[linux-audio-dev] HDCD

[Lee Revell]

On Tue, 2005-03-15 at 23:32 +0000, Steve Harris wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2005 at 04:57:40 -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> > All this (depressing) talk of the various encumbered formats competing
> > to be the next CD standard reminded me of HDCD.
> > 
> > What's the deal with it?  AFAICT it's another closed thing that we'll
> > never be able to support properly.  The only media player that detects
> > my HDCDs is WMP of course.
> 
> Yep, microsoft bought the rights to HDCD, so its unlikly that we'l see
> support on Linux ;)
> 
> I borrowed a HDCD from someone, and I have a DAC that can do HDCD
> conversion, but to be honest I couldn't tell the difference with it on or
> off. I tried playing back the CD data with the waveform inverted so the
> HDCD converter didn't spot the embedded data.
> 
> The HDCD signalling is in the bottom bit of the PCM data, if you extract
> the bottom bit form the CD and rplace it on another track it will make the
> lights come on and whatever. Kinda pointless though.

Well, if anyone really cares there are a few CDs where I actually have
the pre-mastered digital recordings and the HDCD releases so I can do an
A/B comparison.  These are Dead bootlegs (which I used to collect quite
heavily, big surprise) which I had acquired copies of and were later
released by the band.  In many cases these seem to be derived from the
same A->D transfer.

Anyway, some of these I had listened to for years, and the HDCDs do seem
to sound better.  It's impossible to really tell, because there's so
much else that could be done during the mastering process.

Lee