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RE: A CHORD DAC Review, or more MQA PR?

>John Atkinson reviews the Chord DAVE (it's already online) and faults it
>for not offering MQA.

I think you missed the word "if" in what I wrote: "There are two unanswered
questions, however...The other concerns MQA. If that format gains in
acceptance, then the DAVE will never be able to get the best from it:
MQA's and Rob Watts's ideas on filter design are incompatible."

>Is Chord supposed to toss aside more than two decades of their own
>digital development and pay royalties to Bob Stuart?

If there is a pull from the market for MQA, then Chord will have to make
a decision. But as MQA-compatible processors from Mytek and Meridian
offer a choice between the MQA filter and one or more conventional filters
for playback of non-MQA recordings, that is a strategy they could explore.

>Why is MQA mentioned no less than half a dozen times in a review of a
>DAC that will decode 99.999999999% of all digital music out there?

My primary reference for the Chord review was the MQA-enabled Meridian
UltraDAC that I had reviewed in the previous issue. I thought it relevant,
therefore, to compare the sound of the Chord decoding MQA files streamed
from Tidal with the app doing the first unfold to PCM with the Meridian
doing the complete MQA unfolding.



John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile


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