A little news on "Wish You Were Here" SACD

don't they realize people who really really really want this album on SACD are dying of old age

Earlier this summer, Floyd had been in a little tiff with renewing their back catalog contract with the record company. EMI couldn't manufacture any more copies of WYWH, Animals, The Wall or TFC, and had withdrawn digital copies immediately.

If the tiff continues, then if EMI holds the rights then they pretty well have to hold onto it until something gets worked out. Or if Floyd holds the rights to the SACD, then Floyd might be waiting to see if they sign with another record company before they offer up the title.

It is possible Dave..err, David and Roger have an agreement to not release the SACD until Rog's Wall tour is over in a year or so.

Who knows, but whatever the reason this is really annoying.

shinksma

So who mixed WYWH that is being held hostage? Guthrie again? I'm one of the many fans who felt that Guthrie's DSOTM SACD was a letdown.

Why not just license it to an indy like Analogue Productions or Mo-Fi and get it out already?

Because the Pink Floyd brand is a money-making machine. I suspect the reason we haven't seen the WYWH SACD yet is internal politics between the surviving Floydians and EMI. The albums licensed out to those labels have limited commercial potential at this stage in the artists' careers.

Ain't that the truth!
I'm 60 already!

What a surprise- the members of Floyd are fighting about something.

I'm not sure whether the surviving band members are fighting over the SACD or that the band's label is having cold feet when it comes to releasing the SACD. From all indications, everything with the SACD has been done....from the artwork to the SACD and the actual remastering/mixing for the SACD. The only missing part is pressing those SACDs. If the sales of the SACD to "Dark Side of the Moon" is any indication, I'd think a SACD to "WYWH" should be nearly as successful.

Any PF sacd releases would be successful...

BD audio release will likely get better results. Many more people have BD players than SACD.

These guys have enough $, why not release it themselves?
Frustrating, especially since the disc is actually done.
There are some great BBC recordings that should be released officially too.

BTW I read on the BBC site, that Dave, Roger & Nick played a charity gig together back in July.

Floyd has always negotiated contracts with record companies for the distribution rights - I don't think they care to manage that themselves.

It was only David (don't call me Dave) and Roger at the charity gig - Nick wasn't involved.

btw, video (not great quality, shot by Polly Samson, David's wife) is available on David's website (www.davidgilmour.com).

shinksma

Agreed!

If there was any future in SACD all Sony Blu-Ray players would have SACD playback.

If there was a future in SACD all Blu-Ray players under direction of Sony would have SACD playback.

Blu-Ray is the future while SACD is on the same 'forgotten' shelf as Beta 1 speed.

I think there is more to the DSTM sacd release than people think. If I remember correctly (and it has been awhile) Sony had a special deal with PF (re: more $) to release that album on SACD and that format only. It was hoped that would spur the acceptance of the sacd format.

You are right about the money. Someone on the Stones news list, Undercover, is in the music business confirmed that Sony was significantly paying the cost of DSD remastering, authoring and manufacturing the cost of SACD. Sony approached ABKCO with a stack of discount and we got the 1965-1970 Decca/London catalog in wonderful two channels SACD. Rumor has it that 5.1 DSD mixes are still sitting on servers for Bryan Ferry, Roxy Music, Elton John and The Who. The problem is DSD mastering and SACD manufacturing discounts are no longer on the table. Additionally Sony has reduced their SACD manufacturing to a minimum.

The bottom line is unless the artist wants to spend their own coin or advance money on new remixes of vintage material, surround re-issues are going to be few and far between. If something does happen, like it has with Tom Petty, it will most likely be Blu-Ray audio.

Cheer, Michael

Remember that it was CAPITOL that released the DSOTM SACD, and Capitol was a DVD-Audio house. Sony stepped in with some serious cash, along with some persuasion on Gilmour and Waters, to get DSOTM released as a Capitol SACD, the ONLY Capitol SACD. Heck, Capitol even put a warning on the back of the jewel box that the disc might not play on all CD players! (How many other SACDs have such a warning).

