Does HDCD make a noticeable difference?

GH (HDCD) is louder (and also more compressed) in its undecoded RBCD form, but not in HDCD-decoded form (album ReplayGain=-1.66 dB). GH (DVD-V) version's album ReplayGain=-4.61 dB. So there...

 

I play them both on my Sony DVD player, which I don't think is HDCD compatible, so I'm just hearing the red book copy. Compared to the CD (without the HDCD encoding) the 24bit/96kHz DVD-Audio is far superior. My player is compatible with 24/96 PCM.

 

I thought, this thread was about HDCD decoding making a difference...

 

And whether HDCD CDs sound better even on non-compatible HDCD CD players. It started when someone commented that Le Noise isn't HDCD encoded on the CD edition even though all his past CD releases over the last 10 years or so were HDCD encoded. I said this was most likely down to Neil not caring about CD releases of his albums anymore because his future is high resolution, which Le Noise is also released in (on Blu-ray audio).

 

Psychedelic Pill is HDCD and was released after Le Noise.

 

Some HDCD's are not marked, only knew they were HDCD's when indicator light on Berkeley lit up.
Still like HDCD sound but no longer own Berkeley DAC.
Owned both DAC1 and DAC2, in retrospect preferred DAC1 by slight margin for additional slam factor.
IMO: Both very nice DAC's at prices used units are going for.

 

Just checked and so is Cellar Door. Definitely still releasing HDCD's, just being more selective.

 

Well I am listening with headphones to Neil Young's Goldrush and prefer the HDCD to the original cd ..and will compare all of his 1st 4 cd's.
Seems like it is a hit or miss BUT in this case the HDCD of this CD sounds to me way superior.

 

Someone finally posted the dynamic range of the stereo mix on the Blu-ray disc on DR Database. It is the same compressed mastering as the HDCD/DVD-Audio FYI.

 

I tried Bitter VST plug-in (shows effective PCM bits used) with fb2k playing back my HDCD-decoded & padded to 24-bit FLAC files and noticed that for the material which was encoded without PE / LLRE features the bit depth is always 17 (no wonder, since the HDCD-decoded audio level is shifted down 1 bit). The material that was encoded with PE / LLRE features also mostly shows 17-bit depth (occasionally going to 20-bit, seemingly when peaks get extended and/or level drops low)...

 

I have a Panasonic SA-XR25 audio-video receiver, a slim line component that sounds pretty good in the living room. It does not indicate anywhere that it does HDCD decoding (it has 3 digital inputs).

While visiting Germany last year, I saw a Panasonic receiver/DVD player that looked exactly like my receiver ( it shared the same shell, dimensions and fascia) and it had the HDCD logo. I wrote down the model number to check back in America, but I lost it and have not been able to find it in the US (these are early 2000's vintage machines).

Anyway, my interest was because I had already a suspicion that the SA-XR25 was decoding the HDCD from its digital inputs. There is no logo and no light comes on but my ears tell me differently when ABxing between digital and analog inputs with HDCD and nonHDCD capable cd players and cds. (Sometimes I have nothing better to do)

Is it far fetched to think that maybe my receiver shares the same DAC/DSP chip as a "related" German model, giving me an unadvertised bonus feature (i.e. HDCD decoding)? Could it be that Panasonic avoided using the HDCD logo in the US to avoid paying royalties but still standardizing its chip set for different markets?

If anybody has any comment on this, I would be interested in hearing it.

Anywhere I can find a list of HDCD decoding receivers/amps?

 

The Green Day "Nimrod" CD is very good for listening tests to see if your player is decoding HDCD. Nimrod makes the most of peak extend. Moreso than any other HDCD disc I have. It sounds compressed when played without HDCD decoding. Sounds dynamic and open when played with HDCD decoding. It's the easiest one to tell the difference by ear.

One thing you might try is to create a special test CDR using Nimrod. Use a tool like Audacity to add dither to a track from Nimrod. The added dither will remove the HDCD codes. Put a dithered track and an unprocessed track from Nimrod on the CDR. Play it through your receiver. If the two tracks sound different then the receiver is doing HDCD decoding. If they sound the same then it is not doing decoding.

