Hdcd Player List

[Gundenia Ransbottom]

Tubeoutput to PCA plugs? You're joking, right? Why not pipe the digital output (HDMI, USB, TOSLink, AES/EBU, etc.) through to your system DACs, which are going to be immune to common-ground noise sources--at least until they exit your preamp.

You're right - there is an HDCD plugin for foobar2000 - and you can just convert the resulting tracks to 20-bit/44.1 kHz tracks and be done with it. Then you can edit them to get rid of the mastering curves applied to them.

I've had Cambridge, Rotel and Denon, all were good players. I had several oppos, maybe 5, just ok, nothing special. I'm sure Bills NAD, would sound fine. I've been looking at the Marantz 5007ud ,plays everything, 299 delivered.

Having a tubed output stage allows choices and avoids the need for using an external tube buffer (of which I actually have a very nice one). I am feeding all my sources through a Benchmark DAC-2. I can choose digital or analog through it. If I choose analog it doesn't go through the DAC. It's a pass through. The DAC has 3 sets of outputs and feeds 3 different systems in my room. I enjoy listening to the tubed output just as much as the Benchmark DACed output.

The Benchmark is an excellent DAC but what I found out is that on 16/44 it's really not any better than a decent CD player. It excels on the higher res stuff. I'd put the tube analog output stage of my simple Jolida JD-100 up against the analog stage of a "hi end" Oppo or other mid-fi DAC. Those certainly aren't concentrating on providing the best analog stages.

Agreed - I wouldn't recommend analog output with players at all - use the higher quality DACs and analog circuitry in your preamp, especially to be able to decode things like HDCD, etc. so that you don't have "pass through" effects using analog circuitry: digital transmission has zero losses if parity is enabled in your digital bus. Delaying conversion to analog to as late in the hardware stream as possible has significant fidelity-enhancing properties.

I think you get what I'm saying. I feed both into the DAC. With a a button push I can listen to either. This way both versions are available to all 3 systems. Just another choice you get for free with the equipment.

I have a ton of HDCDs. The entire Grateful Dead library is HDCD...........even the newest stuff like the shows they just did this past July. I never actually heard an HDCD played on an HDCD player. A little embarassed to say that since I have collected Dead CDs for years.

I'm actually serious about the remastering thing--you will likely find that you hear amazing things if you undo deep bass attenuation below 50-60 Hz and smooth the highs out a bit. You'll also find yourself cranking it more than a bit, too. :emotion-29: :emotion-29:

Actually there is a way to analyze tracks and do a batch run fix of them (i.e., many tracks processed in series), but...the real value to me is in the fine tuning. I don't know how to automate that yet.

Most of us know that HDCD technology was developed by Pacific Microsonics and later acquired by Microsoft. What I didn't know was that my laptop (ASUS N56VZ-DS71) was capable of playing HDCD... my old desktop system used a Sound Blaster Audigy, which was a decent sound card for its time.

This new laptop uses a Realtek High Definition Audio codec, which most of us would laugh at, since it's been the default audio solution in millions of systems for about the last decade... however, I believe it has full support for 24-bit audio.

That's it! Oddly, the HDCD logo only appears in the lower left corner of the window when I do the opposite (i.e., uncheck Use 24-bit audio) to play the disc. The volume level gets noticeably louder without 24-bit audio enabled. I'm not sure if that means the functions have been reversed by accident or the increased dynamic range of HDCD means quieter playback. Overall, everything sounds great and the noise floor might be a bit lower (literally).

I rifled through my music collection and noticed that I don't have that many labelled HDCD albums... just a few albums by the Cars and all the Roxy Music discs (except Avalon, which I have in SACD). Also Beck's Midnight Vultures and Dire Straights' Brothers in Arms. You have to be careful with HDCDs because quite a few discs were recorded on HDCD equipment and thus light up properly on HDCD players but aren't actually encoded in HDCD. You could call it a musical Easter Egg hunt, like so many other things in audiophilia.

First of all, if it lights up, then it was encoded. It's determining whether or not to decode HDCD (the same condition that causes the light to light up) directly from the digital audio stream (the bottom-most bit, to be specific). There are a variety of encodings, that might be what is throwing you.

Secondly, are you sure the "doing the opposite" thing isn't an indication of a bug -- specifically, what I interpret that to mean is that when you check 'use 24-bit-audio', you're enabling upsampling, and it might be upsampling the undecoded stream (as many DACs did, back in the day, which is why I always wanted a digital means of decoding the bitstream, like the Pacific Microsonics Model One or Two), hence destroying the encoding bit pattern? In other words, how are you confirming that the decoded stream is decoded when it's supposed to be and not when it's not (and please don't tell me, 'by ear')?

