DVD-Audio Sales Five Times that of SACD Says RIAA Survey

Change that either to any. Very and I would guess very few people here could even begin to afford a universal unit that could "properly" reproduce both formats while, many could afford the 3K to 5K for a unit that reproduces one format properly. Because of this those wanting near sota reproduction are in a way forced to choose. From a two channel as well as ergonomic viewpoint and considering the choices in software titles this is the reason SACD was chosen in my case.

 

Good point Khorn. I also think we need to realize that SACD is a relatively young format. I have no doubt that in a year or two, we will see a $1K player that sounds better than many $3K players today. I bet the recording chains will get even better as workstations improve and the ADC & DAC processes improve.

One foreshadowing of this may be Harry Pearsons evolving views in The Absolute Sound. He was initially less than thrilled about DSD until he started listening to better recordings and got a hold of the new Meitner gear. Now is very impressed.

It took ten years IMHO for redbook to reach a decent sound, even though I jumped in early. Super Audio really launched in 1998, so perhaps 2008 may be a year where sonics mature...

 

Exactly right.

 

12 dvdas here and about 200 sacds.

And what I read here and there:

- 100.000 dvdas sold for first 6 months 2003 in US market (Washington Post)
- 300.000 dvdas sold in 2003 (US market)
- 500K dvdas sold worldwide in 2003

- Sound Scan counts hybrids as simple CD, so we can't say how much SACDs was sold, BUT

- total capacity of all SACD plants on 1 of January, 2004 was 150.000 discs per day (and I believe it continues to grow, Sonopress reported recently about 50% increasing of its hybrid capacities. Also total capacity of all hybrid plants will be doubled in 2004 as planned).

So it's very interesting to compare these digits: 500.000 dvdas sold in 2003 worldwide and 150.000 sacds replicated per day, worldwide too.

 

Sony was being conservative. At 150,000 a day that means they will put out almost 55 million SACD this year!!!

Mainstream here we come.

J

 

There better be a LOT of single-inventory announcements very soon.

And if they have so much capacity, why are the Dylan discs being switched to Redbook (same thing for the Stones overseas)?

 

Geoff,

I wasn't being critical. I am an SACD guy too! I just find all of the back and forth stuff to be counter-productive. Each side will trumpet theirs as the "winner" when in fact there are no "winners" yet. Let's hope that they both get promoted and get out there.

As far as expecting a mere mortal to invest in a top of the line player that properly reproduces both formats at their best, well now there you have a clear picture. The number of "universal player" owners vs. those guys is going to be at least 99 to 1!

It's the 563A owners who will save either or both formats!

 

Probably, even more. Some interesting calculations: http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=hirez&n=165439&highlight=&r=&session=

And Sony with its empty upcoming list is only one of 256 labels (accordingly to http://www.sa-cd.net/labels/) playing on SACD field.

 

Lee, I really think you need to rethink a lot of your assumptions here.

First the results of the survey are available on the riaa's website and have been for almost a week (according to my source at the riaa) - I think you are jumping to conclusions about favoritism here. According to my source the results have been made to every riaa member - not one or two, but all.

Although as a research person I have many questions about the survey, the firm that actually conducted it is very well respected and I'm sure (overall) their methods are valid.

The fact is that the dvd-a council released a press release. Sony/Philips can do so, the riaa is not keeping them from releasing a rebuttal. Go back and reread Dan Cooper's post as well as my post that follows his.

Just like you want to see actual sales figures instead of behavior results that the riaa gives, you should also want to see actual sales figures to back sony's claims. They are a privately held company and because of that they have latitude of what the can get away with regarding reported sales. As far as APO and chesky, they are but a tiny portion of disc producers, so saying they sell more sacds that dvd-a's is really a thin argument (and let's not forget that they each only produce a handfull of dvd-as compared to sacds).

My guess is (and it is strictly a guess) that the sacd category contains discs that are being played on an sacd player whether they are hybrids or not. As a research person this is what I hope was done in order to count people who brought hybrids for the sacd layer and not the cd layer.

I'm going to come of somewhat snotty here, but I really think some are being very defensive about the results of this one survery. The fact is that no one and I mean no one knows how many hybrids sold are actually being played on sacd players (and I don't care what anythone thinks the know). No one knows how many dvd players sold with either dvd-a and/or sacd capability are actually playing hi rez discs. My educated guess is very few.