Sony pulled out all of the stops to get DSOTM out on SACD instead of DVD-A, as they were in the middle of thier scortched Earth program to kill DVD-A, which included jumping on the Dual Disc bandwagon, but releasing crappy, non-HiRez Surround DualDiscs to cause confusion and disarry with the DVD-A camp, who were counting on DualDiscs to make the DVD-A "CD compatible" like the SACD.

Unfortunately, the Sony suits had an internal upheaval, and they ended up dropping pop/rock/commercial SACDs soon after that, leaving UMG holding the fort for the final year or so. In the meantime, the whole HiRez surround disc market tanked.

What a mess. If Sony would have continued pumping out great pop/rock SACD titles they would have had the HiRez surround market to themselves, just like they did with BluRay.

Alas, in the end, we all got F'd.

I remember that a couple Stones SACD's said that when they were released.

Everytime I go to Best Buy, Target, or WalFart these days, I never see DSOTM SACD, It's always the '92 remaster.

Every current Blu-ray player listed on the Sony site supports SACD playback.
(Your point regarding the format's waning support is, however, well-taken.)


Not unheard of for discs; certainly not uncommon for playback hardware. The disclaimer likely stems from concern over individual players' ability to properly locate the correct layer on a hybrid disc, rather than any corporate/commercial politics.

On the other hand, based on the number of new SACD releases added to sa-cd.net, it's almost certain that they will be more SACD released in 2010 than in 2009.

!

Perhaps there's a renewed interest with recent hardware support, from universal players like the oppo 93 on the horizon, and newer receivers on the market that support dsd decoding.

Renewed interest from buyers, not the major labels. The prices for titles on Amazon shot up right after the Oppo was released. Some titles I was interested in more than doubled in price.

There is absolutely zero incentive for labels to release new SACD. Now when we have BD that fully supports lossless audio, and players are so cheap and soon be in every home, what would be a reason to produce SACD? Most studios which were making high-res and multichannel audio records are now dedicating their resources to BD releases. For me SACD format is dead along with DVD-A.

agree

Actually (unfortunately) this also applies to BD profile 3 (audio) too. It's COMPLETE consumer apathy (and misunderstanding as to "where is the video on my BD?") to quality music only discs. The percentage of people who will buy BD profile 3's is so minuscule (and getting smaller every day) that it will never be (large scale) endorsed by mainstream record labels. The cloud has all but won (especially with audio) and will contenue to overtake disk based media. People look at music as just a background convince and/or for iPod use.

PLEASE prove me wrong record companies.

I wasn't talking about incentive from the record labels. The only SACD action is from smaller classical and jazz labels, as well as some recent SACD-SHD reissues in Japan. SACD from the labels is dead and buried. When the Oppo came out, the prices for SACD's and DVA-A's shot up markedly on Amazon and other used disc outlets. At least double in price in most cases. And the prices have remained high. Whatever the labels think, there is a definite demand for the product.

As William has said, the demand for BD-3 is also on life support. Hi-rez downloads is where the action will be. Whether the major labels screw that up also remains to be seen. MY money says yes.

Profile 3 refers to a player, not a disc.

Blu-ray for audio isn't on life support, as it hasn't even begun yet. We've seen a handful of artist-pushed titles (Trent Reznor, Tom Petty, Neil Young) but the major labels have not yet made a push for it yet. If they do and they're done right (like Damn The Torpedoes, taking advantage of EVERYTHING Blu-ray brings to the table and not just the audio properties) then Blu-ray stands the greatest chance of being a sustainable media that all manner of consumers can enjoy. That means including downloads, using video functionalities as well as allowing the disc to play when inserted, BD-Live to prevent double dipping (see Archives Vol 1), surround program where source elements allow, interview/archival footage, etc., etc.

If they do it right, it will be successful. Currently I think they're still burned from the SACD/DVD-A debacle that they're not seeing the differences between then and now.

Major Label: "What? no double dipping? this won't do!"

They burned themselves.