Anyone still excited about HDCD ?

The 96/24 and 192/24 DACs in the CD and DVD players coming out now are rendering HDCD irrelevant. They make fidelity accessible without needing a "decoding" chip.
I've heard HDCD discs (I have several) played on a 192/24 player that I brought home for evaluation, and they sounded better than they did on my player that had the HDCD decoding chip. I sold the HDCD player.
HDCD was also being used as a marketing tool by some music companies that, unfortunately, issued badly-recorded music. HDCD cannot help a recording that was engineered by morons.

I hope that HDCD doesn't die. I have a handful of HDCD discs that I enjoy on a regular basis, and I plan on purchasing more to be certain. Time will tell...

So far I have not found a redbook/SACD player the used the Pacific Microsonics Chip, therefore not supporting HDCD, I am thinking that the manufactures have written off any chance of new releases with HDCD. So the HDCD will die and the excisting titles will eventually be unplayable as the new generation of CD/SACD players emerge. A terrible shame, because I too have some favorite discs in HDCD.

Yes still crazy bout HDCD after all these years! Not going to dump on SACD either (too much), yet I find myself selling of 60% of the sacd titles I've purchased. Sold off my SCD-1, using my first sony SCD-333ES for sacd now. Yet still have an ol'e Denon DVD-5000 in my stable that I'm very fond of for HDCD decoding, along w/ a Toshiba SD-9200 in another system. Sacd has somewhat bored me, some recently released Hong Kong BMG SACD RCA Living Stereo releases are the best I have heard to date. Aren't we hitting the 4-5 year mark on this software format? So I'll still be quite happy w/ my HDCD's & JVC XRCD's if SACD should one day follow the path of DVD-(wHAT? wHO? )Audio. Enough time & monies spent on SACD, saving my cents waiting for the new Crystal chip to hit the market for "True" 24/192 upsampling.

If your into Classical? Pick up Lara St.John's 2 cd's on the "Well Tempered" Label. Gypsy, & Bach Works for Violin, both 24bit HDCD (Pre-Mr. Micro/Soft GATES) Compare them to any Violin soloist SACD recording on the market, & you too will still be excited about HDCD.

Golden Ears is exactly right.

If you have a high-quality DAC, HDCD is irrelevant. It is very "tinny"- sounding when compared to good 96 or 192 upsampling. It does however, improve the sound significantly on good lower-level units like Rotel, for example.