What is HDCD? (1 Viewer)

[ChuckM]

My dvd player says it can play HDCD's but what are they.
TIA

 

[Rick_Brown]

"High Definition Compact Digital". Go to HDCD.com for info. Many regular CD's are encoded with HDCD. To decode them you need to listen via your analog outputs rather than the digital connects.

 

[ChrisWiggles]

In this particular case yes, because the player has the HDCD decoding. HDCD is handled soley by the DAC I beleive, so if you have a non-HDCD compatible player, you can use an HDCD-compatible DAC in your receiver for instance. Just to clarify.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Chuck, a good example of an HDCD disc is the Dire Strait's greatest hits package 'Money for Nothing'. If you compare the tracks on this with those on the other remastered Dire Straits CDs (*not* in HDCD, for some reason) you can do a comparison. There are also HDCD sampler discs on the market that will do HDCD-'ordinary' CD comparisons on the same piece of music (can anyone help out here?).

 

[Adam Barratt]

High Definition Compatible Digital on CD uses a proprietary processing (encode/decode) system to squeeze 20-bit resolution audio from a 16-bit format. It's fully backwards-compatible and CDs that use this process can also play on any conventional CD player (albeit at only 16-bit resolution).

There are over 5000 HDCD recordings available. There's a good chance some of the discs in your CD collection already include this feature.

Adam

 

[ChuckM]

Thanks guys