Michael Ritter: HDCD is a comprehensive process for greatly increasing the fidelity of a digital audio recording. HDCD is fully compatible with the existing standard for consumer playback, the compact disc, which is fundamentally a linear format with 16-bit resolution and a sampling frequency of 44.1kHz.
We had to make HDCD compatible with this standard. Yet the goal of HDCD was to achieve a vastly higher level of fidelity—a level of fidelity directly comparable to the finest recording technology available—ie, first-generation analog master tape or direct-to-disc by record lathe. To do this, the HDCD process had to be a conjugate system. By that, we mean a system where all aspects of the recording and the playback decoding had to be controlled as much as possible. For that reason, the HDCD process wraps around both the A/D conversion and D/A conversion.
At the same time, as a concomitant requirement for this overall level of fidelity, we had to be able to take the HDCD process and essentially cut it in half. That is, encode the recordings, but be able to play the recordings on any standard playback equipment and simultaneously hear not only no artifacting, but a substantial improvement in fidelity over what can be obtained with a commercially available A/D converter. We've been successful in achieving that.
We have a process that, when you encode with it and play it back on standard equipment, you have a better-fidelity recording than is available through any other current digital recording method. But when you encode and then play back through equipment with the decoder, and if the playback equipment is implemented to a state-of-the-art level of performance, then you have a record/playback fidelity that is arguably as good as—or maybe even somewhat better than—any other method currently available for recording and reproducing music.