HDCD rescue - it's possible, but man...


I spent the better part of today sick, but working on finding a way to decode music I might have that is HDCD encoded.

As a refresher, HDCD was an enhanced CD format. In some ways the predecessor to MQA. HDCD was an engineer's toolbox, allowing the mastering engineer to select a number of features. This would then be decoded by a matching chip on a CD player or DAC. The most famous feature of HDCD was bit-compression. Getting a 24 bit signal encoded in a 16 bit music file.

As an aside, the Pacifics Microsonics AD converters were highly prized by engineers for their sound quality. Anyway, the format got bought by Microsoft and died.

Of the 670 CD's I have ripped only about 11 were HDCD encoded. But man, what a pain. I ripped everything to FLAC, but the HDCD decoder only does WAV. I had to download source, compile it, then write a script to go through every CD and decide if it's HDCD or not. Once found, I have to convert from FLAC (44/16) to WAV, decode the WAV file (now 24 bits) and convert back to FLAC to compress again.

The discovery process was pretty fast.  About 10 minutes to go through them all by cheating. :) More time was spent figuring out how to pass apostrophe's in file names than finding the files.  Nathalie Merchant was one author who consistently used HDCD by the way.
erik_squires
Hey @jafant

Start a new thread in the digital section. :)

The quick answer is, you use a laptop or PC as a music server, and use USB or S/PDIF output to your DAC. This is most convenient.

Of course, you can also burn a CD-R but I don't ever do that so I can't help you

Best,

Erik
There are many cd's that aren't labeled HDCD that are HDCD also, google HDCD list and you'll find some large list available.

Cheers George 
djohnson54 - Hat tip to you, man! I had no idea that dBPoweramp could do that! Looks like I will be re-ripping my HDCDs. I don’t have that many of them, so not a big deal for me.
@bondmanp You're welcome.  It took me a while to discover it too so I have several that also need to be re-ripped.  Actually, I'm surprised at how many I actually have.  Use George's suggestion above to Google a list and compare to your library!