Does a CD Transport need to be HDCD ALSO?

It's all done with the DAC by employing a special decoder chip/filter. Pacific Microsonics makes one if not all of them. When HDCD's first came out the contract for HDCD playback required the DAC/CD player designer to attenuate the gain on normal CD's. It may still. This guarantees that HDCD's played on HDCD enabled units will always sound louder than normal ones. It's quite a gimmick.

My Theta Data Basic II transport sometimes has trouble initializing HDCD's on the first try, but always gets it on the second. If there's such a thing as a HDCD transport I've never run across one.

the transport just reads the bits, whether hdcd or not, and sends them off to the internal or external dac. if an hdcd code is present on the disc and the dac/filter is capable of recognizing the embedded hdcd code in the bit-stream, then the dac/filter will apply the appropriate noise-shaping.

there is more than one level of hdcd encodeing that the hdcd standard allows. there is a demo disc with the same music encoded with different levels of hdcd encoding.

in other words, all transports will read hdcd discs and send the bits containing the hdcd information, but only certain dac/filters can recognize the embedded signal.

i hope this helps

All of the "bit decoding" is done by the DAC. I use the ML 37 transport and 360S DAC, and the HDCD reading is done by the DAC alone. I've also used Sony and Pioneer CD players as transports for the 360S and it had no problem reading the HDCD info. Good Luck. Craig

This has caused some confusion, especially since some of the early Cal Audio Labs Delta Transports specifically stated HD-CD Transport right on the front of it. CAL meant that it was a "high definition" i.e. "high resolution" CD transport and not that it could specifically decode HDCD discs. When Pacific Microsonics came out with HDCD encoding, CAL was forced to remove this from their faceplates. That is how you can tell the age on some CAL Delta's.

If i remember correctly, i think that Microsoft bought the rights to the HDCD format. Does anybody know what they are doing or plan to do with this ? Sean
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One nice feature of the Levinson No.36 Dac is that you can defeat the attenuation of non-HDCD discs.
Great sounding DAC!!!