Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater DVD Audio - Unbelievably Great Sounding!

In order to play a DTS CD, you would need a CD player with a digital output, so that the raw stream is sent to your receiver, which would then do the DTS decoding. If you try to use analog outputs from your CD player, you'll probably get screeching noise.

SACD's are often released in a hybrid format, with one layer containing the SACD audio and another layer containg regular CD-audio that can be played back on any CD player.

DVD-Audio discs usually have a DVD-Video portion on the disc containing either a Dolby Digital or DTS format for the recording that can be played back on any DVD player. This is not the same as the higher-resolution DVD-A data on the disc, which requires a DVD-A player to use.

Thanks for the DTS CD info jkohn, being that said about DTS cd, then that means I can use my cd player as it has a digital out which I use to connect it to my receiver.... how about the other type of CD i mentioned such as XRCD, XRCD2, HDCD, Gold CD....any idea???

I think many of the DVD Audio discs do require a DVD Audio player although some discs also have a low resolution track embedded as well so you can play them with a regular CD player. I think the standard CD has up to 650 MB of music data, while the DVD Audio discs have a bunch of GBs.

HDCD is backwards compatible, so those discs can be played on any CD player (although you need HDCD decoding in either your CD player or receiver to take full advantage of the increase resolution). I don't knokw anything about those other formats, sorry.

High Definition Compatible Digital (HDCD),
HDCD-encoded CD’s are encoded with 20 bits of information, as compared with 16 bits for all other CDs. HDCD overcomes the limitation of the 16-bit CD format by using a sophisticated system to encode the additional 4 bits onto the CD while remaining compatible with existing CD format.

XRCD and XRCD2 are the same. Extended Resolution Compact Disc (XRCD) is from JVC. This is also done within the current CD standard, so no special cd player or decoding box is needed to hear the benefit of the xrcd. It is essentially the same as HDCD using 20 bits instead of the normal 16 found on standard CD’s.