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RE: Reference FLAC

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


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  • RE: Reference FLAC - Tony Lauck 19:03:02 05/27/16 (6)

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