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In Reply to: RE: I don't understand MQA posted by bullethead on May 27, 2016 at 12:52:51
It's a proprietary process. It is a lossy encoding process. Kind of like a hi-res version of HDCD. And lots of marketing hype.
It might have been a good idea 15 years ago when bandwidth and storage were expensive.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
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Reference FLAC has all the issues covered, I don't know the point of this if it is PCM.
I can understand if it is something else, a competitor to DSD and a competitor to PCM but it doesn't seem that way.
FLAC is just an encoding format that compresses PCM data. In this regard it is no different than .zip file compression, but it does a better job (more compression, faster processing) than .zip for audio files.
MQA takes a PCM container (encoded or not with FLAC, ALAC or any other lossless format) and, through various clever klugery manages to sneak in a certain amount of higher frequency resolution at the expense of reducing a certain amount of lower frequency resolution. This is said to sound better than the alternative low bit rate format, which lacks the high frequency resolution that may be important in favor of very low level lower frequency resolution that may not be important.
I say "may be" or "may not be" because these tradeoffs are subjective and depend on the specific recording. These tradeoffs are fucking irrelevant when it comes to musical quality, because all they do is to save a few bits. When you download $20.00 high resolution album, the cost of the extra bits (over a CD quality FLAC) amounts to less than $0.10 USD for bandwidth and/or storage. In other words, it is fucking irrelevant.
Money should go to the composers/songwriters, musicians and or recording engineers/producers and not to a bunch of useless engineers who are optimizing the utilization of a resource (digitial bandwith) that has become essentially free and whose cost continues to decline by a factor of 2 every one or two years. MQA is a scam and its continued existence depends on high end audiophiles being a bunch of fools.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Well, excellent response!
I agree and sick of all this shit. We have too much control now to introduce some other BS scheme. Enough!!!!!!!!
I would say and do say the same about DSD
Alan
DSD improves transient response. MQA attempts to create new bits from an algorithm.
In your MQA test did you, or did the Marantz upsample the 358.2k 2L files to 384k, or were there typos in your post?
I hear no benefit of MQA over the DXD files from 2L with my existing dacs.
In fact, the 2L38 remastered DXD file for MQA sounds different and better (less hf) than the original one, showing that the process had fundamentally altered SQ of the file. This leads me to think: what are they actually doing in the encoding process.
I do know that Meridian has expertise in mastering processors and that their dithering and dynamic range extensions algorithms can improve the sound of 44.1/16 files significantly.
MQA improves transient response compared to unencoded PCM at the base sampling rate. It does this at the expense of high frequency noise. In both respects it is similar to DSD, except that the parameters are different, e.g. DSD provides better transient response but at the expense of more high frequency noise.
The main advantage of DSD is that it is simple to implement and, unlike MQA, does not require proprietary technology.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
We never used the Marantz as a dac, only the explorer. Did not listen to the original DXD files since the explorer can not play above 24/192 PCM only. As I said before until there are a lot more MQA files the jury for me is still out.
ALan
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