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RE: Meridian's MQA - Here we go again.

Posted by stehno (M) on April 22, 2015 at 00:42:05

In Reply to: Meridian's MQA posted by panhead on April 14, 2015 at 11:08:49:

I just posted this on a thread over in the High-Rez section and thought it worth sharing here.

The problem every last one of our playback systems face has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the resolution format. The MQA can no more solve the problem than a reasonable component or cable upgrade, just like all the other already established high-resolution formats have demonstrated.

All higher-rez promoters are all barking up the wrong technology tree. That is, if one is seeking anything more than relatively minor performance improvements.

What nobody seems get or at least admit to, is that listening to even the most well-engineered high-rez recording on a well-thought-out $1million SOTA-level playback system, the listener is not audibly hearing anything more than roughly the equivalent music info capacity of a well-engineered MP3 recording.

That's the intellectual truth of the matter.

The cause of this catastrophic problem (to use Robert Harley's words) is not inferior resolution. Rather it's a grotesque amount of superior and universal distortions that utterly destroy or cripple a component's precision and accuracy so that the noise floor is raised so high as to render much of the music embedded in the recording inaudible below the much raised noise floor and therefore remain inaudible.

I would attest that perhaps every last reasonably thought-out playback system is reading and processing roughly 99.999% of all the bits embedded in a given recording. No better or worse than downloading a 100MB flac file or burning that same flac file to your $40 CD burner that came with your computer.

All the detail in the world is being read and processed, only just like a severely blurred photo of a beautiful red Ferrari where the noise floor of the photo is so high, you can barely even tell it's a Ferrari. Is all the detail of the Ferrari stored in the photo? I say yes. But much of the signal is so distorted, it remains invisible. A performance-limiting governor if you will, that plagues every last playback system. This is why even well-thought-out playback systems all sound more alike than they do different and not one of them comes even remotely close to the absolute sound aka the live performance.

Bear in mind that the most severe distortions are not even audible per se. These are inaudible distortions that quietly go about their business of catapulting a given playback system's noise floor to very high levels. And it's not just low level detail as many speculate. The harm is induced pretty much equally between low and high level detail.

And just like with a 3.5MP camera or a 13MP camera, the problem with the blurred photo is regardless of the camera's resolution capability or the number of pixels stored per photo graph. An unblurred photo of a beautiful red Ferrari taken with a 1.5MP camera is far more beautiful than a blurred photo of the same Ferrari taken with a 16MP camera.

And just like the camera analogy, it's not the number of music info bits that remain inaudible, it's the percentage of music info bits that remain inaudible due to the much raised noise floor.

This is not hypothesis, this is fact and is demonstrable. But when "scientists" and the science-minded are already halfway up the wrong technology tree, it's pert near impossible to call them down until the entire industry has been forced to buy into it at great expense.

Only for many to wake up 5 or 10 years later realizing they've been doing cartwheels over small incremental improvements when the industry had them convinced the advancement would be life changing.

This is why a well-engineered MP3 recording played back on a SOTA-level system theoretically isolated from the harm induced by such universal distortions should sound at least if not far more naturally musical than a well-engineered 24-bit / 192 kHz high-rez recording on the same SOTA-level system fully susceptible and affected by these universal distortions.

And like the higher rez camera susceptible to distortions, It's simply impossible for higher rez formats to cure the ailments plaguing our systems.

Edits: 04/22/15

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