Hi there, tellme if any of you had seen this before.

I got some new CD, they seem to be strange, at least for me. They are marked as HDCD, at 24bits/96KHz. Where the serial number of the cd is printed (not painted, printed as part of the optic layer) says 24 BITS. Strangely, they seem to be normals cd, they can be played in any cdplayer or cdrom.

The color of the optic layer is the same of the regular dvds (golden).
The sound is superb, very similar to dvd sound, but played as cd.

All the cd are original (with deluxe boxes, booklet,etc), in some of them there are logos of sacd + lineal SBM and the label U2, others only show the HDCD 24/96 logo.

I'm really confused, what kind of cd are these?, I didn't buy them as SACD and my dvdplayer does't play DVD-A.

http://www.hdcd.com/about/whatisHDCD.html - This has HDCD as being 20 bit, with the extra bits apparently encoded by dithering the lowest bits.

So what HDCD 24/96 is, I've no idea, unless they are hyping the premastering at 24/96 before it goes down to squeezing 20 bits into 16.

25% compression would not be a stretch for current lossless encoders, but squeezing it in so it does not upset non-HDCD players is quite something.

Mind you, if cheaper players are not bit accurate to the the last bit or 2 anyway, maybe they skim the last 4 bits off (making it 12 bit resoloution on standard players) and then encode those plus the extra 4 in 4 - 50% compression, now that's a tougher prospect, unless it's a lossy compression

I think it means:
Master at 24/96, then use of hdcd encode to get 20 bits.
I have no problems with that, but:
Neither, my receiver or cdplayer have hdcd decode and the all these cd sound a lot better than any normal cd. Also, why the disk should have the 24bits ISRC text printed in the optic layer?, I've never seen that in others cd.