I'm not dissing one format over the other, I'm just concerned at the amateurish assumptions (from a research point of view) being made here.

 

It's clearly not a capacity issue. Probably something else like marketing.

Sergei raises some good points and again the numbers just don't seem to add up to me.

Have they really? Did I miss something? Do you have a link. I honestly looked yesterday (around midnight) and could not find information about the survey.

Of course, the more evidence and transparency of methods the better. Given the track record though I find Sonys numbers to be reliable. They have been issuing replication numbers for years and have never been questioned. Think about the loss of face their managers would suffer if they were wrong.

I also know that past reportings from RIAA have been dramatically wrong due to how they treat hybrid discs. Combined with everything else, I believe this has definitely led to artificially low assumptions for Super Audio. Alas, the DVDA Council is not releasing any statistics here for us to properly analyze.

I actually referenced Acoustic Sounds which offers most of the DVDAs. I think these are good reference points since they are a good representation of the audiophile market which is likely the majority of hirez buyers plus or minus a small percentage. We know from the consumer profile that hirez purchasers are likely to be wealthier, older people which matches up well with the typical audiophile demographic. Stereophile has some good demographic data on this.

I politely disagree. To me personally the results just go against all other evidence and it looks really bad for the DVDA Council to offer up such thin conclusion based on maybe a 100? hirez buyers...

Would it not be better to survey people who already know what hirez is? Why leave out vinyl fans which have been enjoying a resurgence in popularity. They gotta be at least 7-10% of the market now.

I still don't think we have a good answer at all as to why the RIAA would not report the results of both formats combined if they are trying to promote hirez in general as Mikey states.

I think its good for us to be skeptical until we get better understanding just like it would be good for people to question Sony's numbers in their press release.

I like both formats, but this DVDA press release is clearly a partisan swipe that may turn off a lot more than it enlightens...

 

One more comment regarding the numbers....

Let's assume the average price for a CD is an even $14. The total sales of $11,854.4 million divided by this gives approximately 847 million units sold.

If DVDA is 2.7% of this total, the DVDA moved 22.86 million units. Really on 730 titles? Yeah right.

If Super Audio is 0.5% of this total, then SACD sold approx. 4.2 million titles. We know that Sony and Philips expected 10 million units to move over 2004 (20-10 to date).

[Now I figure the average SACD price is higher than $14 with even a small portion of boutique sales put in, but I wanted to keep the math simple here and it does not impact the results.]

So DVDA supposedly sold a number in excess of what Sony expected the total since inception SACD disc pressed since 1997? I don't think so.

I am sorry but the math does not simply add up. This is the danger of extrapolating based on consumer surveys to what actually sold. I am sure if an honest auditor at the DVDA Council or Warner looked at the numbers he/she would see several red flags.

 

Lee,

You must have missed the following link, which I posted in this thread yesterday:

http://www.riaa.com/news/marketingdata/pdf/2003consumerProfile.pdf

 

A couple of weeks ago I spoke with the person in charge of the catalog at Universal Spain and he told me that all SACDs currently being published by Universal in Europe are hybrid because "that's what the European consumer wants." In fact, Beck's "Sea Change", which is an SACD-only disk, is not sold in Europe, you can only find the DVD-Audio.

Curiously enough, and this has me quite confused, Diana Krall's latest album, which is already out in Europe since earlier this month (CD and hybrid SACD), is not being sold in SACD format here in Spain yet, even though the album's TV commercial shows the SACD logo and he had told me it was going to be published here. Guess I'm going to have to call him next week to see what's cooking.

 

re The Stones,they are switching nothing.When the Stones reissues came out here in Sydney the first thing I saw was the digipak SACD's in the import shops.I then saw discs in normal plastic cases and realised that the local version was only going to be CD with the DSD Mastering stickers on the cover.I believe this is because SACD has made no impact whatsoever that I can see,DVD-A no better,I'm seeing DVD-A discs being sold here for half price,obviously no one is buying them.The only locally produced SACD that I know of is Dark Side Of The Moon and that's probably only the booklet.

 

I am glad that someone who is actually involved in polling/surveying has posted, thank you dcooper.

I am in no way involved with the survey industry, but I am very familiar with some of the techniques and 'theories' involved. What you said here pretty much backs up what I said in a previous post, so if you have done anything thing at all, at the very least you have helped me confirm to myself that I'm not completely clueless and I'm not the only one that sees a problem with the claims made by the DVD-A Council based on the results from this survey.

