Flagship Sony SACD Player SCD-XA9000ES discontinued??

I see from the Sony website that this, their flagship player released less than three years ago, has been discontinued, with no replacement in the pipeline?!?!

Can anyone shed some more light on this? It would be very bad news indeed if Sony are pulling out of manufacturing high-end SACD players

DT

 

if you take a look at this link, which provides a year by year breakdown of format sales in the US, you will see why Sony are pulling out of SACD.

http://www.slyck.com/misc/shipments.pdf


Disastrous sales which are beyond the point of redemption and Sony's concentration on BluRay spells the end of SACD, I believe.

From the beginning, I never thought much of the format. Even though it may have been 'better' than CD, how many people are going to go and buy an SACD if they already have it on CD? Or buy new equipment to play them, when the differences are only really noticeable in a decent hifi systems (and take it from me, most CD sales are not to the likes that inhabit this forum or its likes!). Not many is the obvious (and now proven) answer.

RIP SACD

 

Oh dear, that does NOT make for pretty reading. Audio cassette still outselling SACD?! Bloody hell!

It would truly appear that the writing is on the wall for this format. Damned shame. So much potential gone to waste.

Having said that, in monetary terms, LP/Vinyl isn't that far ahead at all, yet people seem to think Vinyl is in rude health....

DT

 

Three years is an eternity in Japanese product line terms. I'm surprised it was around for so long.

 

Perhaps that might be rephrased as "people with an axe to grind say that vinyl is in rude health"?

 

I never did figure out how they justified the significantly higher price of SACD discs. Surely that didn't help things?

Maybe they did bring the prices down over time but I had well and truely lost interest before then.

 

both the high res music formats were completely sub par - sacd had terrible high frequency noise problems and dvd-a had a confusing array of specs and the acronym also stood for something very dirty indeed. also there was the stereo / multichannel confusion, draconian copy protection and high price. worst of all though neither format offered joe public a real improvement over cd - yes it might have sounded a bit better if you'd spent 2k+ on your hi-fi but most people have a mini system for 200 quid at the most which isn;t going to exploit the slight improvement available.
sony are completely up their own arse at the moment. i'm tracking the development of the ps3 from inside the industry and some of the stuff they are pulling is gobsmackingly stupid (imho) alienating people left right and center and trying to wedge blu-ray into the spec to justify a monster price tag.
to be honest i hope microsoft and nintendo pull their pants down so they fire the current crop of waster manglement and start listening to their customers again.

 

Umm, "sub-par"? The fact is, depsite all the practical banana skins both formats trod on (multi-channel, confusing spec, higher price, tv navigation), both formats sounded stunning when implemented properly (i.e. The Living Stereo SACD's and Silverline DVD-A's).

I don't necessarily think you need a top-flight system to tell the difference. A modest £1000 system would suffice. Admittedly, this is not John Hooligan's ball park!

Re the PS3 - as always, it's the software, not necessarily the hardware, that determine's a console's success. I think unrealistically high customer expectations coupled with enormous development costs, will be the nail in it's coffin....

DT

 

BluRay seems to be farked before it even hard launches.

The delightful disclaimers on current players pointing out that they won't support all releases, that you might well have to log onto the internet to playback some copyrighted material.....

HD DVD is out. It's strong. And it offers superior soundquality to either of the audiophile flops.

 

dt,
the ps3 hardware is a pig to work with as are the sony tools so dev costs are massive
of course the big franchises will get converted however with the lowest estimated cost of $14m for a ps3 game that's all that will be there and they will have to amortize to the 360 and wii to recoup costs at some point so exclusivity will have to be subsidised by sony. also sony are being arses about licensing (not unusual) so not many devcos are able to actually get games past the approval process.

re sacd - that was my point though you have to spend iyo 5x and in mine 10x what joe public is willing to spend in order to hear the difference between cd and sacd/ dvd-a even then it's not a night and day difference that anyone with functional hearing can hear. the transition from vinyl / tape to cd was made because there were tangible benefits immediately obvious to the layman (no static / crackle as from vinyl and no wow/ flutter as from tape) and a far more convienient carrier than either.

 

$14m??!! Jesus, isn't that how much FFVII cost to make on Playstation? Wow. So not only do you have a serious finanical commitment, but you also have to wrestle with vector programming and limited middleware & librarys too (something Sony was lambasted for with PS2 I think?).

Luvin' the 360 btw. Great console IMO. Probably the best one since Dreamcast! Shame it crashes so often though

And I think both blu-ray & HD-DVD will both go the same way as thier hi-res audio counterparts. Limited interest from joe public and not enough of a difference (unlike vhs>dvd) for him to warrant the outlay....

DT

Anyway, seeing as the XA9000ES has been made redundant, I wonder if there's anywhere I can pick one up on the cheap??

 

yeah it's insane - they are looking 'down' on titles that don;t 'utilise all the facilities' i.e. fill a blu ray disk so you end up having to render reams of junk to satisfy the tdr. ps2 was ok - you only had 2 vu's and a processor to worry about which you could pretty much break into graphics, physics and game but if you imagine ps3 as trying to get 3 ps2's all to work together to do various jobs synchronised then you just about get the idea of the problems you face. also sony's toolset is all linux based whereas everythign else is xp. no one has ever got their debuggers to work reliably (even on ps1). middleware is only really viable for physics as renderware got bought by the leviathan that is ea. so you are looking at writing your graphics and game engines from scratch on a horrible platform with bad debugging facilities. or you can buy the unreal engine for £1m and then spend a but load of cash teaching all your engineers how to use it. not really a conducive environment for original content - madden / gta 9 ok - gems liek katamari damacy nfw....
sony's internet strategy is pants, they got shafted in a recent law suit over their controllers (so they are now ripping of the wii controller) their big release presentation at e3 was a joke (and has been made much fun off with the phrase 'giant enemy crab' becommng a buzz 'word' in the games industry for something that's a bit ****) all in all it will be a miracle if ps3 flies.
myself? i'll be joining the wii60 crowd and buying a 360 when they hit <100 quid and a wii when it does the same.

as for the hd formats - i can;t see either being as successful as dvd or cd more like laser disk was to vhs - it co-existed but only for the fanboys. the next big thing is network enablement for recordable devices. there are a few available now where you can record to the internal hard disk and archive to either dvd or a network resource one they get that working with hi-def tv it'll be downloadable off the net.