Not wasting my time on new Digital

And to top all of this off, now we have Blue Ray technology coming to the forefront from the same wonderful people that gave us SACD and DVD A. I absolutely refuse to invest in this, till it is totally proven. We all know the current fiasco regarding SACD and DVD-A. Please Sony, enough is enough.

And to D-edwards, yep I am an aging baby boomer. Been in this hobby/business since 1957, owned and sold more gear that you can possibly fathom. I do take offense as being dismissed as nothing more than a relic.

Got into digital the day it hit the streets. In fact when I purchased the first CD Player, there was only 25 CD titles in the Schwanns Catalog. Digital has its place as does analog. Also have had a very expensive Lexicon HT system. Great for movies, total dreck for music.

For all the prowess that Digital provides, when it comes to accurate musical reproduction, it is only of late, that the promise of digital is coming to light, but the jury is still out for me. It takes a damn expensive digital player to get music,not movies, to sound correct.

For what it is worth. Once again Sony wants to re-package and re-sell their existing library. This marketing strategy always fails. No one with any common sense, no matter how good Blue Ray or HD DVD may or may not be, is going to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to re-populate what they already own in an existing format.

If Blue Ray or HD DVD is a superior process, it will have to very right straight out of the box and have such a dramatic impact to make all other digital forms obsolete immediately. Thats an almost impossible task, due to the fact that costs at the retail level cannot exceed the magic $399.00 for a launch of a new format player. Software has to be priced very near current levels. At present all I see is a lot of red ink to be overcome. And for the consumer another format to deal with, that has all the potential of another SACD or DVD-A demise, that leaves consumers with outdated formats, that consumers paid far to much for. Till proven different, I believe this to be another fad, with zero substance.

There is a need for a new digital system to raise the bar, that we have had since 1982, but major breakthroughs do not occur often and are not priced at entry level consumer gear in the initial launch. In 1982 I paid a very hefty price for a first generation CD Player and the first CD discs were very expensive, when compared to the analog LP of the same period.

With Blue Ray and HD DVD I do not see that happening. These new operating systems will have to hit the decks running and the return on investment to Sony will have to be swift. Entry level consumer electronic products, due to their mass market nature, will not have the build, parts, or reliability quality to ensure consumer confidence after the launch.

But, I am always ready to be impressed beyond my wildest expectations, which happens all to infrequently and after 48 years in this hobby business, major breakthroughs I can count on the fingers of one hand. I spent a lot of years at CBS/Columbia and well remember the Quad disaster of 1975. There is not a better mouse trap, only major break throughs that deliver the promise, and that technology is expensive to R&D and deliver to the market place.

I only wish Viridian was totally on target with his assesment. However the numbers do not support his views.

Before CBS/Columbia made the hugh committment to jump into the then new CD technology, we formed focus groups in several parts of the country to evaluate consumer trend in this medium. Would they pay the $800.00 for the entry level player? Would they pay near twice the price for the software? Would they buy titles they already have in LP or Cassette ? The list goes on, but that was crux of what needed to be evaluated. The results from these focus groups was an overwhelming resounding YES!!! So armed with that the plunge was taken.

Guess what? Did not happen in the numbers expected, in fact nowhere even close. Wish the hell it did, would have saved a ton of jobs. Also resistance at the retail level was another area encountered, that was not foreseen. Retailers had to regear themselves to accomodate this new medium. All of this held true for Capitol and RCA as well.

Even new releases in both LP and Cassette and the newer CD format, the LP contiuned to outsell the CD by a far margin until about late 1988 some seven years after the introduction of the CD Players and by that time the price of CD Players had fallen dramatically, but prices on CD software remained much the same.Software prices remained high losses had to be recovered from previous years, and have remained high since.

Comparing DVD Video to Music CD is an apple to oranges comparison. Music CDs are bought individually and are added to ones library. On the other hand DVD Video is a different animal. If it was not for the vast majority of rental libraries such as Blockbuster and the like the DVD Video market would near collapse under its own weight.

Case in point in my own vast collection I have precisely three CDs that I already have on the LP format. If I posses it in LP or Cassette, I see zero reason to add the same title in CD format. And to this day not everything has been transferred to CD. Same holds true for the DVD Video format.

We will see if Sony with Blue Ray can weather a 7 year storm in this day and time. However thier recent debacle with SACD and DVD-A proves otherwise. The Corporate environment has changed dramatically in recent years, no longer will Corporations pour resources into a medium that show a poor return. Now its all about the numbers, there are no more visionaries heading these Corporations now. And in the final analysis it is the end consumer that ends up with an obsolete purchase.