The triumph of mid-fi

Thanks Tok. I may not have been very clear though. You are absolutely right that a new standard could not be easily established by any but the mighty. However, why can't a consortium of high end companies do a better job with SACD and/or DVD-A than Sony or Philips are doing? After all, the Panasonics of the world don't rule high end redbook reproduction. What are they waiting for? Is it illegal to improve on their designs? Again, sorry for any confusion in my earlier phrasing and thanks for the response.

Ozfly: The high end is a pretty small market, and only a subset of that has embraced either of these formats. Given that, it's not surprising that smaller companies are sticking to the sidelines for now. There just isn't a big enough market for them. If it appeared that one or the other format was going to go mainstream, then I suspect you'd see a lot more action. But not until.

I don't agree that the SACD market is too small for high end manufacturers.Consider some of the other products they sell.How big a market can there for a $10,000 turntable like the Walker Procinium or other such high end items? Surely they could sell more high quality SACD players at $1000 - $5000?

You also have to remember that the name of the game is to sell audio or electronic equipment, don't forget that.
The manufacturers need to sell gear to stay open, and that means that they need to balance the R&D decisions and Advertising money as well as other product launch/revision money.

When any company large or small undergoes the idea of making a new product or model, they are going to look at the demand for that product. If the demand is small than they will not spend a lot of R&D money on a product even if they know they can improve it because if they cannot sell to a large segment of consumers than they are inherently wasting money that could have been spent on product they are selling well.

Unfortunately in the end the number of boxes moved HAS to be an important part of the equation no matter how good of a product you can build.

The large companies are going to spend money in areas have growth potential, a large target market, or in an area where they feel they can be the dominate player. Examples of these categories are Plasma, camcorder, DVD, memory card product/Hard disk product.

I think the high-end audio companies are taking back the high-ground vis-a-vis SACD 'as we speak'. There is the Lindemann, which is already here and from what I have read bests the SACD efforts by Sony and Marantz. Audio Aero has announced their new SACD player (in Europe). I expect quite a few SACD players to be announced on this side of the water at CES next week. I expect them all to be better than the current slate of players.

That said, it has indeed taken awhile for these players to come out, IMHO because of licensing issues, the newness of the formats, and the engineering challenge of having to support BOTH CD and DVD at state-of-the-art levels (and perhaps adding DVD on top of that as well) in one player.

-Mike