They are still in the stores, at least they are in the states. You can tell the difference in a couple of ways. First, there should be a sticker on the front that says HDCD. Second, the spines are different looking than the old cds--- the old cds had larger print on the spine, and the Asylum ones (those from For The Roses through Shadows and Light) had a standard font. On the new cds, the spines usually have lettering that is in keeping with the design of the album cover-- for example, Ladies appears handwritten, and on some of them the two spines will have different colours because they are on opposite ends of the cover painting, and the colours of the spine come from the colours on that edge of the cover. (Clouds does this rather noticeably.) The third way to tell the difference is that all the new HDCDs have some text on the back cover towards the bottom that mentions Joe Gastwirt's name.
To answer your other question, please see www.hdcd.com. It's a processing and mastering technology that actually creates real 20-bit sound on a cd that can be played either on a normal 16-bit player, or on an HDCD player, which converts the extra info on the disc, giving true 20-bit sound. They're quite lifelike. On the newer albums, such as TTT and BSN, joni's voice sounds like she's in the room with you. On Thu, 29 Nov 2001, [iso-8859-1] David Shannon wrote: > Sorry. What's HDCD? > > Are they still in the stores? How can you tell the > difference between them when you buy? > > - Dave > > --- w evans <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hissing, and > all the other Joni albums up through > > Shadows and Light (that > > is, everything before she switched to Geffen) were > > remastered in 1997-8 > > from the original source tapes and in HDCD. They > > sound incredible on any cd > > player. They *really* sound incredible if your cd > > player has the HDCD chip, > > which reads the extra bandwidth encoded on HDCDs but > > unread by normal cd > > players. (Joni was my reason for buying one.) > > The irony of this is that since she went back to > > Reprise in 1994, which > > was before HDCD was available to the record > > companies for general use, the > > one non-Geffen album of hers that is not mastered > > with HDCD is Turbulent > > Indigo. (The new ones since-- TTT and BSN-- are in > > HDCD.) > > > > This reminds me--- Does anyone know when we will be > > seeing those > > remastered four Geffen albums with bonus tracks that > > Joni was talking > > about a few months ago? > Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music >Charts > http://uk.my.yahoo.com
