Anyone still excited about HDCD ?

Yes still crazy bout HDCD after all these years! Not going to dump on SACD either (too much), yet I find myself selling of 60% of the sacd titles I've purchased. Sold off my SCD-1, using my first sony SCD-333ES for sacd now. Yet still have an ol'e Denon DVD-5000 in my stable that I'm very fond of for HDCD decoding, along w/ a Toshiba SD-9200 in another system. Sacd has somewhat bored me, some recently released Hong Kong BMG SACD RCA Living Stereo releases are the best I have heard to date. Aren't we hitting the 4-5 year mark on this software format? So I'll still be quite happy w/ my HDCD's & JVC XRCD's if SACD should one day follow the path of DVD-(wHAT? wHO? )Audio. Enough time & monies spent on SACD, saving my cents waiting for the new Crystal chip to hit the market for "True" 24/192 upsampling.

If your into Classical? Pick up Lara St.John's 2 cd's on the "Well Tempered" Label. Gypsy, & Bach Works for Violin, both 24bit HDCD (Pre-Mr. Micro/Soft GATES) Compare them to any Violin soloist SACD recording on the market, & you too will still be excited about HDCD.

Golden Ears is exactly right.

If you have a high-quality DAC, HDCD is irrelevant. It is very "tinny"- sounding when compared to good 96 or 192 upsampling. It does however, improve the sound significantly on good lower-level units like Rotel, for example.

Interesting thoughts all accross the board. Right now I am comparing playback between my Classe DAC1 and MSB Platinum Plus DAC. I been comparing HDCD discs on both DACs. Some sound better playing back through the HDCD Classe. Patricia Barbers Cafe Blue in HDCD sounds far superior to standard playback through the MSB (with the upsampling on) . Holly Coles Helplessly Romantic is another example. Most of the "unmarked" discs that trigger the HDCD decoder sound better with the MSB as do regular "Redbook". I am concluding that discs that are done correctly with HDCD, sound best that way.

Interesting thought that the upsampler makes HDCD irrelevant. I have a Cary 303-200 with 96/24 upsampling and HDCD. You can compare the upsampling to the use of HDCD, but not to use of neither, by switching on the upsampling while playing the CD. The differences between the upsampling and HDCD are very very small to my ears. When I was testing out CD players I thought that the Jolida was much better with HDCD, other redbook disks sounded very bad on the Jolida as compared to a rega player (for example) but the HDCD discs sounded much better on the Jolida. So, perhaps you are right that it helps with lower end CD players w/o upsampling.

The problem with HDCD is that Pacific Microsonics chip limits the dinamic range to 6 dB, which is already not good for today.

Interesting... RR Reveries HDCD, being played on non-HDCD player sounds with lower level then on HDCD player, so I have to push the volume significantly. I haven't noticed such a difference on regular CD, they sound the same level on both players...