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

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.

They seem fine to me however I am always hungry about an hour after playing them.

A lot of the sellers of these discs have been rumbled and have disappeared with the discs that say hdcd but no light comes on. Quality is good on genuine discs. Quality on others(bootlegs)is surprisingly good at first but ultimately tiring.