Glenn Richards

HDCD isn't an "audio format" as such; it's an encoding that's applied to PCM data, with in-band signalling used to indicate when the encoding is applied. Essentially it encodes the top and bottom 4dB of range using a logarithmic scale, increasing the apparent dynamic range to 20-bit but folding it into a 16-bit sample. Unfortunately there are very few players out there which can decode it. My old Arcam DV79 would, but only via the analogue out (the HDCD decoder needs to be in the DAC). There were...

HDCD decoding support