What is HDCD and how do I extract any extra detail into Apple Lossless?

[Brian A]

New to the forum and new to computer audio. Glad I found you folks as you have a wonderful forum going here.

 

Just purchased a Musical Fidelity V-DAC. I have been ripping CDs in Apple Lossless format and temporarily have a 15 foot unamplified USB cable connecting my computer to the V-DAC across the room. It's working perfectly and I am very happy so far.

 

I have been reading many threads here with great fascination. A noob question I can't seem to find the answer to is; can I rip the extra detail out of a HDCD? An example is the Reference Recording "Copland 100" HDCD. When I look at the meta data for the Lossless file, it just looks like a plain 16 bit file. Does it matter?

 

My current plain CD I am going gaga for is Dave Brubeck's 20-bit remastered "Time Out". Hard to believe the recording is 50 years old. I assume there is no extra anything in the CD that can be extracted despite the "20-bit mastering" process. True?

 

[kdoot]

What is HDCD? See Wikipedia for all the details. In summary, it uses the least-significant bit of CD audio to encode commands that can be used by a player to change the playback in a couple of specific ways: gain adjustment for increased dynamic range, and filter choice to match the mastering engineer's intent.

 

Microsoft bought the rights to the technology about a decade ago. Windows Media Player is the only licensed software I know of for decoding during playback from a computer. You can get a command-line tool for Windows (hdcd.exe) which uses WMP services to decode a 16-bit HDCD rip into a 24-bit WAV file. This doesn't (can't) make use of the filter options, just the dynamic range hints.

 

I went to the effort of doing this on my Mac mini over the weekend, only to find that the HDCD discs I have don't use the gain adjustment feature at all. Haven't listened to the results yet, but not hopeful that there'll be any sonic improvement.

 

[wgscott]

Elsewhere on this site, you can find instructions for ripping this on Windows with dbPoweramp, which has a specific plug-in for this purpose. Once ripped to FLAC (or whatever), you can play the files on the Mac. (I converted the FLAC files to 24-bit, 44.1 kHz ALAC using XLD. Max will of course work too.)

 

[blaine78]

In my opinion, I much prefer the 16/44 rip without HDCD encoding (using dBPoweramp on PC). HDCD just adds processing and find it loses energy, detail and sounds flat and dull.

 

[Brian A]

Thank you for the responses and for helping me identify my "real" question which, I suppose, was, "should I care about HDCD?"

 

I HAD read the Wiki article defining HDCD before posting, but couldn't make sense of it. The clarifications above helped. (I also now found the FAQ section on Computer Audiophile, which is great help for noobs like me.)

 

I will now go on my merry way enjoying "plain" CDs and not worry about missing out on something in HDCDs.

 

[kumakuma]

Hi Brian,

 

Your assumption is correct. There's nothing extra on the Brubeck CD. The data should be standard Redbook (16 bits). The "20-bit remastered" refers to what they did before converted it to Redbook format.

 

Kuma