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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

128x128malacka
Post removed 
engineears
39 posts
 
erik_squires! You said earlier:

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 would absolutely love to hear more in-depth detail about this process. In particular, how are you decoding the HDCD material into a higher bit depth? Is this done in software?!? or are you feeding a DAC a 16-bit HDCD stream, it’s decoding it to an analog out, and then you’re feeding that into a 24-bit ADC back into your computer?

I have many losslessly encoded digital files from HDCD encoded CDs and would love to convert them as you have.
mahler123
3,328 posts
 
Perhaps you already have the Paul O’Dette Kapsberger disc.  If not, highly recommended!
ieales's avatar
ieales
1,201 posts
 
Some HDCD sound fine on regular players, some don't. Like anything, the devil is in the details.

@erik_squires - Did you actually DECODE the HDCD or just take the 16 bits to 24?

Interesting article on HDCD and Pacific Microsonics
https://www.stereophile.com/content/hdcd-keith-johnson-pflash-pflaumer-michael-ritter
erik_squires
16,061 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
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