I am now starting to get worried about Sony and Phillip's new audio format SACD. They seem at this point in time impossible to copy. There are no drives for pc capable of reading them. They have a very hefty copy protection scheme that makes css look like a walk in the park(which it was). An overview of the SACD.
Very very high quality 2/6 channel sound at a 2ghz sample rate, according to SOny it captures the "space" around the sound as well. also the bits are set out very differently to pcm format. It uses DVD vased media. the lead in part of the disk is scrambled so raw extraction is difficult. The content is scrambled using 80bit encryption making it impractical to crack every time you want to listen to a song. The disk key is imprinted on the disk in a special way(something to do with the shape of how it is written), at this present time it is impoosible to read or extract this key. There is no software licenced to play SACD and hardware licences are strictly controlled. All of the encryption/decryption happens within the propreitary SACD chipset and no keys are transported any hardware busses(making logic analysers useless). Also there is no plaintext on the disk that made css so easy to crack. I am not looking forward to when this format becomes widespread becuase it seems to be impossible to crack, at least until quantum computers come out. If anyone has any other information please post.

This is the point... furthermore, as far as I know Standalone SACD Players does not offer digital audio output (at least my Sony doesn't...). So of course digital copy is impossible now.

However, it is not clear if SACD will become the definitive audio standard or not... also the DVD-Audio format is rapidly growing in popularity.

Regards,

ET

I think that's the goal of the company isnt it? To creat a nearly copy-proof disc?