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

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

I have a few Chinese DVDs and the quality is generally quite good and they are inexpensive. The DVDs that come from China are from companies that have their DVDs made in China. Therefore the discs are simply the Chinese releases of the same title. In some cases the Chinese versions have better packaging and extras that the American counterparts do not have. And all are in english with chinese subtitles. But some turn out to be rejected discs that may have a missprinted label or may even lock up.
As far as the Chinese HDCD titles, I have a few but none are actually HDCD encoded. They just have it printed on the cover.

Most of the China sellers work as follows:

They set up an auction for a CD or DVD. You buy it. They go down the street and buy it at a store for $2 or less, and mail it to you, pocketing the rest as profit. Yeah, these $2 CDs and DVDs are usually high quality pirates, but still pirates. I spoke to a gentleman at length about where he got a particular DVD and that was pretty much his answer. So you usually _aren't_ dealing with the pirates, themselves. Just some student buying discs from a local store.

Though me never did bother to send my money back. Oh well.

I've also unintentionally bought some very high-quality pirates from the Russian Federation on eBay. I did notice the tonal balance on those CDs (about 12 for $36) were tipped up in the treble. Pitty as those CDs were out of print, but I was able to compare it against the one that I did have.

I've learned to avoid these auctions.

Velo62-yes the HDCD light comes on with these discs-read my intial post again.
If anybody wants to direct me to the information that Radiohead and Coldplay exist officially on HDCD I'll eat my words.

The bootleggers realise HDCD attracts audio fans hence the clever pirating of these discs.

I bought two Coldplay cds. They sound ok but I haven't compared them with US versions. I bought a US version for my sister, I'll have to check it out to see which is better.
I will say these two cds don't present the soundfield depth that cds such as Joni Mitchell's do. I have compared "Blue" and "Court and Spark" HDCD against nonencoded versions and believe there is much better sound with HDCD encoding. I believe they were also remastered so that could contribute significantly to improved sound.