So what is SA-CD, anyway?

[Bobby Henderson]

The SACD and DVD Audio disc formats are now largely irrelevant now that Blu-ray is gaining more and more popularity. The Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD and LPCM formats all have the capability of running at the high resolution bandwidths boasted by SACD and DVD-A.

SACD and DVD Audio never reached their full potential because the popular music industry never bothered supported either format with a healthy number of new titles. That's it in a nutshell. The failure has nothing to do with MP3 or any of that other stuff. It all comes down to content. Blu-ray won its format battle mainly on the strength of movie titles using the format.

SACD and DVD-A were also hurt by consumer electronics technology that wasn't mature enough to do either format full justice. The first players could only output the audio in analog format. HDMI didn't come along until later.

Blu-ray has a much better chance of becoming a powerhouse delivery platform of very high quality music because playback infrastructure is already in place.

Originally Posted by CptGreedle

mp3 won because audio is not as important to most people as video. They can't hear the difference, so they don't care. It is easier to see the difference though.

That's not true. Just look how many people in this forum gripe if a Blu-ray movie doesn't have lossless or uncompressed master grade audio.

Honestly, lossy MP3 and AAC fills a completely different purpose of music playback. It doesn't fit the context of listening to music on a good quality stereo system and especially doesn't apply at all to playback on high end gear in a carefully controlled listening environment.

Severely compressed yet highly portable music files are great for convenience. The quality loss is often unnoticed because the listener is usually hearing the playback over little ear buds or other poor quality speakers.

Lossy portable music files and high bandwidth music on Blu-ray (or SACD, etc.) can coexist. However, the music creators have to support the high end formats by creating the original music tracks with appropriately high levels of quality and then export down-sampled versions for MP3/AAC use and Red Book CD.

Right now that situation is horribly backwards. Many popular music acts are recording and mixing music more with formats like MP3 in mind. They engineer the audio tracks very loud and clip the wave forms all to hell. This very stupid practice deletes a lot of sonic information from the track. This is also the main reason why many people can't tell the difference between a music CD track and the same song in MP3. Both sound loud and harsh. The "culture" behind that crap really must change before the music industry can move into its own "high def" next generation of audio.