Buying HDCD

[Ebor]

Total lottery, unfortunately. Here are some posts I’ve made in the past that might be helpful:

CD Players

HDCD, somewhat like Betamax, was a good idea which suffered from a number of unfortunate factors which hindered its uptake. One of these was the way HDCD discs were not always labelled as such and, even when they were, the HDCD encoding wasn’t always done correctly. There were many discs that lit up the HDCD light on players but on which no HDCD features had actually been used! This wiki is far from exhaustive but shows the rather confused state of affairs: List of HDCD-encoded Compact Discs - …

Hdcd?

There are various lists on numerous sites - as suggested above, just google ‘hdcd list’ and check more than just the first hit. What really doesn’t help is that many manufacturers didn’t label their HDCDs, so the decode light coming on can come as a (pleasant) surprise. The downside is that you might have several in your collection without knowing it. Linn are one of the few labels to have kept producing HDCDs beyond the early 2000s, so try some of them. Neil Young, Mark Knopfler and Mike Oldf…