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Is HDCD dead?

I'm looking at players on this site and hardly none of them seem to encode "HDCD".Is this used in some of the newer players yet?In the past the cd's that had the HDCD label on them all sounded better than regular redbook cd's.Why are'nt more players using this technology.Does anyone have a list of players that use HDCD encoding?
spaz

Showing 4 responses by eldartford

eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Psacanli...Microsoft wanted the technology to apply to video, or, perhaps, to prevent someone else from doing it.
You forget that SACD and DVDA are about multichannel. HDCD can't do that.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Spaz...It's the mix. An extra 4 bits of resolution would (perhaps) have other benefits. HDCD is/was a very clever idea to live with the 16 bit CD. The extra 8 bits of DVDA or SACD are even better, and come with higher sampling rate, and that's why HDCD is dead. (Except that the technology may live on for video, which is why Microsoft bought it).
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
Psacanli...The encoding technology of HDCD could indeed be applied to multichannel recordings, DVDA and SACD. But these are already significantly higher resolution than a CD, so why bother? A HDCD (CD) cannot be multichannel.
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
On second thought it isn't applicable to SACD because they are not PCM code.
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