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When the 1812 was released, the cover read "Caution! Digital Cannons," and the interior of the booklet warned the listener that "the cannons of the Telarc 1812 Overture are recorded at a very high level. Lower levels are recommended for initial playback until a safe level can be determined for your equipment." Reviewers also issued cautions: "Just be sure the volume isn't so loud that one of the shots spreads pieces of speaker cone all over your floor," (Digital Audio); and "Its peaks would crack your window panes and maybe your speaker cones, too." (Knight-Ridder Newspapers).

Whether or not the increased bandwidth and dynamic range of DVD-A and SACD will improve the sound quality of recordings is debatable (having heard both, I know that it can, but only if the recording engineers know what they're doing).

However, the comment "surround sound is pretty useless for basic music" is dead wrong. If you play a two channel recording through one of the faux surround modes in many receivers, I'll admit that it doesn't sound all that great. But have you ever listened to a recording that was specifically mixed for 5.1, or even Dolby Pro Logic (e.g. some of Telarc's releases)?

If the mixing engineer knows what she's doing, the result produces an increased sense of envelopment and makes you feel more connected to the performance, even in pop recordings. Yeah, if the surround mixing is done using gimmicks like the original Fantasia, it just becomes distracting

(I say this having just spent an evening at a colleagues home listening to several 5.1 DVD musical performances. Trust me, done properly it makes a difference)

You want this and that and so on..
I listen to and enjoy music, I don't care to sit around and look at a PR poster of the people that made the music.
I do agree about the bitrate and/or ripping method but only on something recorded REALLY well like some of Telarcs releases like this one (and I do not like the real Beach Boys at all). 95% of non independant music and even a higher % of independant music is recorded with "average" quality that encoding to MP3 at 192 would not make much of a difference to the overall quality. Even less for someone that is used to listening to 12in vinyl (unless you've spent 10000's on your turntable, planer speakers, and your tube amplifiers and I've yet to see a vinyl setup that you could listen to while driving or jogging)

Many "new" SACD releases are actually old albums. For example, all of the Rolling Stones albums released on the Abcko label have been re-released as SACD/CD Hybrids. (BTW, you can rip the CD layer easily). The Sony SACD site has a list of available releases. Most of them are older releases. In fact, a brief perusal reveals very few "popular" music selections that were released this millenium. If the reason you aren't buying SACD is because of "new music" that is an wrong reason. It is also a boon for "audiophile" labels. For example, Telarc has a relatively large selection of SACD classical music.

Small artists which do not get screen-time on MTV or air-time on popular radio stations have no other way to let people "try before you buy" than the Internet. Some recording companies provide samples of music from the albums they publish, but an artist should have the right to do this him/herself if the record company doesn't. I know of only one record company where the artists own the copyright to their own work. DGM only functions as a recording and publishing company, they don't buy intellectual property. Arthur Brown made a record which sold 5 million copies in three months and never got anything for it. Somehow I don't buy it when the big recording companies say they work for the artists. They are in fact only working for artists that sell millions and then only to rip them off completely.

Several small audiophile record companies are also producing material for the SACD-format.

Here are some facts about Sony's SACD players. They don't have a digital output. So that $1500+ DAC that you have is going to do no good.

Not that they would do you any good anyway: DACs don't do DSD-encoded streams. You can use DACs with the digital PCM output on Sony players, however, but only with CDs. Since PCM is a late 1970s compromise anyway I'm not sure I care.

I'm not sure about the region coding on SACDs

There isn't any.

They are restricting content more and more

How? By forcing SACDs to have a watermark as proof that they are not copies? By making piracy harder (in contrast to video-DVD-style copy "protection" which does not hinder mass production of pirated DVDs but rather (kind of) hinders DVD playback on Linux.)?

The Disklavier system (unless they've made a recent upgrade that I'm not aware of) is not precise enough to completely mirror the original performance. In general, Disklavier files are MIDI with some metadata. If they were looking for true competition grade reproducing pianos, they should have gone with the Bosendorfer 290SE. The files it creates are much higher resolution (higher sampling rate of the hammers) and in general a higher bitrate file format. The Bosendorfer has been used in competitions before (of course, you expected that with /.), although only one piano was used (no variation). It's been used commercially in Stereophile's collection of Beethoven's Sonata's and by Telarc to bring Rachmaninoff back from the dead. Alan Dang www.firingsquad.com Random Fact: While developing one of the early reproducing pianos, Clarence Hickman developed a high speed camera system that he later used in WW2 to develop the bazooka.