How's the quality of the HDCD's from China/Ebay

I bought a Radiohead HDCD from China several months ago. The quality of the packaging and artwork was very good, with the exception that some of the song titles were amusingly misspelled.
The disc itself sounds very good, although I suspect that some kind of maximizer has been used to boost the overall level of the disc. Also, tracks that should run seamlessly together have been written with 1 second gaps. In other words, what you are buying is definitely a bootleg - a very impressive bootleg - but nevertheless a bootleg!

See if this helps. A co-worker, who came back from a trip to China, had a DVD release of a new movie that was not officially on DVD yet. The case and cover art was as professional as any you see in the stores today. We loaded the DVD on a laptop at the office I noticed that it had a black band on all sides of the movie as if the format ratio on the laptop was not set properly to view it on the entire screen. We did not pay any attention to it until we saw something scroll across the bottom of the screen. After reversing it to view it again we realized that it was the top part of someones head walking in front of the movie screen that someone was capturing on their video camera. :)

I have friends over there and know that a great deal of items are extremely cheap. I also know there is a lot of bootlegging going on. All one can say is let the buyer beware.

I believe most of these discs are pirates.

They are not official releases therefore I would suggest it is very probable that it is possible to put code on the discs that enable HDCD decoders and as Spiritualized says the volume is boosted but crucially the discs aren't actually HDCD at all.

Surely a waste of time.

Well wouldnt the HDCD display light let you know if you had a pirated CD?