The Mystery of the Ayu CD

Expanded version of this Bluesky thread

I finally did it. In my ongoing project to make FLAC rips of my CD collection, I found a CD release so obscure the internet says it doesn’t exist. Not documented on Discogs, can’t find through searching, completely unknown. What makes it special? It appears to be a DTS-encoded gold edition of the normal single.

Fre:ac just gives garbage data when reading the TOC. It isn’t in CDDB or AccurateRip at all. Is it even a CD? Also it has a lot more tracks than a CD single should. Assuming, of course, that it is a CD single...

Well the disc has a CD logo on it so it must be a CD, right? It even has a photo of a pretty lady on it.

t’s playing audio in my CD player! It must be a CD. So what’s going on?

VLC also says it’s a regular audio CD. The presence of the 'hdcd' text in the garbage text made me think it might secretly be a HDCD but none of my other HDCDs behave like this.

Eventually, I get the disc to rip. I have to manually add track information and data, but otherwise it ripped in fre:ac without incident.

There's still the question of what exactly is going on here, and why this isn't documented on Discogs. Is it a bootleg? Bootlegs will show up on Discogs though, so it's surprising this doesn't. At this stage, I don't think it is. As far as I can tell it's also not a Copy Control CD, as many of Avex's releases were at that time. Those rip fine though.

I'm still thinking it isn't a bootleg when I notice this sticker on the front. It was there before, but closer inspection makes me suspicious.

What is "Look Into Star Music"? I don't know, and searching brings up nothing. Very, very sus...

Then there's the record label. Ayumi Hamasaki is signed to Avex, a big label in Japan. But on the spine...

VERY SUS.

Also, what's going on with that DTS thing? DTS CDs are a real thing but they don't play in normal CD players. You need a decoder to play them. This disc plays in my perfectly normal CD player. So what's going on with that?

On the CD Collectors subreddit recently, there were two posts of CDs with DTS labelling that were Chinese bootlegs. They looked like this.

My Ayu CD uses the real DTS logo, but otherwise looks similar in format to these discs. If only there was some kind of smoking gun that would confirm my suspicions...

There it is, the silver sticker is identical. This is definitely a bootleg. If I hadn't seen those posts on Reddit, I might not have suspected a thing, but in the end, I did get to the bottom of this mystery because I remembered them.

But... there's something bugging me. I mentioned before that this CD has a lot more tracks on it than the official single. What I skipped over is that this a two CD set. That disc I showed up above with the pretty lady on it? That's the second disc.

Also that pretty lady is not Ayumi Hamasaki.

So, another mystery. Who is the mysterious pretty CD lady? Why is her picture on this disc? Did the bootleggers just think that people would assume that all pretty Japanese ladies are Ayumi Hamasaki?

Actually listening to the audio on the disc deepens the mystery. Not only is that not Ayu on the picture, it's not her voice on the songs either. Ayumi Hamasaki has a very distinctive singing voice, and even a casual JPop listener will recognise her.

I'm not a casual listener, but I also couldn't recognise this voice. To the Shazam-o-tron!

Well huh. That's interesting. I Shazam a few more songs and confirm that the disc does indeed feature a bunch of songs by Mai Kuraki, another singer who was popular around the same time as Ayu. I even had a couple of songs of hers when I was first getting into JPop, but I lost them along the way and just forgot about her.

Until now. What a strange way to reconnect with her. Anyway, what CD am I ripping next?

Oh no. Oh no no no no no....