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Trouble with 20-bit HDCD

Greetings,

I purchased a CD that turned out, on delivery, to be a 20-bit HDCD published in 2002 (although the disk itself brand new). The music on it is very rarely recorded (Girolamo Kapsberger’s “Jesuit Opera”) and only available in this format.
My Project transport (Box RS) doesn’t recognize the disk, however. I presume that there is no solution to this problem (apart from buying a different transport) but I’m still interested in what kind of compatibility issue may cause the problem.

Thank you,

Csaba

malacka

Showing 2 responses by erik_squires

erik_squires
16,675 posts
 
Did you actually DECODE the HDCD or just take the 16 bits to 24?

I wrote a Perl script to scan all my FLAC files for evidence of HDCD encoding, and those that appeared to be encoded I decoded using open source tools. All this was on a Linux/Ubuntu box. I believe I used ffmpeg to actually locate and convert.

It is important to note that due to the widespread use of the Pacific Microsonics ADC, and the engineers not caring about settings, a lot of CD’s may be digitally watermarked as HDCD, without any of the HDCD features, such as 20 bit dynamic range expansion, being used.


Best,
E
erik_squires
16,675 posts
 
No compatibility issues.
For convenience, I have ripped all my CD's and then wrote some scripts to scan for HDCD and decode them. Now all my HDCD's are stored as 24 bit FLAC.

I imagine there is some conversion tool out there for whatever PC / OS X you are using as well.

Best,
E
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