One point I would like to stress, however, is this - though a margin of error of +- 1.8 may be a very high level of confidence it is still, IMO, rather large when you look at the difference in percentage points between the two high resolution formats determined by this survey. With SACD at .5% and DVD-A at 2.7% with a +- 1.8 margin of error, would't that be a theoretical tie? Please correct me if I'm wrong; like I said, I'm no statistician nor am I a mathematician.

 

Golden Boy, here is some relevant analysis I posted at the Home Theater Forum:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I did some analysis of the survey.

1. They had 2,900 participants.
2. Total hirez buyers were 2.7% for DVDA and 0.5% for SACD or 3.2%.
3. 3.2% of 2,900 is 92.8 people who apparently bought hirez, excluding vinyl which is also high resolution
4. If the formats were tied, then an equal 1.6% (half of 3.2%) would buy each format.
5. Therefore 46 hirez people out of 2,900 changing their mind on the format would completely change the results of the survey.
6. It was a phone-based survey.

Isn't it possible that 46 people thought that listening to DTS tracks was the same as DVD Audio?

Is it not possible that some people may have though watching & listening to music videos was the same as DVDA?

The point is that a very small number of the people sampled could have a big impact on the results, either for or against the stated result.

If you assume that 2.7% of totals sales of $11.854 billion was DVDA, then $320 million of discs were sold. Divided by $20 you get 16 million disc sold during 2003. I have done the calculation a new way that is less sensitive to the price per disc assumption. At the same time, the RIAA states that 400,000 DVDA discs were shipped to retailers during the same period.

How can DVDA outsell what has been shipped by such a wide margin?

It just does not seem right...

If we had some Soundscan sales data from both formats, I think we could do a better analysis.

It would also be unfair to count hybrid discs as pure SACDs (Soundscan cannot distinguish these anyway) and say that Super Audio outsold DVD Audio.

I think the real bottom line may be two things:

1. All the bickering may be confusing the consumer and turning off additional purchases of hirez.

2. All the discussion on digital's problems is likely driving to some degree IMHO the popularity of vinyl.

 

The numbers from this 'survey', regardless of what my personal preference may be toward the two formats, are highly questionable, IMO. They just do not ring true.

 

I agree. There is simply no way that DVDAs sold somewhere around 16 million units.

I think the DVDA Council must be very desparate to want to imply that when a simple check of the numbers reveals more sold than were shipped to retailers. Those of us who like DVDA suffer as well as the industry group gets caught with stretching the truth.

 

This is also true of the catalog for The Police and Peter Gabriel....available in Europe as hybrids, but generally single-layer SACDs here in the States.

 

I think it is a mistake to offer single layer discs. If they want to see the format expand, they should offer hybrids always and offer single inventory discs as much as possible.

One wonders if Sony & Philips could have made more money by simply aligning with Warner in exchange for 50% of the royaltees....smaller slice of much larger pie.

I really do hope BluRay or HD-DVD can offer a strong chance to unify the hirez market. I would much rather discuss music than format wars.

 

Which is exactly what turned me off to DVD-A.

 

Major Fudge Factor: "Confussion."

Most consumers, most audio sales people, and most reporters don't know what is going on. SACD disk can be mono, stereo, multi-channel, dual layered and hybrid with a CD layer.

DVD-A disks are easily confussed with DTS audio CD's and DTS DVD music videos. DVD-A started out as purely multi-channel audio, some with fold down stereo and some with intentionally mastered stereo.

I doubt that even a well executed phone survey of 3,000 people can accurately capture the usage and comprehension issues involved to gain my confidence that the results are meaningful.

If you think the world is confussed about audio try HDTV.

Richard.

 

so true!

I consider myself knowledgeable on music and video but HDTV can be very confusing.

 

Thanks! You are absolutely right to point out that given the 1.8 margin of error, the values would in essence be theoretically tied.

This poll is much ado about nothing, IMO. Accurate sales figures - not shipping figures and DEFINITELY not polling results - tell the real story here.

 

We have probably spent more time discussing this poll than the people that took it and used it!

Although I am a strong proponent of each format, there is no way that I could ever believe that DVD-A's have outsold SACDs. Just no way.