The third album by the British rock band Free gave her her breakthrough. Fire and Water includes exquisite guitar playing (Paul Kossoff), expressive vocals (Paul Rodgers) and a world hit with All Right Now.
UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but rather cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to protect the softer photopolymer from scratching. The combination results in a significantly reduced reflection of the laser light inside the CD and an unequaled precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with normal CD players. Musically, the result is a sound that is strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.
The discs offered by Universal Japan are also MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoded. Anyone who outputs the digital signal from the digital output of their CD player or the previously ripped data stream from their music server to a corresponding MQA-DA converter can generate a 24-bit signal with a sampling frequency of up to 352 kHz from the CD data.
The current UHQCD series is based on the DSD data of the single layer SHM-SACDs from Universal Music Japan published in the years before. The UHQCDs are therefore ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not have an SACD player.
