Cassettes. 8-track. Compressed digital masters. Dolby for those cassette decks. Dolby Digital. Not Sony but the audio road is littered with stuff that does not sound better but is somehow more convenient.
Audio is very very very very often NOT about better sound at all but about $$$$$. Oh, MiniDisc! That's from Sony! And sounds as good as CD! So how does SACD sound any better than CDs "perfect sound forever"?!?

Yes it would have been easy. Sony was looking for something else, an easy archival format. So since they were using 1-bit A/D converters, they decided to just archive the one bit, literally. From that point of view in one way you cannot have better sound than the CD since the CD came from that 1-bit A/D in the first place. Then again, there is some conversion which is skipped, which is a good thing.
- Technically, I saw a demo at a surround sound conference where a tiny waveform was faithfully reproduced by high rate PCM, and DSD recreated this wavering kind of thing.
- Telarc's guy said they had compared live microphone feeds from live musicians into monitors, then through a high rate PCM chain, then a DSD chain. They felt the DSD was a bit closer hence they decided to support SACD.
- I asked famed recording engineer John Eargle once what he thought. He said he felt high res PCM captured the sound from the microphones...I don't recall him using the word "perfectly" but maybe "faithfully" or something. Having something that transparent he didn't seem to have felt a need to mess with DSD, which has mixing problems.
- Those are the only two sets of folks I have ever heard of comparing actual DSD versus PCM chains. All other opinions are pretty worthless, since due to unknown chain/provenance you cannot compare say and SACD to a DVD-Audio of the same title. You cannot even compare an SACD's DSD layer to the CD layer since they may not be mixed the same, witness the idiocy of
Dark Side Of The Moon's CD layer actually clipping (and not the DSD layer). If SACDs sound better it most likely because more care is taken with the whole process compared to the previous CD.