MQA TnaHF's take?

[Sloop John B]

A search threw up 4 mentions of MQA whilst over on the Roon and CA forums many are apoplectic.

Any opinions one way or the other here?

.sjb

[nige2000]

lovely contentious issue

firstly im not sure what the point is
is bandwidth/storage that much of a limitation?
if so whats more important.... doing 16 44 well or just getting hires?

has mqa files not been manipulated and shrunk or deleted some of the data?
i believe very little mqa has been created from the masters?

on the other hand i think the vast majority of people couldnt tell difference between a lossless wav file and 320 mp3
so mqa will hardly affect them

great piece of mind with wav files though...

[abraxalito]

Looks to me technically dubious and, based on the marketing one of the most deceitful companies in audio land.

Their marketing must be working with punters though - dCS (over on CA) say they've spent thousands of man-hours to implement it, based on what they term 'real customer demand'.

[hudo]

Brilliant marketing move to add DRM to all our digital files.

Its a lossy format, so whatever they say about "timing benefits" or "high res audio" is just their sales pitch. It sounds worse than a normal CD or high res uncompress format.

They compress upper freq band into first 3 bits (they say "thats enough for 48-96khz range"), so for the rest of the band there are only 13 bits left ("first 3 bits are blow noise floor anyway" they say). Perfect for them because if you don't have the license, you'll be able to listen to your music but in lower quality, whatever is in those first 13 bits.

Nice explanation for an expert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl3LDwQ1pVs

boycott mqa!! :) :)

[abraxalito]

Jim Austin, who's been writing a series of articles in Stereophile on MQA just popped his head above the parapet over on CA : https://www.computeraudiophile.com/foru ... ent-821784

The vitriol he's received is something to behold.

[james]

Computer Audiophile has this article on MQA ..

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/ ... 701/

My personal understanding is that its a lossy-compression. It tries to make a 24/96 file smaller so that it will fit into a 16/44 wrapper. Maybe it works and maybe it does not.

My approach to streaming is to rip my CD's to a local server. (I have a very small number of hi-def files I got from DVD-Audio discs). I have a streamer and a DAC and nothing that supports MQA. MQA would only make sense to me if I started using Tidal -- and even then I could not decode the extra MQA resolution (without getting a new DAC or a new streamer).

I am skeptical having seen various CD's (e.g. Zepplin) reissued first in CD and then in various re-masterred versions of CD's. I don't want to have to buy everything again and I don't want to buy new hardware.

[hudo]

Interesting take from Chord:

“Fundamentally, we’ve looked at MQA, and it’s not for us," says John. "It’s a clever idea as a packing system. But you don’t need to pack your audio down. It solves a problem that’s not there now. We looked at it and we thought it was inferior to what we were doing, so we haven’t touched it."

taken from https://www.whathifi.com/features/making-chord-mojo