Why HDCD did not become a dominant format?

Mcpody I understand the majors couldn't agree; I just don't understand why, given the marked superiority of HDCD? Sure DVD-As and SACDs were on the way-but neither was as easily backwards compatible. In fact,it seems virtually all manufacturers could have made money selling new machines had they fully adopted HDCD.

Given the amount of compression applied to most recorded music by the studio mastering engineers - I am not sure HDCD was necessary even if it was better on paper...

There are more HDCD recordings available than SACD and DVD-A combined. It was widely used, but lost momentum when Pacific Micro was bought by Microsoft. Many, if not most, HDCD encoded recordings are not even marked as such.

In a word, proprietary. The recording studios had to lease or buy the encoder from Pacific Microsonics. Even worse, the builders of playback equipment had to use a Pacific Microsonics oversampling filter chip (PMD-100 later replaced by the PMD-200). This was not compatible with the design strategies of companies like Wadia, Theta, Krell, and others that specialized in custom digital filters implemented on DSP chips.

PM once talked of licensing the algorithms, but to my knowledge this didn't happen. Part of the argument against licensing was that the decoding processing involved a reconstruction filter that was a perfect conjugate to the filter used in the encoder. By implementing the process in a chip PM had complete control of the decoding implementation.

The purchase of PM by Microsoft just made things worse.

I read once that Wadia had a protoype digital processor designed to sit between the transport and DAC. It would decode HDCD and output 20 bit 44.1 khz PCM (this is what the PMD filer chips do) to the DAC. They couldn't market it or build it into a DAC due to licensing issues.

What is the answer to 99 questions out of 100? Money. From the movie "Vanilla Sky".