Hi-Rez Highway

Interesting

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In Reply to: RE: Aha! posted by Charles Hansen on June 06, 2017 at 19:01:41

Charles, thanks for this. I may have been right (approximately) from early on, but exchanges like this help solidify my tenuous knowledge and provisional thinking. And it should be noted that any insight I have derives also from conversations with--and in some cases specific ideas expressed by--the other JA.

Your explanation here is consistent with one thing Bob Stuart has said repeatedly--that what MQA does depends on the recording. The other 44.1 MQA I posted results from didn't have this wide, obvious gap. Presumably the Beyonce needed a lot of apodizing. Curious, then, that the CD version and the MQA version should be nearly identical--what do you make of that. (The possibility that this near-identity is an implementation error--a mistake or compromise made by this particular converter and not necessarily a specifically MQA phenomenon--of course remains.)

Just one more comment. You wrote:

>>
As far as MQA's claim that 32dB of anti-aliasing is sufficient for signals in the 0 (DC) to 7kHz range, I think that is open for debate. It would seem that high-performance audio generally revolves around the idea of continuous improvement, and not dictating "sufficient" levels of performance.<<

But the MQA folks maintain--this is my interpretation; I hope it's more or less correct--that this is not "settling", but, rather, striking a different compromise, one that prioritizes the time domain over the frequency domain to a greater extent than any previous technology. It could therefore be seen as a natural extension of the last couple of decades of thinking about digital audio, by you and others. I remember reading, a few years ago, Ayre's White Paper on minimum phase filters. Viewed in that context, MQA could be seen as a natural next step--although to say it's natural is not necessarily to say it's wise. Plus, I've seen no direct evidence that they're achieving the time-domain performance they've specified. It's on this basis--that the technology is plausible and a reasonable (if radical) next step, that I've argued that it deserves an audition.

Thanks again,

Jim

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