I got these two CDs a few years back and was never entirely happy with their sound.

There's a harshness in louder passages which is similar to a mistracking LP or clipped samples.

I always wondered if this was an artifact of the #hdcd encoding on the disks but there were only scant details of the process available in the past and we were assured that it only brought benefits on players with HDCD decoders while being inaudible on standard CD players.

I now know that that was a lie. A marketing trick to encourage people to replace perfectly good equipment.

HDCD crushed the top 9 dB of dynamic range into just 3 dB, causing distortion on normal players. The decoder fixed this.

The patent on HDCD expired a while ago and free software (ffmpeg) can now restore the full dynamics. I burnt the restored version of the music to CD-R copies, which sound *incredibly* better than the originals. The music could always have sounded like this on every CD player.

The decode process produces 24 bit samples which have been truncated to 16 bit on my CD-Rs. In theory I dither is required when truncating samples, but of course this music came from analog tapes which have plenty of background hiss so there was no need to do anything but truncate the samples to 16 bit.
#jonimitchell #hdcd #cd