That is very odd an HDCD disc should play fine on any CD transport. If you don't have HDCD decoding in your DAC you won't get the full benefit of HDCD but the disc should still play.
Trouble with 20-bit HDCD
Greetings,
I purchased a CD that turned out, on delivery, to be a 20-bit HDCD published in 2002 (although the disk itself brand new). The music on it is very rarely recorded (Girolamo Kapsberger’s “Jesuit Opera”) and only available in this format.
My Project transport (Box RS) doesn’t recognize the disk, however. I presume that there is no solution to this problem (apart from buying a different transport) but I’m still interested in what kind of compatibility issue may cause the problem.
Thank you,
Csaba
I purchased a CD that turned out, on delivery, to be a 20-bit HDCD published in 2002 (although the disk itself brand new). The music on it is very rarely recorded (Girolamo Kapsberger’s “Jesuit Opera”) and only available in this format.
My Project transport (Box RS) doesn’t recognize the disk, however. I presume that there is no solution to this problem (apart from buying a different transport) but I’m still interested in what kind of compatibility issue may cause the problem.
Thank you,
Csaba
16 responses Add your response
Did you know that Kaspberger’s first name is really Johannes ? He was a German working in Italy (his patrons referred to him as In Tesoro de Tedesco) and probably Italianicized his name at one point. Regarding the HDCD issue, I have several HDCDs ofthat era that have played on several CD and SACD players. Have you tried it on another player? |
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Thank you all for the help. - eventually, the only thing I could do was copying, bit-by-bit the CD into my digital library on an SSD, so at least I can now listen to the music, without compression and through a DAC; - the problem was not the DAC - the signal never quite made it that far, since the transport itself didn't recognize that it was fed a CD; - other players: my 10-dollar CD-radio in the bathroom played the disk without a problem. Perhaps I should give up on all the fancy stuff and just go back to the boombox of my greener days; Kapsberger: yes, and thank you. I also have a number of recordings with his music but, being a lutenist, I mostly focused on his plucking and not his operas. |
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It’s the disc not your player. For instance, I have innumerable Grateful Dead discs and their entire catalogue including their live releases are HDCD. My player as most are not able to translate the HDCD encoding, means zilch. Nor does the bit rate of the disc mastering. But I have some Dual Discs that don’t want to be read on the CD side. No rhyme or reason. As some else mentioned, it’s those pesky pits and all it takes is a few. One disc big deal. Don’t sweat it! |
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erik_squires! You said earlier: For convenience, I have ripped all my CD’s and then wrote some scripts to scan for HDCD and decode them. Now all my HDCD’s are stored as 24 bit FLAC. I would absolutely love to hear more in-depth detail about this process. In particular, how are you decoding the HDCD material into a higher bit depth? Is this done in software?!? or are you feeding a DAC a 16-bit HDCD stream, it’s decoding it to an analog out, and then you’re feeding that into a 24-bit ADC back into your computer? I have many losslessly encoded digital files from HDCD encoded CDs and would love to convert them as you have. |
Some HDCD sound fine on regular players, some don't. Like anything, the devil is in the details. @erik_squires - Did you actually DECODE the HDCD or just take the 16 bits to 24? Interesting article on HDCD and Pacific Microsonics https://www.stereophile.com/content/hdcd-keith-johnson-pflash-pflaumer-michael-ritter |
Did you actually DECODE the HDCD or just take the 16 bits to 24? I wrote a Perl script to scan all my FLAC files for evidence of HDCD encoding, and those that appeared to be encoded I decoded using open source tools. All this was on a Linux/Ubuntu box. I believe I used ffmpeg to actually locate and convert. It is important to note that due to the widespread use of the Pacific Microsonics ADC, and the engineers not caring about settings, a lot of CD’s may be digitally watermarked as HDCD, without any of the HDCD features, such as 20 bit dynamic range expansion, being used. Best, E |