Nice thread Kelly, I know you don't need my ideas on the topic of wich format, but let me tell you why I chose SACD. I watched for three years as the talk of a "new" format bounced around in Stereophile. I held off upgrading my digitial front end in anticapation of the new digital! Last year my cd player being five years old was in my opinion dated in it's advancement so I decided it was time to move. I chose to go with SACD for the sole reason that I could continue to use and grow my "redbook" cd collection, but I could also get the benifits of the latest technology (digitial filters) and start a collection of SACD. My choice became fairly obviouse to me, for $3000 I could buy the SCD-1 wich I understood to be within the same ballpark as an upsampled $15,000 system with standard cds. With SACD the sound was reported to be better and DVD-A had another stumble getting out of the blocks. To me DVD-A was dead when it's codes were broken, and deader still when the watermark issue came to light. Upsampling is very exciting and I believe will remain a viable option. But with a system one fifth the cost achieving about the same level of proformance what was my choice? I think you face a different possition than alot of us Kelly. Your base point is a system most of us will only read about, so moving to SACD may not have the same impact as it did on my system.
The one thing I wouldn't do is sit and wait, listening to the old playback technology for the next two, three, four ... years and not getting the best proformance possible during that time! (for me, being told I had a 1% chance of still being alive today, two or three years is too long to wait. Fact is we only have today, enjoy!)Your options I would think are a digitial to digitial upsampler to at least get the best from your existing library and wait, or wait through the summer when some of the big boys come out with there machines that may provide for upgrading.
For the rest of the lower price adiophiles, I just don't see how waiting is helping you. For the price of a good standard cd player, you could have an SACD that improves over standard "redbook cd" playback, allows for the choice of SACD and improved the DVD playback (9000es). By the time something actually happens, the system you'll be listening to will be 5,8,12 ... years old based on a technology pushing 30 years.
That was my thinking, no debates or defence from me, I promise. I'm just sharing how I aproached it, it worked for me. J.D.
The one thing I wouldn't do is sit and wait, listening to the old playback technology for the next two, three, four ... years and not getting the best proformance possible during that time! (for me, being told I had a 1% chance of still being alive today, two or three years is too long to wait. Fact is we only have today, enjoy!)Your options I would think are a digitial to digitial upsampler to at least get the best from your existing library and wait, or wait through the summer when some of the big boys come out with there machines that may provide for upgrading.
For the rest of the lower price adiophiles, I just don't see how waiting is helping you. For the price of a good standard cd player, you could have an SACD that improves over standard "redbook cd" playback, allows for the choice of SACD and improved the DVD playback (9000es). By the time something actually happens, the system you'll be listening to will be 5,8,12 ... years old based on a technology pushing 30 years.
That was my thinking, no debates or defence from me, I promise. I'm just sharing how I aproached it, it worked for me. J.D.