The wrong Epinions about SACD

I'm sure many people who read my blog could care less about SACD and other audiophile formats or topics, but it's a big part of my life! :-) So here we go:

Came across this Epinions.com article back from 2002 about the downfalls to the consumer of SACD. Most makes sense, yes, from the angle of the author. But, the author is simply coming from the wrong angle.

Don't Believe the SACD Hype
http://www99.epinions.com/content_2514985092

----
Believe the SACD Hype!
SACD is an audiophile format. It's not designed for the consumer level. Lets say you, like myself, are an avid audiophile. You have collected have all this great equipment for home theater and music. You have a decent CD player, music sounds beautiful and clean. But due to the scale of your equipment, you begin to notice the imperfections of CDs. Such as the lack of warmth in your music, and the harsh highs and lacking bass. You wish you could drive your system to the max. Enter SACD. SACD brings back the warmth and frequency spectrum lost in CD compression. Think of it as vinyl records in disk form. Vinyl, if played on a decent turntable, blows away CD.

SACD was developed by accident, really. Sony developed DSD (Direct Stream Digital), the technology behind SACD, to losslessly preserve master tapes.

Why is it so expensive? Easy: it's become a niche market. DVD's were expensive before the public jumped on them. So were CD's. Unfortunately, the public isn't jumping on to SACD. Why? Consumers favor connivance over quality. You can't put an SACD on an iPod. You can't download SACDs for free.

The author made one other point that doesn't make sense. The fact that SACD players don't have digital outputs. There's a very good reason why, and it's not because of copy protection, though it happens to help. A digital output would mean an extra DAC step on the SACD player and on the receiver. This means on-the-fly compression and decompression. Defeats the purpose of SACD. And cables aren't $250 for a full set. I got my full set of Monster Cables for about 25 bucks.