Apologies for exposing my own ignorance but...
What is HDCD and how does one take advantage of it!
It's technology designed to provide a High Definition (HD) presentation of tracks - As per the Great Man himself (Mark L) from the 2001 twofer liners - "The disc has been mastered using the Pacific Microsonics HDCD which encodes 24 bits onto a conventional 16 bit CD."
HDCD cooked up by Pacific Microsonics, who are no longer in biz. The technology is now owned by Microsoft and codecs are included in Windows Media Player.
The deal is, additional signalling info is encoded onto the CD, giving you a High Def experience, as opposed to the Standard 16 bit (which is what you hear when you play it in a normal CD player).
HDCD definition is not as high as SACD, because a CD is limited to sampling rates of 44,1khz and frequency range of 20hz - 20khz; SACDs are based on DVD tech and can handle samples up to 2.8ghz + a slightly broader frequency range. Except for Pet Sounds, I don't know of any other BB SACD releases.
Debate rages but, IMHO, I think the HDCD tracks sound great versus standard CD.
To take advantage of it, here are 3 methods:
1) buy a HDCD compatible CD player - Oppo and a couple of other companies still crank 'em out. That's the most convenient method if cash is not an issue.
2) If you are a windows user, and you have a 24-bit sound card in your machine you can playback via Windows Media Player. As long as your speakers are good, you should hear the difference.
3) If you are a windows user, and you have a 24-bit sound card in your machine, and you download Foobar2000 and the HDCD plug-in, then you can rip the CD to 20-bit PCMs (ie a wav file). That's what I do, and I think it's worth the frickin' around. The resulting improved clarity of sound and image are worth it. (If you happen to have digital copies of HDCD tracks, you can run 'em through Foobar - the encoding is in the file, you don't need the source CD)
I've recently done some A/B/Cing of Surfin' USA - standard CD version, Steve Hoffman remastered Gold CD, HDCD rip from the recent reissue (all Stereo mixes) - and the HDCD version blows the Hoffman mastering out of the water.
Some would have it that HDCD is a dead format, but, hear ye, I think it's great that Mark continues to use a format that doesn't require any major equipment investment to get a good result.
Or forget about all that sh*t, and buy a record player for a true HD experience.
BTW, that's all my own layman's opinion and research (by research I mean noddling around on wikipedia and goggle). Back to MIC spoilers....
Great, informative post, Alan! Thanks for that! Only a few years ago SACD's were suppose to be the next big thing and the successor to CD's with a larger data capacity, then it was determined that they weren't much better than CD's as far as audio quality. They were popular for a brief period, especially with audiophiles, but never really caught on with the general public.
Since Microsoft owns the rights to HDCD, the primary usefullness for it now is if you have a PC running Windows then it's built into Microsoft Windows Player (Ver. 9 and above.)
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