Entelligence: Why Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio haven't caught on

By Peter Rojas

Every Thursday Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research contributes an interesting item of gadget-related research data. This week's factoid: Why Super Audio CDs and DVD-Audio haven't caught on.

Displacing the CD? Not so fast... There's an old saying that says that says "standards are great, that's why there are so many of them." The truth is, everyone wants to control the standard du jour, and there's been a (not so)
quiet battle going on to displace the CD with new music formats. Back in '99 Sony and Philips (the same companies who came up with the original CD in the '82) came up with the the SACD format to move beyond the CD. Less than a year later, a number of manufacturers, under the DVD Forum, launched a competing DVD-Audio format. To date, neither has had a major market impact; in a recent Jupiter Research survey, only five percent of respondents had ever purchased a disc in either format.

There are a lot of reasons behind this, but it really boils down to three. To successfully introduce a new standard,
three constituencies must be aligned: hardware manufacturers must rally behind the standard, media companies must adopt the standard, and consumers must be convinced of the format's superiority via clear and visible differentiation. All of these ducks were in a row for both the CD and DVD. None of these have occurred for SACD or DVD-Audio in great enough numbers to either to achieve critical mass. Consumers are far more interested in the compatibility as well as the portability of their CD content (via MP3) than a small increase in quality that most people don't appreciate. Given these barriers, neither SACD nor DVD-Audio will displace CDs, DVD-Video, or MP3 files over the next three years.

Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director for the Personal Technology & Access and Custom Research groups at Jupiter Research in New York. Contact him at
mgartenberg@jupitermedia.com. His weblog and RSS feed are at http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg.

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