Whatever happened to HDCD?

Interestingly the Dick's Picks series from the Dead are all HDCD. My player is not though, so I can't say if the HDCD sounds better or not...

It's difficult to ask "What Happened to HDCD" when it really never happened at all for much the same reason that SACD isn't happening. Good ol' Doc Johnson and friend came up with the idea, but wanted too much money for the encoding chip for the recording side and too much money for the decoding chip on the cd player side. They killed it themselves so they found the perfect suckers to buy it for too much money - Microsoft who didn't know the audio biz nearly as well as they did computers and there it lies pretty much dead and buried. If the recording industry made cd's in the same way that Audioquest did and didn't ask for half your paycheck as JVC XRCD does, we wouldn't be asking questions like "where is HDCD" or "does SACD or DVD really sound better than redbook."

Let's face it....Surround sound is where all the "Sheep"(myself included) are being led......

The folks that make speakers must love surround sound. Now they'll sell you 3 pairs instead of one.

An aquaintance of mine was over on Saturday and I mentioned HDCD and the Joni Mitchell reissues on HDCD. He said that there is very little difference, other than the HD discs play louder. With volume matching, damn if he wasn't right. Joni's "Hejira," when volumed matched sounds pretty much the same on redbook and HD.