SACD vs DVD-A (Business/Marketing reason)

[topspeed]

Rumor is Sony has shelved SACD development while the BluRay/HD-DVD format war heats-up. There was no Sony SACD booth at the CES, the first time that has happened since they launched. DVD-A has the luxury of market recognition because of the first three letters. I'd venture to say that John Q. Public has no idea what DVD-A is and mistakenly thinks they can play them in any 'ol DVD player. Of course, you can get hi-rez players for next to nothing now so it hardware isn't the problem. In addition, the lack of promotion and quality software is only partially to blame. The tsunami you see on the horizon is the market's continuing shift to lo-rez, downloaded MP3's.

Who should win? Who cares? Universal players can be had for little more than a bill. See all those iPods? The market could care less about hi-res sound. Even though I just bought a universal, I really bought it for it's video processing w/ the hi-rez decoding coming in as a bonus. Truth be told, I'm not holding out a lot of hope for either format.

[markw]

...neither of 'em will amount to anything more than a fart in a windstorm. The purported advantages are not worth his time/money and effort.

This isn't like the switch from vinyl and VHS tapes to colorful bejeweled 5 1/4" discs where the improvement in convenience and sound/picture were no brainers.

If market penetration is a major factor in their continuance on th sellingfloor, then I don't put too much faith in either one.

...unless they discontinue the old formats, in which case they will be royally pissed.