there are actually many HDCD discs that do not state they are HDCD, but it's a great format if you have a HDCD player...
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I normally don't listen much to CDs any more--prefer either vinyl or streaming with Roon + Tidal. However, several years ago my wife bought me the Neil Young Archives Vol 1--pamphlet of which says recorded in HDCD at 24/192--which immediately confused me because i thought HDCD was only 20 bit depth--but that's not relevant so much. Anyway, i have an old CD player/recorder--Pioneer PDR-609--when i do play discs. I have two DACs--an Aesthetix Pandora and a Mytek Brooklyn--i use the latter mostly for vinyl, MQA and headphones and the former for everything else digital and it plays 24/192. Sooo- I thought that if i use the Pioneer to play the Neil Young discs it would send the 24/192 to its coaxial digital output (it also has a Toslink output) and i could then send that to the Pandora DAC and it would play 24/192 the way Neil intended. Sadly, no--the Pandora display only shows 16/44.1--which is actually still pretty good but...so what am i missing here ? Do i need a DAC that has an HDCD-specific chip to decode that information? Is the Pioneer not actually sending 24/192 to its digital outputs ? Should i try to send the Pioneer coax to the Mytek ? (Big Hassle but do-able)--I just want to hear if there's a difference between 16/44.1 (as Neil firmly believes) vs. 24/192. Appreciate any help--if it turns out that i have to purchase a new CD player i will not do that just to listen to these CDs--they are the only HDCDs that i have. Ditto for DAC. Thanks
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I think you may be confused. This music was released in at least 3 different formats. CD’s do 44.1kHz at 16 bits. HDCD hides an extra 4 bits. The stream is still 44.1/16. However! The DVD set is 96kHz/24 and yes, you can feed your average DAC this: https://amzn.to/2G8p7Mv And the multi-format version does BluRay which has a stereo signal (192/24) you can feed a DAC, as well as a DTS 5.1 track, but you can’t get either of these signals from a CD player. https://amzn.to/2RDH7Uf Best, E |