What is the difference between SA-CD and HDCD?
HDCD (officially an acronym for High-Density Compatible Digital because the company that conceived this standard could not use a name that included ‘Compact Disc’) is a variant of the audio CD format that uses some otherwise unused ‘subcode’ bits to enhance the resolution slightly. It’s an elegant approach in the sense that it provides the sort of two-way compatibility with CD like described for hybrid SA-CDs above: HDCDs can be played on regular CD players as if they were normal CDs: the player will simply ignore the extra bits. While it provides an improvement over ‘Red Book’ CD it doesn’t approach the fidelity of SA-CD, or of DVD-Audio, for that matter. HDCD was developed by a company called Pacific Microsonics, later acquired by Microsoft.
HDCD (officially an acronym for High-Density Compatible Digital because the company that conceived this standard could not use a name that included ‘Compact Disc’) is a variant of the audio CD format that uses some otherwise unused ‘subcode’ bits to enhance the resolution slightly. It’s an elegant approach in the sense that it provides the sort of two-way compatibility with CD like described for hybrid SA-CDs above: HDCDs can be played on regular CD players as if they were normal CDs: the player will simply ignore the extra bits. While it provides an improvement over ‘Red Book’ CD it doesn’t approach the fidelity of SA-CD, or of DVD-Audio, for that matter. HDCD was developed by a company called Pacific Microsonics, later acquired by Microsoft.