 

I once had an HDCD player years ago, but was never able to suss out whether it was beneficial.

The Wikipedia entry says HDCD plays 20-bit from 16-bit CDs or PCM files.
Is this the equivalent of up-sampling?

You may be interested to know that the latest 'The Absolute Sound" for October 2014 has a feature paper suggesting that up-sampling returns quasi-objective improvements in sonic performance.
The paper acknowledges that "up-sampling cannot add any data", but outlines a methodology for objective listening and measurement for both up-sampling and down-sampling.
I would recommend it as a read to all of you interested in the differences between hi-res and standard-res, that does not involve the sterile arguments swirling around the technical limitations of human hearing.
The article is not without its opponents!

 

No, upsampling refers to the sampling rate. HDCD is a way of quasi-extending the bit depth.

 

I can't really answer your question, but this line is hilarious.

 

In a wider sense I've always liked the sound of HDCD discs- Over a decade ago I had the top level Audio Alchemy gear I bought 2nd hand piece by piece and that had the filter-always felt there were a lot of good recordings.

Revisiting them on the Oppo I still think most sound very good-what I actually never do is switch off the HDCD and see if there is a difference-I don't think I can even been bothered-I do the same thing with SACD I just play the discs.....

 

My OPPO is an old one (980 I think, I am at work) and I can't see where I can turn on and off the HDCD decoding feature.

I'll try to do a definitive shootout this weekend by taking a HDCD converting it to 320 MP3 and back to CD (which should strip the resulting CDR of the HDCD subcodes).

Thanks, Ham, for the idea. This should do the same as your dithering suggestion in so far as resulting in a non HDCD cdr.

 

I think I once compared the redbook CD file in Audacity to a digital "needle drop" I made using WMP in HDCD mode for one of the tracks on "The Cars". The difference looked (and sounded) negligible to me- maybe not a good example tho since that particular remaster is pretty compressed...

 

I actually always thought that HDCD encoding survived MP3 compression, although I don't recall if I ever had occasion to test that out, so I could easily be wrong here.

 

The HDCD encoding is in what is effectively the dither bits. It won't survive lossy encoding. Redithering the file will also remove it.

 

Yes, the data must remain bit-perfect to retain the HDCD encoding. Even digital attenuation (by any degree) will lose the HDCD encoding.
FLAC encoding recreates the original digital data exactly, so retains the HDCD encoding.
I see this happen when I use the digital attenuator on my Squeezebox to an external HDCD DAC (the HDCD light goes out).

 

I've never experimented, but haven't there been issues in the past where HDCD encoded audio was modified for subsequent releases, causing things like the HDCD light to go on and off? I thought that was the case for the first mono/stereo Pet Sounds CD released after the box. That is to say, it seems that while the HDCD data is likely to get corrupted, it may not disappear entirely.

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/check-this-pet-sounds-thread-out.5212/

 

I can’t speak to the Beach Boys CDs, but the HDCD flag can be retained inadvertently in the file in later processing and doesn’t gurantee that any of the HDCD features are still being used.

 

A lot of the HDCD discs came out around 2000, many of them the last batch of remasters before the loudness wars completely ruined a lot of recorded music. So, they often benefited from the latest digital recording technology and from being careful transfers. The Pacific Microsonics A/D encoders were particularly well-regarded at the time, not even considering HDCD encoding. I think the Joni Mitchell HDCD discs sound great - very clean without being overly crisp, and lightly equalized. Our host's master of Court & Spark is I think superior to the HDCD version - it seems more heavily re-equalized to me, in a very pleasing and not artificial way - but it's hard to come by these days. I'd love to pick up his master of Blue, but I've yet to run across it used. Maybe someday... Until then though I'll get by fine with the HDCD version.

Truth be told the original Warners CDs aren't awful, but I don't think they're great, either.

 

I'm so proud of myself- finally managed with the help of cuetools to decode The Cars HDCD to 24 bit WAV from the 16 bit ALAC I originally ripped. I then made 16 bit lossless & AAC lossy files in iTunes for casual/car listening...what a huge difference in DR- sounds a lot closer to the original CD with the dynamics restored.