Buying HDCD

[SHEP]

I recently purchased Mark Knopfler’s Shangri-La CD from HMV and when playing it, the HDCD light came on, to my surprise. I have looked at the CD case and without pulling out the inlay card, there is nothing to indicate that it is anything other than a common or garden CD.
Am I missing something here or is it just a lottery in which you can occasionally get lucky? The sound is great, which is pleasing.

[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…

[SHEP]

Thanks, Ebor. Another I have to add to your list is The Early Years by Roxy Music.

[broomy]

Naim CD players supported this encoding, unfortunately, Microsoft bought the rights and then discontinued. There are quite a few titles out there, some clearly have used this and some haven’t! I have about 70 titles, I would say the following are some of the best, any Mark Knopfler, The Doors, Bryan Ferry/Roxy Music, King Crimson, Grateful Dead, Lady Antebellum, Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, Peter Green, Dave Brubeck(Time Out), Al Di Meola(Friday Night), CSNY, SuperTramp, Talking Heads, Flaming Lips, Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell & Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac live in Boston Trio. These started coming out around mid 90’s, real shame new players dropped this, as I felt some of these really made a difference and still some much later titles have this.

[Ebor]

And, as I’ve posted before, many discs will light up the HDCD light on a player but won’t necessarily be using any HDCD features at all. Apparently this is due to studios using Pacific Microsonics gear routinely for years but have the HDCD features switched off. It’s possible for HDCD flags to be put on the data and carried through all the way to the final CD without any extra sonic advantage.

Mark