"Mike" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" writes:

You forgot the most important that they can reasonably expected to
fail: The new formats provide zero audible benefits.

True, especially for the mass market. The change from LP to CD was
boosted because a CD is more rugged, smaller than a vinyl record (or
a cassette) and a CD player is really easy to use, compared to a
record player.

Unlike DVD-A and SACD CD-A provided a clearly audible benefit. Sometimes it
got buried under bad mastering, but almost all of the time it was clearly
there. The greater durability and size advantage was just frosting on a very
nice sonic cake.


There may be some legacy music
that is remastered to some audible advantage when it is retrofitted
to the new format, but that's another matter entirely. IME any piece
of music can be remastered as often as one desires to do so, and a
different sound and something that pleases some people more than
others can be expected.

You can use a high resolution PCM format for new releases quite
easily. The problem is that even for CD few releases reach the limit
of the support.

That would be none. CD has over 20 dB of dynamic range that has IME never
been exploited in a commercial release.

If huge stores have a small collection- what's the
chance your local woolies/whsmith store has a dedicated
DVD-Audio/SACD rack?

Slim and none. Note: there used to be three stand-alone record
stores within walking distance of my house. Some were large,
long-term businesses with an excellent reputation. They're all gone.

Same happened here. Actually a new record shop opened here, but it
also sells PC, game consoles, games, books, cellphones and photo
stuff.

Same thing here, kinda-sorta. There are still large stores some distance
away that sell CDs, but they sell many other things as well. Some are
traditional discount stores, and others are essentially high-tech appliance
stores that also sell pre-recorded media, one form of which happens to be
CDs.