tasos

I am a big fan of HDCD - I think it will survive as a Red-Book format, but the PMD-200 does not have much future without the success of DVD-A, which I think will lose the war to SACD. Contrary to what's claimed, there are tons of HDCD encoded disks, and you can see them on www.hdcd.com. Many have questioned the value-add of HDCD, even the technology. I happen to have two copies of Dave Brubeck's Take Five on Columbia - one of them is HDCD encoded, the other one isn't; they are both re-issues from the original analog tapes. The differences are staggering, and good enough reason for me to give HDCD the thumbs up. Some will argue it's because the PMD-100 chip degrades the pure red-book version. I don't think so, and have played the non-HDCD version on top non-HDCD D/A converters (e.g. dCS), next to my Classe DAC-1 playing the HDCD-encoded version. The differences are still staggering.