On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Mike Hicks wrote:
> I picked up a few CDs at Cheapo today, and one of them apparently has HDCD
> ("another Microsoft Buynnovation(tm)") encoding on it. I'm wondering, is
> there a way to rip that data? (I'm doubly intrigued, as the CD and liner
> notes bear no discernable copyright.)
Did Microsoft buy them too now? What's next, will the annex the
Sudetenland!?
HDCD was developed by Pacific Microsonics, and the guys that did the work
have done a heck of a good job. Their A/D convertor is pretty sweet too,
but it's part of the HDCD system -- a $13,000 box. And that's pretty much
cost -- they wanted to make their money off licensing decoders into CD
players, the way Dolby did with B and C type noise reduction for cassette
decks.
I was never that convinced that the world _needed_ their solution, but
their engineering was just dandy -- sounded good. I'm just skeptical of a
solution that means everyone has to buy new gear.
> The scant FAQs at hdcd.com seem to indicate that the information actually
> gets spit out the digital output port on a standard CD player, so maybe
> I'll have to find some hardware solution..
You can *only* find a harware solution, unfortunately. It's not something
you could do in software even if you wanted to, really. It would bog down
a fast machine. That spendy box I mentioned had 4 or 5 DSP processors
running at the same time. I've got some of their whitepapers from the '97
AES convention in NYC, if you're really interested.
> Not that it matters, as my sound card only does 16-bit audio anyway (HDCD
> is supposedly 20-bit).
20-bit resolution stored in 16-bit data. But, not to worry -- if you
don't decode it, you still get regular "CD quality" sound.
--
"To misattribute a quote is unforgivable." --Anonymous