[Wayde]

Hey JM4N – Great observations

I think you hit the nail right on the head with Sony trying to reinvent the wheel. Add SACD to your litany Sony wheel creation efforts. Sony has the audacity to do this over and over in the electronics industry because well… quite frankly they can. It’s a powerhouse company.

One of the reasons Sony keeps re-inventing is it’s not only a consumer electronics manufacturer - it’s also a content provider. It’s big in movies but positively HUGE in the music recording industry.

I like your analysis of the HD DVD tech specs making it easier to do DVD. It’s why BD has a higher cost.

Personally, I don’t think either format is going to “take off” like DVD. The last gasp of the shiny disc is upon us and its life is being shortened by the format war.

I look into my crystal ball and I see people in the future speaking fondly of the old HD DVD and Blu-ray formats the way some today look back at Laserdisc.

History shows the general public prefers scalability over quality in media. That’s why the lowly 128bit MP3 kicked the snot out of both SACD and DVD-Audio as the acoustic format of choice.

In the near future we’ll download HD movies from the phone/cable/ISP companies. They’ll be encoded in highly compressed formats that will inevitably sacrifice some of what we’re enjoying now. Sure, it’ll be HD video and multi-channel sound. But anyone with a decent entertainment system and memory will long for that old concept of the disc player.