Hi, putting this in Music Talk since our Hardware section isn't that active, but just out of curiosity I was wondering what brand of DVD/Blu player that I'm likely to find used in a thrift shop, is the most likely to be able to also play SACD and HDCD discs?

I know Sony made SACD, so I always check their players, but I'm not sure about HDCD. Any chance of a player that might have both?

I don't remember any Sony players reading the HDCD layer. Pioneer and Sony usually played SACDs in their higher-end players. Denon players would play everything - SACDs, DVD-A, and HDCDs. Panasonics almost never played SACD as they were the company behind SACD's competitor.

Only a handful of HDCDs really took advantage of the format, which pushed slightly past the Redbook CD's limits. Outside of the Neil Young HDCDs, not sure the format was really worth it.

Thanks for the info. I just see so many players at the thrift stores nowadays, I was thinking I could take advantage of one for some extra fidelity in my music listening.

The only HDCD discs I remember were the Neil Young and Grateful Dead. The problem with those Dead discs is that most a lot of people have reported disc rot with them. Some of those sets were hundreds of dollars and out of print now. I have a Sony 4K player that I use for SACD because it is worthless as a 4K UHD player.

The Sony UBP-X800M2 plays everything but HDCD.

DVD-Audio, SACD, CD-DA, DSD (up to 11.2 MHz), FLAC, WAV, ALAC, and AIFF. And does a great job of playing files from USB flash drives.

Onkyo players would usually play most formats.

Thanks all.

I’ve been under the weather a bit here lately so I haven’t been able to get out to the thrift stores yet but I’m hoping to get out now that it’s warming up.