasters put into the SACD format.
Whether this will come to pass is highly debatable...I was just presenting the Sony view, as I have come to understand it from the past two years of spending obscene amounts of time on AudioAsylum's "Hi Rez Highway," a page that specializes only in SACD (their DVD-Audio page is separate."
The second point is, they deliberately made the Stones reissues as hybrids; that is, they contain both a CD layer and an SACD layer. As a result, tons of owners of regular CD players bought these discs, but Sony can claim them as "SACD purchases." The idea is, labels will see people buying SACDs, therefore those labels will want to *put out* new SACDs...
And then new music will be recorded using the pure DSD technique, rather than analog remasters put into the SACD format.
Whether this will come to pass is highly debatable...I was just presenting the Sony view, as I have come to understand it from the past two years of spending obscene amounts of time on AudioAsylum's "Hi Rez Highway," a page that specializes only in SACD (their DVD-Audio page is separate."