End of the run for the DMP! What’s next?

I believe the SACD uses the same laser as a DVD so that would be why no SACD to keep costs down. Damn Sony for holding onto SACD so tight that the greed killed it from mainstream. Another Sony blunder. If it were not for Sony games and such, it would have been a lost brand a decade ago…

I do feel SACD is quickly seeing it’s end of life soon. Marantz and Esoteric are really the only left I think? Al least on the main front of huge brands to offer SACD units. Oppo was the best for the money and that’s long gone. True bummer.

Re: your first sentence, it was always my impression that they used different resolution/color lasers. Though I may be mixing up CD and DVD lasers with SACD. Hence “Blu-Ray” vs. ‘red-ray’, so to speak. Much higher frequency of laser and smaller pits than either CD or DVD.

And heartily agree with all the rest of your post : )

Accuphase also. I think they use a SACD optical drive built by D&M (Denon).

I think SACD is alive and well. Analogue Productions just released Jimi Hendrix Axis album on SACD (which sounds insane) and Are You experienced is coming soon. Pink Floyds Wish You Were Here long out of print SACD just got a re press from Analogue and is out now! Dark Side of the Moon is coming soon and Animals! All the RCA Living Stereo SACD’s that have come out within the last couple of years and more to come! And I’m not even scratching the surface on all the Japanese SACD releases that are coming out soon. It’s a shame the DMP appears to be discontinued. This is my second player thats gone out of print in a year! My Oppo UDP 205 being the other! Kinda worries me re if anything goes wrong considering the money I paid. Nonetheless, I dont understand why the new transport coming will have NO SACD capability. Paul seems to love the digital format and the SACD format espeically. He talks up Gus Skinas all the time and what he has done for DSD recording and authoring. And didn’t Gus move his Super Audio Center to the new PS Audio office where they are going to be recording bands in native DSD? But yet PS Audios next Transport won’t be able to play DSD? The word Direct Stream is in half their products for goodness sakes! Odd.

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Nope, for the most part it’s a standard DVD transport, the SACD digital rights management is encoded in the width of the pits so a SACD player needs to be able to get the data out normally just like a DVD but also notice how wide the pits are when (for example) reading the table of contents. Burning SACDs takes special hardware and there only used to be a few machines in the world that could do it.

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Actually, I think Paul would love to have an SACD player, problem is finding a drive mechanism that includes the rights to move the encrypted data from one box to another. In case you didn’t know, the DMP used an OPPO drive mechanism (hence the source of DMP drives drying up) and part of the purchase price to PS Audio was the Sony license that allowed them to send the encrypted data over I2S to the DS/DS Jr/Stellar (not sure about that one). All of the currently available drive mechanisms that can play SACD have issues, e.g., high cost, not available to competitors, poor sound, etc. such that PS Audio just said forget it. Yes it’s a shame, but it’s the reality of the marketplace. Sony made a real blunder with SACD, but they don’t seem to care.

There are better places for Sony to place its resources with a substantially better ROI than SACD.

So far only some audiophile labels seem to provide DSD downloads, but I hope that this replaces SACD finally for the industry…hopefully Sony reacts earlier than they can afford.

Jeebus. Lots to parse in your post.

Probably all of us who own DMPs agree with you heartily. It’s why most of us bought them. I took to SACD as a format when it came out, and didn’t understand why it failed until after the fact. It was not about SQ and Music, but about Viable Formats.

“Axis” is a fave of mine, and so, I will be all over that. Thanks for the heads up!

The issue, it seems to me, is that SACD was introduced in 1999. One of my fave Prince songs, BTW : )

Many of us adherents were like - “Sounds more like real MUSIC! Yay!” But that was not the general consensus at the time, and as usual, people were pissed that it was both expensive for the discs AND required proprietary hardware to play it. Bad-ish move on Sony’s part. I dunno . It may have been a very smart move economically for them.

But that had something to do with the ongoing issue of Labels and Artists saying, “You are going to Give them our Master Quality Album?!?”

That started at least as far back as the Casette Walkman. Not Kidding. Sony felt, “OMFG, Everyone is going to be able to Copy and Share recordings!!” Seems quaint and almost humorous, but it was a Big Deal at the time.

Never forget that this is the same Sony that thought putting out music on the UMD format was a great idea.

Consumer: “Sony can’t possibly come out with anything worse than the root kit copy protection scheme and ATRAC on minidisc.”

Sony: “Hold my beer”

That being said, I have a boatload of minidiscs and a player in the basement that my son has claimed for when he moves out because he enjoys the esoteric and obscure.

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Agreed, but to my myopic way of thinking, the whole digital rights management of SACD has been bypassed with DSD downloads. While you can’t get all music in a DSD download, the fact is you can get some of the same music that is in both formats, one restricted the other open to copies. If Sony chose to forget SACD that’s fine, but why not at least make it easier for other companies to carry on the flame? I’m sure there are holes in my argument, but just the same …

This is the sort of thing that gave me the impression stated - From a Wired article introducing Blu-Ray:

“Current DVDs employ a 650-nanometer red laser and have a recording capacity of 4.7 Gbytes. The Blu-ray Disc’s 405-nm blue-violet laser enables the recording and rewriting of up to 27 Gbytes of data. The new disc can read at higher resolutions because the lens numerical aperture is 0.85 - a 40 percent jump from the red laser’s 0.6. It also captures a larger portion of the beam with less divergence, creating even finer images.”

Maybe getting confused between these and SACD is my problem.

No, actually, the SACD is based on a different laser than DVD. It is the same laser as a BluRay player.

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That’s what I was thinking, but searching on it, it appears it uses the 650nm laser like a DVD…

I have a Sony DVD player that plays SACD’s It may be some kind of hybrid. It definitely was not a Bluray player though.

SACD was released in 1999, before prototype Blue-ray players existed, so originally the players were basically DVD players, using a red laser.

I think since then, a lot of drives capable of handling SACDs happen to be Blue-ray drives.

McIntosh is still supporting SACD with 3 units, one being a stand alone transport that also has the ability to send encoded DSD to a McIntosh DAC via their own proprietary MCT interface. https://www.mcintoshlabs.com/products/cd-players...which I believe was on the market before the DMP. I emailed McIntosh labs regarding which drive they use in their transports and the response I received Jordan Smith at tech support was “It’s a Denon”… no model number given.

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If I recall correctly Mcintosh and Denon may have been owned at one point by the same company, along with Marantz. Or I could just be confused.

Yeah - me too. It got kludged in my head. Maybe because SACD players had two lasers for playing the SACD and CD layers.

Eventually PS Audio will stop releasing updates of the DMP’s firmware. When this happens, perhaps Paul would be kind enough to release the source code so that programmers in the user community may continue where PS Audio leaves off.

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