Pioneer is giving American consumers the shaft in my opinion.

[Big C]

It is true that you can get DVD-A/SACD players under the Pioneer Elite brand internationally. However, has anyone noticed that the Pioneer DV-588A was the last of the DVD-A/SACD players sold in America under the standard Pioneer brand, yet its predecessors (the DV-696 and the DV-600) continue to sell in other parts of the world such as Europe? The real shame of this is that with the new HDMI version 1.2A, if Pioneer sold a US version of the DV-600, it might be even less expensive than the new Oppo DV-980H. With firmware available from pioneerfaq.info, it can be made multi-region. What's more, if anything happened to it after its warranty expired, paying another $120-$150 to replace it would be no problem!

[jman98]

I think Pioneer is simply recognizing the reality of the American marketplace. I like both DVD-Audio and SACD. Unfortunately the major music labels botched both formats when they introduced them. SACD and DVD-Audio survive here for things like classical music and jazz. SACD seems to still have some life in Europe for pop music. The American consumer voted with his wallet that he just wasn't interested in either format, so Pioneer is just reflecting the reality of the marketplace. SACD in particular could really have taken off had Sony not (again) botched it so badly. Sony claimed at first that it was "impossible" to make hybrid SACDs that would play in both regular CD players and SACD players yet smaller classical labels like Telarc were regularly producing such discs at the time. Sony's stubborn refusal to produce hybrid discs when it might have helped sell the format helped to doom it in the eyes of most consumers as being a too expensive audiophile only format. DVD-Audio died because it's not compatible with CD audio and most consumers are too stupid and lazy to know how to rip the Dolby AC3 tracks and convert them to CD audio if they want to listen to the music on their CD players.

Other than Oppo, the only company I know of that has combo SACD/DVD-Audio players for sale in the USA is Denon and their players are expensive.

[hech54]

Minidisc
Enough said. I personally loved the convenience of
Minidisc but it never really caught on in America. Oh it
caught on bigger/better than SACD but still.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minidisc

MiniDiscs are popular in Japan as a digital upgrade to cassette tapes, but have not been as popular world-wide.

[Marvingj]

You only build where the money is...Thats a Corporation Logo...

[Big C]

But now with HDMI 1.2A, do you really need the multi-channel analog outputs? Wouldn't it be less expensive to make a multi-format, purely digital transport that can be connected to a receiver for processing? Maybe it would help promote DVD-A and SACD if the equipment was less expensive.