Editor's note: Death to Ken Kessler and a pox on Stereophile....
London, Tokyo, Portland (Maine), and Points Global: Just because some of us write for the audio press doesn't mean we're any better informed than anyone else when it comes to the truth about the single biggest format screwup since Betamax.
I am utterly mystified by the current state of SACD and DVD-Audio, especially since Sony has all but disowned the former and no one talks about the latter. DVD-A is looking less and less like a dodo that might someday be revived, Jurassic Park style, from DNA, and more like a unicorn or chimera. Does anyone any longer give even a hoot about DVD-A, a format whose launch was mishandled so comprehensively and sublimely that its virtues have been utterly forgotten? But SACD . . . well, whether you think it sounds better or worse than DVD-A doesn't matter at this stage. At least it's got a substantial catalog of recordings for consumers to sample.
Or so one would believe. I can't get a firm handle on this either, but to the best of my reckoning, between 1500 and 2000 SACD titles have been released so far. (Chad Kassem, Josh Bizar, and the rest of you in the software sales side: please send the correct number to the usual address.) But try finding them if you don't use mail-order. Judged by the yardstick of retail support, SACD doesn't seem much healthier than DVD-A.
Okay, okay—so traditional stores matter less and less, thanks to the Internet. But the way I see it, bricks-and-mortar's attitude toward SACD and DVD-A is a total and conclusive indictment. When the majors—Virgin, Best Buy, Circuit City, HMV, Borders, et al—either hide their stocks in the end racks or don't even bother to give them their own section, well, do the math. As for asking staff about titles, don't bother. Inquire about SACDs and they'll think you mean "essays on CDs," V la "audio books" for the visually impaired. Ask for DVD-As and they think you're suggesting they have a rare strain of a sexually transmitted disease.
Time to fess up: Absolutely and positively, no one outside the microcosm we call "the audiophile community" cares about these formats. Which is a pity. I adore what I've heard on SACD, especially some of the archive treasures from Audio Fidelity and Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, while DVD-A has about as much of my attention as jai alai scores or commedia dell'arte. I relish each new SACD release, and actually enjoy wiring up the new players that arrive for review.
Despite my love for SACD, I was recently berated for always writing about it in so melancholy a tone, as if I'm propounding a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus "sabotaging its future." Of course, my possibly too-pessimistic view may be unfounded, but in my experience, any new digital format that, as of 2005, is outsold by vinyl LPs is in deep doo-doo.
Despite this, SACD is still being supported on the hardware end. Companies continue to release extreme-high-end machines. TEAC/Esoteric, for example, has launched a five-chassis state-of-the-art player, consisting of the P-01 transport, outboard power supply, two mono D-01 D/A converters, and the G-0s Master Clock Generator. Unlike some other purist machines, this one will access surround sound from multichannel titles, but it's clear that Esoteric has made no compromises.
I first caught a whiff of the Esoteric's greatness at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. But when I heard it in Tokyo a few months back, listening to standard, two-channel "Red Book" CDs through Krell Evolution electronics and Krell LAT-1000 speakers, I was dazzled. The Esoteric rig left nothing out, and ensured its future-proof status by including every type of connection known to man bar TosLink, including IEEE1394 (FireWire) digital input and output, conventional RCA, and XLR balanced. The Master Clock Generator was the icing on the cake—a real behemoth of a jitter-killer. Even with some vintage CDs—referring to both the ages of the discs and the even older original recordings—the sound was breathtaking.
Conversely, Musical Fidelity, that champion of the two-channel SACD, has just announced a new two-chassis player, an "affordable" derivative of its kW model. It's CD-only. As is its practice, MF has added some cool features: the kW DM25 transport and DAC connect to each other by mono left-and-right XLR connectors at 96kHz (the DAC will accept TosLink optical and RCA coaxial from other digital sources), and the user has a choice of—get this—solid-state or tube outputs from the DAC. It looks like another smash hit for Musical Fidelity. But I was puzzled by the change of philosophy. Was Musical Fidelity abandoning SACD? Then I read the sheet that accompanied the product description: "Why a CD player when SACD and DVD-A are available? Well, for all intents and purposes, DVD-A is dead—while SACD still has only a thousand or fifteen hundred titles, most of them re-issues of old analog tapes. And these discs are very expensive. So, thanks a lot. However, there are over 2½ million CD titles available, in every form of music you could imagine, and all at intelligent prices. For us, this means that CD is the only logical medium."
All of the above is rendered less depressing when you acknowledge that, unlike with most other failed formats, we are not left with unusable hardware—every SACD and DVD-A player also plays CDs, while DVD-A players and universals also play regular DVD-Video discs. But that's small comfort to those who tasted the new formats, fell in love, then realized that they have the same future as 78s and 8-tracks. Whatever your take, Esoteric's take, Musical Fidelity's take, or any others' takes (and while I hate to quote or paraphrase an arch anti-Semite), it is certainly time, in Voltaire's words, to êcrasez l'infame (crush the vile thing). No, make that plural: SACD and DVD-Audio have wasted enough of our time.
