I can feel your pain , I personally think SACD/DVDA didnt take off because its too confusing to the casual enthusiest. first you have 2 formats and neither have taken off, people are first confused by that. secondly people get confused when they cant hook everything up via one cable, let alone 7 or more cables. then you have to have a reciever with muti channel inputs as well as some kind of bass management unless your just going to do 2 channel SACD. Then to top it off the titles are more expensive, the sound quality on a lot of releases leaves a lot to be desired. when everything is done right it does sound awesome, but my first SACD was Bostons first disc which i already had on cd. I put it in and gave it a hard listen, and it was hard to listen to it sounded godawful, my second SACD was aerosmiths greatest, not much better at all. im thinking wow this sucks. I bought a couple of DVDA's one of which was fleeetwood macs rumorus. now to me that sounded great,, a huge improvement. then i got Pink Floyd dark side of the moon and was blown away.
I think we might run into the same thing with the High def dvd formats coming out too. no wonder people are leery of new technologies.
I bought into laserdiscs in the late 80's and early nineties only to have that format go belly up when dvds caught on. now ive invested in sacd and dvda and thats not taking off, personally i think i will wait on getting the new DVD format. or at least buy an IPOD so i can listen to my boston while im walking.... ok now that ive vented i feel better