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Have you ever accidentally stumbled across an HDCD encoded CD that wasn't labeled? I have, and they were both albums I totally didn't expect, because they're alternative rock albums, and popular. They're: The Used: In Love and Death and Story of the Year: Page Avenue. Both sound good, but in my opinion Page Avenue is way too synthesized, the singer's voice is digitally altered constantly, you even here them joking and playing around with the effects at the end of the album.
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Post by soundboy January 25, 2005 (2 of 10)
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crazyhayashi said:
Have you ever accidentally stumbled across an HDCD encoded CD that wasn't labeled? I have, and they were both albums I totally didn't expect, because they're alternative rock albums, and popular. They're: The Used: In Love and Death and Story of the Year: Page Avenue. Both sound good, but in my opinion Page Avenue is way too synthesized, the singer's voice is digitally altered constantly, you even here them joking and playing around with the effects at the end of the album.
HDCD.com hardly list all of the HDCD titles released. Here's a list at head-fi.org that identifies "newly discovered" HDCDs.
http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=67082
While we are on it, a number of hybrid SACD contain HDCD-encoded CD layers, such as those from First Impression Music, the hybrid of Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", Lee Ann Womack's "Greatest Hits", etc...
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Post by LC January 25, 2005 (3 of 10)
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crazyhayashi said:
Have you ever accidentally stumbled across an HDCD encoded CD that wasn't labeled? I have, and they were both albums I totally didn't expect, because they're alternative rock albums, and popular.
The Head-Fi list has some surprising items (Ice Cube?). I was going to add Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile, which has a single track in HDCD (actually, it blinks on and off for some of the time), but that's already on the list. One that's not on the list, and which, frankly, I always figured must be a disc error of some sort, is one of the later Godflesh albums (1999's Us and Them). I don't imagine many people reading this are familiar with Godflesh, but they are a three-piece band (guitar/vocals, bass, and "machines") from the UK who were one of the stars of Earache Records from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. They had, quite simply, one of the most punishing and oppressive sounds of any band in the whole genre broadly known as guitar-driven industrial. Crunching bass, agonized, distorted vocals, and relentlessly pummeling drum machines. Some of their bleaker albums end with a track of guitar feedback and industrial machinery samples drawn out to twenty or thirty minutes. Not exactly "hi-fi" material, but the little HDCD light lit up every time.
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Post by soundboy January 25, 2005 (4 of 10)
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soundboy said:
HDCD.com hardly list all of the HDCD titles released. Here's a list at head-fi.org that identifies "newly discovered" HDCDs.
http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=67082
While we are on it, a number of hybrid SACD contain HDCD-encoded CD layers, such as those from First Impression Music, the hybrid of Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", Lee Ann Womack's "Greatest Hits", etc...
I wonder what's Super-HDCD?
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Post by brenda January 26, 2005 (5 of 10)
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soundboy said:
I wonder what's Super-HDCD?
wasn't HDCD a 20 bit medium, - whereas the Super HDCD listed in your photo is 24 bit??
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I'm sure I'm a decade behind the times, but can someone post, in simple terms, the audible benefits of HDCD? and is it as good as SACD? I have several HDCDs but my Sony SACD player does not decode the HDCD part.
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Post by tream January 26, 2005 (7 of 10)
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peteyspambucket said:
I'm sure I'm a decade behind the times, but can someone post, in simple terms, the audible benefits of HDCD? and is it as good as SACD? I have several HDCDs but my Sony SACD player does not decode the HDCD part.
Here's the link that will give you more info.
http://www.hdcd.com/default.asp
HDCD has the advantage that it does provide an audibly superior experience to RBCD, and is completely backward compatible with CD (SACD is not 100% backward compatible-my CAL Audio CL-20 cannot read a hybrid SACD, nor can I play hybrid SACD's in my car). It does add a cost-you need a license from Microsoft for the recording, and a chip for the decoding. I'm told there are thousands of HDCD's out there, and it has been a disappointment that my Sony SACD's players don't support HDCD. HDCD doesn't support multichannel.
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Post by Dinko January 26, 2005 (8 of 10)
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peteyspambucket said:
and is it as good as SACD?
For classical music, I'd say HDCD sounds "spectacular" but does not necessarily sound "good", so no it's not as good as SACD based on my personal experience.
All orchestral HDCD discs I've heard so far have really crisp brass and a powerful bass line (nice for percussion and double basses). They're certainly impressive... but that's pretty much it. Contrary to SACD, HDCDs don't sound to me *much* better than early 16-bit RBCDs. They suffer from the exact same "digitalitis" problems. It's just that the added higher and lower frequencies make them more impressive, and less annoying than those CDs. I find that HDCD audio fidelity & orchestral warmth are far, far behind what SACDs are capable of, in orchestral music.
In pop/rock music, I don't see much of a difference between stereo SACD & HDCD.
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Post by mandel January 26, 2005 (9 of 10)
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Don't suppose anybody can enlighten me how they managed to get 20bits onto a backwards RB compatible disk? Googling hasn't revealed anything useful.
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mandel said:
Don't suppose anybody can enlighten me how they managed to get 20bits onto a backwards RB compatible disk? Googling hasn't revealed anything useful.
I don't know that it'll completely answer all the questions you could ask :-), but have you read through the white paper here:
http://www.hdcd.com/partners/proaudio/AES_Paper.pdf
It talks quite a bit about the technology and how it works.
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