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[EnglishTiger]

I have the European release of Alan Jackson's "Greatest Hits II" which, according to the info on the CD and the Rear Case Insert is supposed to be HDCD, but MC 26 is telling me it isn't. I checked with Discogs, which lists the format as - "CD, Compilation, Copy Protected". All the other versions are showing as HDCD. However when I bring up the page for the European release and scroll down the page I spotted the following - "Notes
HDCD(R)."

So is there any simple test I can use to determine if MC is telling the truth; i.e. it's isn't an HDCD disc and the US release artwork was, wrongly, used on the European CD and Case Inserts; or is a genuine HDCD that, for some odd reason, MC26 has failed to detect.

MC 26 did detect that my Dire Straits "Sultans of Swing", Go-Go's "God Bless The Go-Go's" and Kenny Chesney's "Greatest Hits" CD's were all HDCD versions.

It also detected that 3 tracks on my "Essential Alabama" CD, 2 tracks from Kenny Chesney's "The Definitive Collection" CD and 1 track from my multi-artist "Ultimate Soul" 4 CD compilation were in HDCD format even though there was nothing on any of those CD's or the case inserts to indicate that fact. However, after a bit of searching/manual effort I was able to determine that each of those tracks could have come from CD's that were formatted as HDCD.

P.S. I tried using WMP12's ability to detect an HDCD disc "on the fly" but was not aware of any Discernible Difference in the audio quality regardless of whether that option  was enabled or not.

[tij]

CUETools can detect HDCD

[dtc]

The best way would be to find someone with a CD player with the HDCD chip in it. That will tell you pretty conclusively whether HDCD was used or not.

However, even if a track has the HDCD markers, it may or may not have any actual HDCD code in it that effects the sound. The Pacific Micro A/D/A was one of the best ever made and many producers used them even if they did not use any HDCD features. So, many tracks show up as HDCD but there is no actuall HDCD code  in the track other than some markers.  Matt put some code in MC to not report a track as HDCD unless there was actually HDCD code, not just the markers.  Hence, some tracks that people think are HDCD are not reported as such in MC, since there is no real HDCD code in them.

HDCD is proprietary. Pacific Micro licensed  the chip makers who did HDCD in the CD players, so they are generally taken as giving good results.  PM sold HDCD to Microsoft who implemented it in WMP, so that implementation is generally believe to be based on the actual specifications. Other implementations, such as in MC, foobar, dPpoweramp, EAC, hdcd.exe, etc. are based on software that was developed to decode HDCD, but was based on the authors knowledge, not the specification itself. So, it is hard to know how complete those implementations are.

The foobar implementation is based on HDCD.exe (a different program than MC uses) and it has a facility to report the actual HDCD Extensions  that that were detected. That is one place to start to find out just what might be in your CD.   There is a discussion here of the details:

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,79427.0.html

Bottom line - CD players with HDCD detection and WMP should be accurate at detecting HDCD. Other implementations are very good, but since they are not based on the actual specifications, they may not be entirely accurate.  And, even if any of these detect HDCD, there may not be any significant HDCD code in the track.  The MC implementation complicates the situation in that it reports tracks with HDCD markers, but no actually sonic changes, as not being HDCD.

Good luck.