HDCD CDs and transcoding

[Soli]

I suspect the other tools have come from reverse engineering and are not open source. Microsoft owns HDCD now, although they seem to have trashed it.
HDCDkinda useless nowadays anyways, as a couple of todays top ADCs sound just as good/better, and then you dither the resulting 24bit file down to 16bit with various dither-algorithms and get music that sound in all DAC not just HDCD capable DACs. Of course the same goes with HDCD files that arent coded with HDCD specific features. It's just that you never can be sure until you have analyzed them, so it's a minor pain in the ass. Just like de-emphasis was.