HDCD CD's

Herve1 -

Have you looked at Reference Recordings' catalogue? While it is not as extensive as the big labels, every offering is a sonic gem. (They were engineered by Keith Johnson of Spectral fame, and most of the releases are in HDCD.) There isn't a heck of a lot of pop music, although there is some good jazz, big band, and a fair amount of classical; there's also some other stuff that doesn't lend itself to easy classification. A number of RR's discography have made the audiophile lists of great recordings. The greater the resolving power of your system, the more you're likely to enjoy these discs.

You can deal directly with them. Their service is very good.
And their prices are quite reasonable, unlike a lot of the commercial CDs that are overpriced.

Check it out at www.referencerecordings.com

Jeff, my understanding is there are less than 200 releases to date on XRCD and XRCD2. The XRCD Web site probably has them all. BTW, my digging around uncovered that JVC relaunched the technology with XRCD 24 in November of 2002. XRCD 24 "directly inputs 24-bit information onto 16-bit PCM masters" and "JVC is confident that XRCD 24™ can be compared to any of the best digital formats nowadays". Sounds promising. Now if someone will just use it...

Tommy, I feel your pain and agree that JVC would be more successful licensing the XRCD technology if the enduser prices were more competitive with standard Redbook issues. But then, the prices for XRCD disks are currently similar to what the SACD releases fetched initially. If the latest version of XRCD is comparable to SACD (per their press release) AND requires no additional hardware might be a world beater. It'll be interesting to see how everything pans out.

xrcd releases are mostly or all reissue. so jvc uses superior electronics for their reproduction, so big deal. a dollar or tow more would be one thing but i will NOT pay $26 new or $16 used for them!
hdcd is used on many more discs than supposed. of all the useless places for it was Neil young's mirrorball. you have to look for the hdcd logo SOMEWHERE on the label of the cd or watch for the hdcd light to come on your cdp. notice that hdcd isnt extra price, and neither are a lot of the sacd releases. heres a whole new technology, the one we deserved in the first place instead of redbook.
xrcd will rot on the shelves if they wait for me to buy. sacd otoh was worth the hardware money i spent to get that capability.
hifitommy@aol.com

I agree, not the most common, even though there are about 6,000 "known" titles mentioned. There are also CD's that do not have the "HDCD" logo but are. I love stumbling upon them. Finally, if Microsoft is smart (and they are), they should take the SACD/DVD battle as an opporunity and move in with more HDCD new releases.

Matty

I looked at the XRCD website, very limited offering. I did a search under Dire Straits on the XRCD site (I have the Brothers In Arms XRCD) and it came up with nothing. Obviously JVC's site is less than complete, they don't even list titles that I own. Where can I find a truly complete list of XRCD's?

Check out http://www.hdcd.com for a list of the available titles on HDCD.

Another excellent format is XRCD which takes no special equipment for playback since it is accomplished via a mastering and optimization process. Their catalog is available at http://www.xrcd.com.

Who needs SACD anyway (as I duck my head to weather the expected storm...)?

I'm not sure why there aren't so many around, but I'm quite happy with the ones I have.

Hervel, actually they are pretty popular, I belive that there are about 6000 titles with HDCD. Some of them don't have the logo.