crimsondonkey:
Alternately, if your kit is good enough you won't need SACD?!
Is the format (which never really seeded itself) now in danger from the future threat of 'SA' quality downloads and increasingly capable DACS?
I suspect no matter how good your kit, if you had an equally capable SACD player and played the CD vs the SACD, I'm confident you'd notice a big difference. Having said that, CD's are usually limited by poor production, if you compared an
XRCD played on a CD player to an SACD, then I suspect the difference wouldn't be so noticeable.
SACD never took off because the majority of music buyers were compressing CD's to 128kbps mp3's when it first came out, high fidelity being the least of their concerns. Unfortunately, unlike the contributors to this forum, most of the public aren't so fussy about sound quality.