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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

malacka
dobnbav
30 posts
 
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!
mental
1,029 posts
 
My experience with remastered 20 bit, they are cheap recordings catering to those that think 20 bit is better. I prefer original recordings and I research for the original. I’ve bought MFSL that I thought were poorly done, then again I’ve have several that were done correctly. It all depends on the original, you can remaster anything to conform to your gear that sounds like shit on a better system.
elizabeth
6,726 posts
 
I, on the other hand, own a pile of 'remastered 20 bit' Jazz titles they do sound better than the average early CD issue of the originally 1950's 1960's music.
mental
1,029 posts
 
Technology can clean up the original, yes. Clean up being key words. Make it better? I don’t think so. Editing an original that was recorded with tape? C’mon now. That reminds me of the kids swearing their mp3's are the chit...lol
engineears
17 posts
 
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.
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