325xi;182270 Wrote: > Wow, it also says about HDCD: "When played back on a normal CD player > the sound will be compressed and "loud". When played back on a CD > player equipped with HDCD decoding, a dynamic range expander is brought > into play, reversing the compression applied at mastering." > > Which means I'm better to avoid HDCD CDs altogether unless I have > HDCD-enabled player! > > What happens when I rip HDCD disk? Am I getting HDCD info, or just the > base comressed recording?
Since HDCD is a way to squeeze better-than-CD audiophile sound out of CD's, hence getting top-notch production treatment, I doubt very much those CDs would sound bad without HDCD decoding. The HDCDs that I have sound just fine. If I remember correctly HDCD swithes between different anti-aliasing filters dynamically depending on the transient behaviour, so as to avoid time smearing. There might be something about dynamic range too... Nevertheless, they sound generally good even without HDCD decoding. BTW, this was quite funny from the Wiki: "HDCD is a proprietary process, and no accurate technical description has been released to the public. Hence, none of its claims have any evidence. In fact, since the technology does not involve compression, and still allows an audio CD to hold the normal 80 minutes of audio within 700MB, the additional 4 bits of bit depth it claims to add to the recording cannot physically exist." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCD The author has obviously never heard of other coding schemes than linear PCM.. I bet one could use, for example, DBX to put a lot of dynamic range onto a 16/44 CD. Perhaps he confuses data compression with dynamic range compression. I had a Krell CD player at one stage which did HDCD, and HDCD CDs sounded very good indeed. Very startling transients -which is where I feel CD often falls short. -- P Floding No, I didn't ABX it. And I won't even if you ask me. (Especially not if you ask me.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ P Floding's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2932 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32967 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
