I think Sony produces some great products, but one of the things that irks me most about the company is that NIH attitude you're talking about. I almost hope that Memory Stick, Mini Disk, SACD, etc. fails miserably just so that they start to learn a lesson from all of it. Apparently Beta wasn't enough lesson for them.

Of course, I don't REALLY hope that SACD fails just because it's from Sony. Or Mink Disk & friends. Some of the Sony technologies are actually kind of nice. But others (Memory Stick, in particular) just seem pointless as they don't add anything to the industry.

I think that DVD/A is "neater" technologically, and of course, being a PCM based format will make things easier to integrate with the rest of the system, when we finally get digital interconnects.

I also don't see any reason why it should be harder to convert from PCM to DSD than from DSD to PCM. It all just seems like math to me.

DSD just seems to me to be... needlessly "different" from what's already working well in the market. Now, SACD, as a format is a useful evolution beyond CD, but I think they could have done just as well with PCM in that format.

Also, remember that SACD *can* be backwards compatible with ordinary CD players, but is not necessarily so (the extra layer need not be there). Additionally, DVD-A *can* be backwards compatible with DVD-V players, but is not necessarily so.

I don't see any large technical advantages to one format over the other in this "war", although I think DVD-A's use of PCM and its use of the DVD encoding at the data layer (SACD is an all-new format at the data layer) provide advantages in cost and system integration.

Of course, in the end, I think that it's going to come down to software. I also think that both will probably live on side-by-side for quite some time. This isn't going to be decided soon because, unlike Beta/VHS, it doesn't have to be.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net