It was developed jointly by Sony and Philips Electronics and intended to be the successor to the compact disc (CD) format.

A hybrid SACD contains a Compact Disc Digital Audio (CDDA) layer and can also be played on a standard CD player.

Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) sold over 800,000 copies by June 2004 in its SACD Surround Sound edition.

[8] The Who's rock opera Tommy (1969), and Roxy Music's Avalon (1982), were released on SACD to take advantage of the format's multi-channel capability.

All three albums were remixed in 5.1 surround, and released as hybrid SACDs with a stereo mix on the standard CD layer.

[13] Commercial releases commonly include both surround sound (five full-range plus LFE multi-channel) and stereo (dual-channel) mixes on the SACD layer.

[citation needed] Some reissues retain the mixes of earlier multi-channel formats (examples include the 1973 quadraphonic mix of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and the 1957 three-channel stereo recording by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, reissued on SACD in 2001 and 2004 respectively).

[citation needed] To reduce the space and bandwidth requirements of DSD, a lossless data compression method called Direct Stream Transfer (DST) is used.

The content may be copyable without SACD quality by resorting to the analog hole, or ripping the conventional 700 MB layer on hybrid discs.

Copy protection schemes include physical pit modulation and 80-bit encryption of the audio data, with a key encoded on a special area of the disc that is only readable by a licensed SACD device.

[28][29] Nonetheless, very early versions of the PlayStation 3 with an SACD-compatible drive and appropriate firmware[30] and certain Blu-ray players[31][32] can use specialized software to extract a DSD copy of the HD stream.

[36] When the level of the signal was elevated by 14 dB or more, the test subjects were able to detect the higher noise floor of the CD-quality loop easily.

But we have gathered enough data, using sufficiently varied and capable systems and listeners, to state that the burden of proof has now shifted.

Further claims that careful 16/44.1 encoding audibly degrades high resolution signals must be supported by properly controlled double-blind tests.

Joshua Reiss performed a meta-analysis on 20 of the published tests that included sufficient experimental detail and data.

In a paper published in the July 2016 issue of the AES Journal,[40] Reiss says that, although the individual tests had mixed results, and that the effect was "small and difficult to detect," the overall result was that trained listeners could distinguish between high-resolution recordings and their CD equivalents under blind conditions: "Overall, there was a small but statistically significant ability to discriminate between standard-quality audio (44.1 or 48 kHz, 16 bit) and high-resolution audio (beyond standard quality).

[54] In order to play back SACD content digitally without any conversion, some players are able to offer an output carrying encrypted streams of DSD, either via IEEE 1394[55] or more commonly, HDMI.

[60] Unofficial playback of SACD disc images on a PC is possible through freeware audio player foobar2000 for Windows using an open source plug-in extension called SACDDecoder.