HDCD compatible?

High Definition Compact Disc was (is) a way to squeeze a little more information onto the digital coding on a CD. It involves slightly modifying the standard CD encoding and does not require extra layers like hybrid SACDs. The CD can be played normally through a non-HDCD player or played in HDCD if the player has the decoder to extract this extra detail. The player you are looking at will probably play HDCD discs in HDCD automatically. See if there's a switch to enable/disable. Microsoft bought the rights to HDCD six or seven years ago. Not many albums were released using HDCD; it was obsoleted in the SACD/DVD-Audio war.

I might add that you can set your windows media player to play HDCD discs as well.

Chuck

Actually there were quite a number of HDCD encoded CD's released, some of which didn't stamp the HDCD logo on the jackets. I'd guess there are many times more HDCD's available than SACD and DVD-Audio discs combined.

HDCD recordings do not involve an additional layer, otherwise standard Redbook transports couldn't play them (which they can.) If a DAC, however, doesn't have the HDCD decoding chip, it just throws the extra HDCD information away and decodes it as if it was standard Redbook.

Wadia DACS, on the other hand, because of their unique algorithm software, DO look at the extra HDCD information (because thay can look at ALL the information) and so they incorporate it into the analog output signal -- and I might add, quite stunningly! (Ya jus' don' get da little logo ;--)
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