Some guy named Herbie talks about high res audio

[bub]

Sherbourn cd-1 also. ...

[jmilton]

In a conversation with Keith Johnson (whose ears I trust completely) he said the single worst thing that ever happened to any of his work was the down sampling of the master tapes to CD’s. He hated the results and I am sure this must have prompted their subsequent release of their HRx series with exact copies of the masters. I’ll bet our friend Cookie Marenco of Blue Coast might have similar misgivings about down sampling.

I don’t believe it has as much to do with the increase in dynamic range and frequency response afforded by the higher resolution format as it does by the lack of down sampling.

Down sampling may be one of the worst things to ever happen to the CD and one of the central reasons we judge it so harshly.

It may also partially answer why we can make a digital copy of an analog event without much in the way of loss. We don’t have to mess with the final result of the conversion, just play it back at whatever sample and bit rate we recorded it at.

...just saying.

[jmilton]

44.1/16- "That's good enough!"  How many times have you heard that from someone?

audiophilereview.com/cd-dac-digital/whats-good-enough.html

[luvsorite]

May 20, 2014 13:27:45 GMT -5 KeithL said:

That would be the one... and, from what I've heard said, everyone agrees that it's still one of the best sounding encoders out there.

There is also a lot of confusion around about the HDCD process itself and the available options. According to "sources", and the original "sales blurbs" for HDCD, the original encoding scheme also included the ability to choose different reconstruction filters for playback (the encoder could instruct the decoder which filter to use from a set of several), and to do a second type of peak compression. However (also according to several sources), only the one basic form of compression was ever implemented.

For the true HDCD aficionado, you should also know that FooBar and dBPowerAmp can both decode HDCDs in software - and, in fact, dBPowerAmp can RIP HDCDs and save the DECODED audio to a 24 bit digital audio file (like a FLAC) - for proper "decoded" playback from any DAC. Both require a plugin to handle HDCD - and both plugins are free and pretty easy to find if you Google for them. (Since separate DACs just don't decode HDCD, this is useful.)

And another final bit of trivia.... guess who now owns the HDCD "technology" (the last time I looked anyway)?

Give up?

MicroSoft... and the decoding is supposedly implemented in Windows Media Player
(even though they don't seem to be doing anything else with it).

Hello. this is my first post at this forum. I hope I'm doing so correctly.

I like to play my ripped CD tracks through M-Powered Pro Tools 7.4.2 with plug-ins like Serato Pitch n Time
or Samplitude 11’s elastic audio. But as some of my collection was HDCD encoded (i.e. my “Pet Sounds” boxed set), how could those tracks be ripped to (uncompressed) WAV files and then played via these DAW platforms, while retaining the HDCD decoded sound quality?

My understanding from this thread is that both Foobar and dbPowerAmp (neither of which I’ve yet to try) can both decode and rip HDCD tracks and store them as 24 bit WAV files for playback through any DAC.

My question is that once the tracks have been so ripped and decoded, can I then use Pro Tools and/or Samplitude to access those files and play them back with my chosen plug-ins ? Or is the HDCD audio enhancement only possible via playback through Foobar or dbPowerAmp?

Also, WAV or FLAC? Does one file format have any advantages over the other?

Lastly, though a bit off topic, how do high end DACs (Wadia, Berkeley, Lavry, Weiss Labs, et al), essentially accomplish their often claimed benefit of 16 bit Redbook CD (or uncompressed WAV file) sonic enhancement? How is this often done?

Is it “upsampling” and/or through other means?

May 20, 2014 13:08:11 GMT -5 cd said:

Keith wrote: "There is only one digital converter that is still in widely used by pros that can encode HDCDs. According to quite a bit of "industry chatter" I've read, many still use it because it happens to sound very good as a "regular encoder"."

Keith, are you referring to the Pacific Microsonics/Euphonix processors? From my reading, the filtering used by the Pacific Microsonics processors provides audible benefits even if the disc player does not support HDCD playback. I can tell you for sure that The Other Ones' disc sounds spectacular no matter what player is used. I noticed this right away when I was riding with my buddy in his car and he popped the disc in. He saw my expression and smiled knowingly.

As it turns out, ALL of the Grateful Dead discs are HDCD encoded. And since most of the guys in The Other Ones are GD band members, they opted for HDCD encoding for their release....

CD