To be sure, SACDs are a niche product, but longtime devotees and younger enthusiasts just discovering the format will be happy for reassurance that their holdings won’t become merely decorative anytime soon. There may not be the flood of SACD releases there was at first-though labels like Pentatone, BIS, Mobile Fidelity, Analogue Productions, Chesky, and Reference Recordings keep it interesting-but audiophiles with large SACD collections may not want to go to the trouble and expense of converting their discs to high-resolution files. So it’s surprising, perhaps, that SACD playback capability remains widely available ten-plus years after the death knells were first sounded. This occurred, of course, in the context of the fading away of all physical media: CD sales have declined 80% over the past decade and 75% of record-company income nowadays derives from streaming. But with a failure to gain much traction outside of a classical audience (and to a lesser extent of jazz aficionados), the flow of releases slowed to a trickle, while the major labels-Sony included-abandoned ship entirely. The medium’s superiority over Red Book CD in dynamics, detail, and tonal complexity-not to mention its capacity for multichannel audio-was readily apparent to most who chose to give it a serious listen. A decade later, over 6000 SACDs had been released on over 400 labels.
But most refer to the allegedly moribund status of the Super Audio Compact Disc, introduced with great fanfare by Sony and Philips in 1999. Some reference high-resolution recordings-several versions of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, or albums from Dead Can Dance, or some San Francisco band that formed in the Sixties whose name escapes me. G oogle “SACD + Dead” and you’ll get quite a few hits.
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