What Happened to the SACD?
Why its Influence Has Never Left EMM Labs.
There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when the future of recorded music seemed to be sitting on a small silver disc. The Compact Disc was approaching its twentieth birthday. It had transformed the music business, largely displaced vinyl and cassette, and put digital audio into millions of homes. But for engineers, there was still a considerable gap between what could be captured in the recording studio and what could ultimately be delivered to the listener.
Sony and Philips believed it was time for something better.
The result was Super Audio CD, introduced in 1999. Instead of the 16-bit, 44.1 kHz PCM system used by conventional CD, SACD was built around Direct Stream Digital, or DSD, a fundamentally different approach to representing music digitally.
And this is where Ed Meitner enters the story.
Long before EMM Labs became known for products found in listening rooms around the world, Ed had established a reputation for solving difficult problems in digital audio. During the development of DSD, Sony sought his expertise in converter design. What followed became an important chapter in EMM Labs history.
Ed and the team worked closely with Sony and Philips on DSD technology and the practical challenges of turning the new format into something capable of capturing and reproducing music at an exceptionally high level. EMM Labs would ultimately develop the first complete multichannel DSD playback system, while its converters found their way into recording and mastering facilities around the world. For many listeners, their first encounter with EMM Labs was therefore inseparable from SACD.
Products such as the CDSD, CDSA, TSD1, TSDX, TX2 and XDS1 became part of a generation of machines designed to extract everything possible from the format. Some remain in daily use more than a decade later.
Which raises a question we still receive regularly:
If SACD is such an important part of EMM Labs history, why don't we make an SACD transport today?
The answer is surprisingly simple. We can't currently obtain the drive.
The disappearing SACD mechanism
Building an SACD player is very different from designing most of the electronics inside one.
EMM Labs can design the digital processing, clocking, power supplies, analogue circuitry, control systems and mechanical architecture of a product. But the mechanism that physically reads an SACD is a highly specialized component, manufactured by a very small number of companies. And that supply chain has steadily disappeared.
The OEM mechanisms and support that once allowed independent high-end manufacturers to build SACD players are no longer readily available. TEAC and Esoteric no longer provide the OEM support that third-party manufacturers once relied upon, while Denon and Marantz have likewise ceased supporting outside manufacturers in this area. This leaves companies such as EMM Labs in an unusual position.
We have the knowledge. We have the technology. We have customers with substantial SACD collections who would very much like to continue playing them. What we don't currently have is a viable mechanism around which we can build the machine. We have explored the avenues presently available to us, and so far none has provided a solution we believe is suitable for an EMM Labs product.
That distinction is important because the absence of SACD from our current range should not be mistaken for a loss of interest in the format. Quite the contrary.
SACD still matters here!
It would certainly be easier to declare SACD a technology of the past. But that would ignore both our history and the people who have spent decades building collections around it.
For many EMM Labs owners, an SACD collection represents hundreds, sometimes thousands, of carefully chosen recordings. These aren't files waiting to be replaced by the next streaming service. They are physical libraries assembled over years of listening.
We understand that particularly well because EMM Labs helped build the technology used to create and reproduce many of those recordings in the first place. So we are still looking.
If a suitable path to a new SACD mechanism presents itself, we intend to pursue it. Not out of nostalgia, but because SACD remains an exceptional music format and because supporting physical media still matters to many of the people who own our equipment.
In the meantime, something else has been happening.
The Compact Disc wasn't finished after all!
For a while, CD seemed destined to follow cassette tape into history. Streaming was easier. Downloads required no shelf space. Huge CD collections were boxed up, sold or donated as listeners moved their libraries onto hard drives and, eventually, into the cloud.
Yet the CD never actually disappeared.
If anything, there seems to be a renewed appreciation for physical media and for the simple act of choosing a recording and playing it from beginning to end. Perhaps part of that is fatigue with having everything available all the time. There is something rather pleasant about standing in front of a shelf and deciding what to listen to. You take out a record, read the notes, put the disc in the player and listen.
No algorithm chooses what comes next. No subscription is required. No favourite recording disappears because a licensing agreement changed. You own it. For people who have been collecting music for thirty, forty or fifty years, those shelves are also something more than storage. They are a personal history of music discovered, record shops visited, recommendations taken, concerts attended and albums purchased simply because something about them looked interesting.
That was part of the thinking behind the TXi.
The TXi is unapologetically a Compact Disc transport. It exists because we still believe there is value in building an exceptional machine for a format that millions of listeners continue to own and enjoy.
Would we like SACD to be part of that story as well? Absolutely.
The obstacle isn't a lack of interest, or a belief that SACD's time has passed. It is the rather mundane reality that sometimes determines what can and cannot be built: somebody has to reliably manufacture the mechanism. And should the right SACD mechanism become available again, we won't need convincing.
After all, DSD has been part of EMM Labs from almost the beginning.
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