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RE: MQA questions

Thanks Michael.

Bob Stuart seems a good guy and I wish him all the best, but I doubt he can engage like a philanthropist having investors capitalization.

I understand that Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) is stated as an end to end technology. However it seems two parts connected in a series string.The A/D side being MQA encoded after the A/D conversion and the D/A side being encoded prior to D/A conversion. MQA profiling sits between these two.

Let's consider that A/D side MQA profiling has merit. Meridian is suggesting that 44.1KHz/48KHz being streamed into an MQA device in hardware can be profiled out to a 44.1KHz/48KHz DAC and achieve that merit. This indicates that the bandwidth required to stream non-profiled MQA is the same as if streaming already profiled MQA. In other words there is no bandwidth advantage for streaming a profile "ready" MQA file vs. streaming an already profiled MQA file.

On the D/A side manufacturers have control over their hardware. If their hardware is time aligned in accordance with maximum allowable limits as tested by Meridian then what is MQA going to do for manufacturers except be turned off. If Meridian is adding dither or other unrelated artifacts to the D/A side this can also be incorporated in the profiled CD or in streaming.

Implementing MQA on the D/A side seems much more difficult as seeming requiring predictions about the manufacturers equipment. It seems far from simplistic as to identify a manufacturers DAC chip. The question becomes as to how are they are coming up with a profile? What testing hardware was used to implant the DAC chip for testing? How does their testing hardware relate to a manufacturers implementation.

Ultimately there are countless exotic players created by manufacturers that have dealt with all aspects of implementing a DAC chip. It is hard to imagine that a profiling algorithm on the D/A side as dealing with the hardware (as opposed to simply adding dithering or other artifacts) can do anything reliable, predictable and/or significant.

My question remains as to why we need MQA hardware implementations giving arguably excellent results if profiling can be done in the CD or by streaming to an existing DAC. The only thing I see is to get a return on capitalization. Return on investment isn't unfair or any suggestion of wrongdoing. It just means that the consumer has to buy an MQA ready player instead of just an MQA profiled CD or stream.




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