The HDCD flag stayed on when I played Beck's Midnight Vultures, regardless of whether the feature was checked or not. The Audio Fidelity version of the Cars' Heartbeat City, which is what I was listening to when I wrote the first post, seems to have encoding errors.

I could use foobar to check, as indicated in the Head-Fi thread. Microsoft is fairly unclear about what 24-bit audio does, other than to claim that HDCD will play back at "full audio quality. The audio quality of standard CDs is not affected."

I've been ripping SACD's lately from my Pioneer Blu ray player (one Kevin recommended in the other sub forum) as my old PS3 needs to retire. I swear with some HDCD's on my Classe player when it worked, it sounded quite good compared to the usual redbook I also owned.

It's been hard for me to tell the difference between Red Book and SACD quality on various rigs... I think the hi-fi manufacturers are still chasing a moving target when it comes to optimizing digital sound quality. Ayre's apodizing filter of 2009 (apparently also in Meridian players) was news to me and Stereophile seemed to love it... my player uses an upsampling DAC and the previous Arcam players used dCS's Ring DAC.

DAC technology seems to change very quickly and I don't think most of us are capable of understanding all the technology. At the end of the day, you still have to do a lot of listening to make a decision. I do enjoy Stereophile (and Tyll's) attempts to measure and quantify output, but a lot of what we hear probably can't be measured yet. Also, the manufacturers make a lot of noise about their DAC chips but you usually don't get as much analysis on the analog output stage or power supply, which are critical. I'm relieved the great jitter scare is over for now.

I have Berkeley Alpha DAC and I use HDCD for testing digital output. The HDCD indicator on the DAC lights if and only if nothing messes with the digital stream when HDCD recording is played. Even when volume is adjusted (changed from the default value) in software player, or when OS native digital output is used instead of ASIO/WASAPI, DAC fails to recognize HDCD. Naturally, it also affects the sound.

That's annoying... in the Hydrogenaudio thread, the posters mentioned a lot of inconsistency in HDCD recordings (even coding HDCD on one channel!) and the developer, kode54 (as well as Charlie Hansen), wrote that a lot of recordings didn't use the Peak Extend function and virtually none of them used Low Level Range Extend.

The HDCD indicator on the DAC lights if and only if nothing messes with the digital stream when HDCD recording is played. Even when volume is adjusted (changed from the default value) in software player, or when OS native digital output is used instead of ASIO/WASAPI, DAC fails to recognize HDCD.

That's correct. As I already explained, it's encoded into the bitstream, so the bitstream needs to be untampered with. Think about it, they're putting a signal that has nothing to do with the audio into the audio, so if you do anything with the signal at all (including mixing it with nothing), it's going to disappear like a thread of string in a volcano.

High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD) is a proprietary audio encode-decode process that claims to provide increased dynamic range over that of standard Compact Disc Digital Audio, while retaining backward compatibility with existing compact disc players.

Originally developed by Pacific Microsonics, the first HDCD-enabled CD was released in 1995.[1] In 2000, the technology was purchased by Microsoft, and the following year, there were over 5,000 HDCD titles available.[2] Microsoft's HDCD official website was discontinued in 2005; by 2008, the number of available titles had declined to around 4,000.[1]

The claim that the encoding process is compatible with ordinary CD players (without audible distortion) is disputed: not being able to decode the peak soft limiting, a normal CD player will output distorted peaks.[6]

HDCD technology was developed between 1986 and 1991 by "Prof." Keith O. Johnson and Michael "Pflash" Pflaumer of Pacific Microsonics Inc. It was made publicly available as HDCD-enabled audio CDs (often identifiable by the HDCD logo printed on the back cover) in 1995.

Between 1996 and 1999 Pacific Microsonics VP of OEM Sales, Steve Fields, made over 20 trips to Japan, visiting Sanyo, Burr-Brown Japan and major audio companies, with the intent of licensing the HDCD technology. In 1998, Burr-Brown (now part of Texas Instruments) and Sanyo Electronics of Japan introduced low-cost digital-to-analog converters with HDCD decoding included, allowing HDCD to be used in CD and DVD players in the $100 range. HDCD algorithms were included in DVD chips from many IC makers including Motorola and C-Cube, allowing HDCD to be offered by mass-market DVD player makers such as Panasonic and Toshiba.

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