HDCD: What do you like?

Don't be so heartbroaken about HDCD. HDCD, SACD, XRCD are the limited production sources and certainly in minority of most audiofiles. Let's say in average on every 100 CDs of the average collection only 10 HDCDs. There is a large gap in possibilities of sound reproduction but there is a small gap between actual quality of performance between HDCD and red-book CD.

I know that Dire Straits are being re-mastered and re-issued with much better resolution and they're all HDCDs.
Mark Knophler also produces new albums on HDCD which have a fantastic performance(still far from vinyl). Most of cheap HDCD compatible players reproduce red-book CDs with worse quality than a regular player so you should realy do a thorogh research to get yourself in audio-equilibrium when you can enjoy both HDCDs and regular CDs. I believe that Cary 303 players can satisfy you in that case because they have switchable upsampler in case you won't need it.

I agree with the Cary CD 303 recommendation. Owned one and it convinced me that HDCDs, despite some opinions to the contrary, are generally superior in sound quality. I highly, highly recommend the Rachmaninoff "Symphonic Dances" by Minnesota/Oue issued by Reference Recordings. Fantastic piece, fantastic performance, fantastic recording. My wife really likes the Dixie Chicks, and their first album was HDCD encoded (don't know about the rest), although not as noticeable a difference as with the Reference Recordings catalogue.

Hope that helps!

Dave Brubeck "Time Out"

Reference Recordings has a sampler or two with identical tracks in redbook and HDCD. This (these?) will let you compare. Don

Although we don't know your musical preferences, Stevie Nicks' Enchanted HDCD boxed set is one that I particularly enjoy time & again. It's not even identified as HDCD anywhere (on the box or discs) so this was a pleasant surprise indeed.
And I have *never* heard of a Pacific Microsonics DAC implementation that offered degraded 16bit redbook performance, in fact quite the contrary. Furthermore, everything that I've heard available in 20 bit is significantly superior.