...and I agree. I have a Classe DAC1 with HDCD decoding and when I play an HDCD disc it does sound great!

My only guess is that manufacturers went the SACD route and felt that HDCD was inferior. just a guess.

with the high-precision digital filter by Pacific Microsonics is usually implemented in players and the resulting 20-bit digital information is transmitted to the player's DAC or to the digital outputs. While it may be scarce in DACs there are numerous players which use the easy to use and cost-effective HDCD chip. SACD on the other hand is also easy to integrate but comes with heavy licensing fees from SONY to be able to actually implement it. And because SACD decodes 5.1 channels it is quite different from the two-channel HDCD. I have a CD/HDCD player with SACD circuitry but it is not active because the manufacturer could not justify the product cost impact of paying those fees.

Agreed-

I, too, enjoy the sound of HDCD discs. It is too bad about companies having to pay licensing fees to ofeer that chip in their cd / sacd players.

My current CD player has HDCD playback capability, but I guess if I want to keep taking advantage of my HDCD disks, any upgrade in CD player is very limited.  The good news is that as I move farther towards using my computer as my main music source, I have the option of using Foobar2000's HDCD plugin to decode ripped CD's.

yes it is quite sad that HDCD has fallen by the wayside. There is however another option available so that one can enjoy the sound of an HDCD encoded CD uisng an external DAC.

While this option does not involve actually playing the HDCD encoded CD it does give one the added bit depth of the HDCD encoding. Here's how it works:

First one must the rip the HDCD encoded CD using dbPoweramp CD ripper program (sorry this program is Windows only) and in dbpoweramp under the DSP settings tab add the HDCD effect. What this does allow the program to decode the HDCD information and create a 24 bit file rather than a 16 bit file (the last 4 bits are just padding - the resulting audio file is effectively a 20 bit file). One can create either an uncompressed wav file or a losslessly compressed flac file.

Then use any method one likes to play back the resulting 24 bit audio file, e.g. via one's computer or via a streaming audio player, and send the digital stream into one's DAC.

Works great!