I got a used CD player that says "HDCD" (High Definition Compact Disc) on it. Is this the same thing as SACD? Does that mean it will play SACDs? If not, where can I find HDCDs?
― Abbadabba Berman (Hurting), Wednesday, 16 November 2005 17:20 (twenty years ago)
HDCD is obsolete, w/sacd and dvd-audio taking over. The most recent HDCD I've seen is Neil Young's "On the Beach," released 2003 but I believe planned a few years earlier and held back. Still it's satisfying to see the HDCD light go on on the player, a nice placebo effect if nothing else. (By the way you don't buy special hdcd discs--the discs play fine in regular players and supposedly give you a bit extra in hdcd-compatible players.
― These Robust Cookies (Robust Cookies), Wednesday, 16 November 2005 17:40 (twenty years ago)
Yep, developed by Pacific Microsonics in the mid-90s; encrypts 20-bit data into a 16-bit stream which can be unpacked by the right decoder. Fortunately, the HDCD decoder was generally bundled with a PM chipset that was considered pretty top-notch anyway so that HDCD players tended to be very good sounding with 'ordinary' discs.
As TRC says above, they weren't special discs that didn't play in anything else, they were fully compatible (a non-HDCD player just wouldn't exploit the extra dynamic range of the 20-bit data; I think there was something very clever going on with the encoding which meant that playback on a regular CD player wasn't subject to truncation distortion); nor were they released in tandem with a regular CD at a premium - the album was generally only available as an HDCD at standard price.
Plenty of HDCDs were released without advertising the fact in their artwork and occasionally the opposite happened (Joni Mitchell's late-90s reissues, Nick Drake remasters - claimed to be HDCD but weren't).
HDCDs were probably obsolete technologically as soon as the practice of recording at 24bit and dithering/noise-shaping for 16-bit CD release became commonplace; done properly, that gave you all the perceived gains of HDCD on a regular disc.
I've got maybe 15-20 HDCDs. Yes, it's nice when the little LED comes on.
― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Wednesday, 16 November 2005 19:01 (twenty years ago)