35 years after The Police’s last studio album, Universal released the LP box Every Move You Make: The Studio Recordings, which included the compilation Flexible Strategies. This will now appear as UHQCD in 2021 and will give access to 14 of the band’s B-side titles.
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 unmatched 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.
While the first UHQCD series by Universal Music Japan used the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, albums that were not previously released as SHM-SACD are now also appearing with increasing popularity. For this purpose, the master tapes of the Universal Archive are typically converted to DSD and then post-processed with the appropriate MQA encoder. 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.
