I'm sure there will be errors in what I say, so I welcome any corrections if anyone has any. It's been a while since I experimented with this, plus it's early and I'm still drinking my coffee.
My understanding of the situation is that Microsoft now owns the patents for HDCD encoding/decoding, and that they aren't letting anyone have any new licenses to use the tech. Any new equipment out there that utilizes HDCD decoding is covered under prior licenses that haven't expired yet. So you won't ever see HDCD decoding covered natively or officially on the SBT. However, you can still get the same effect as the Foobar2000 plugin on the SBT. Basically, you add the HDCD plugin into the conversion chain in Foobar, then export your HDCD-encoded FLAC to a new 24-bit FLAC. You end up with a 20-bit file padded with zeros to make up the 24 bits. Since it's FLAC-compressed, those extra zeros essentially get nulled out, so they're not taking up any hard disk space. The SBT plays it back as a 24-bit file, thus giving you the extra decoded bits. EDIT: I stand corrected on the licensing aspect. And at $400,000+, it's understandable why so few devices use it. -- Pugnax555 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Pugnax555's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=37609 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=85934 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
