Just heard some MQA today...........

I heard it last year, but didn't hear a kind of A-B comparison. What I heard I liked, but I like to hear an A-B to be convinced. Perhaps this years show in Munich will give me that opportunity.

I have heard it several times, including at Meridian HQ

Lets just say "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but not jam today"

A real shame. 

jon honeyball posted:

I have heard it several times, including at Meridian HQ

Lets just say "jam tomorrow, jam yesterday but not jam today"

A real shame. 

I was looking forward to / hoping MQA could be a means of improving Tidal's offering (I use it a lot through the naim app). Out of interest, what didn't you like about what it was doing?

Jon, your response caught my eye - can you expand on your reasoning?

S

There is no material. Effectively nothing. And nothing coming any time soon. Tidal said they would, but the new boss has backed away from it. 

There is no studio engineer kit which allows you to take your own masters, process them, play them back to satisfy yourself in your own studio that it is working properly. I asked for this over a year ago. If you cant get the pro audio world on your side, you are dead. 

There is one last chance -- iPhone 7. Apple will be going to hi-res audio. If its not MQA, then MQA is completely dead in the water. It is giving every impression of coming up for the third gasp of air at the moment anyway.

Its all really rather sad. It could have been huge. 

Well I certainly heard and saw Tidal streaming an MQA of  Enya's latest album unless it was all smoke and daggers as our previous illustrious Taoiseach called it.

The rest was songs rather than albums that were there locally, Dire Straits, Van Morrison, Ella Fitzgerald were the tracks I heard.

So there is some material.

SJB

you cannot go end to end. And the material that there is has been carefully crafted and converted by Meridian, as far as I can see.

The lack of any end-to-end process that is deliverable today simply kills it stone dead in my view

Is there a need for MQA anyway, with digital sources from Naim, Chord, and other companies making very enjoyable music?

Now that we have heard with our own ears that there is a 'better than CD'  sound (and not just vinyl!), I, for one, am praying for anything which might provoke the supply of a meaningful body of work, all genres, past catalogue, and every new release. What we are getting is a mountain of obscure (and maybe very worthy) 'Classical' stuff, interspersed with a very few lollipops. I can dream I suppose.........

The Absolute Sound raved positive about MQA, but then the commenters whom appeared to have the knowledge seemed to highlight a fact that in order for MQA to work a master had to be played through MQA hardware only and they retain the ownership of the original. I am not experienced enough, so a look at the TAS website may help. I asked Naim directly about MQA a few months ago and they said Meridian came to HQ and showed MQA, but at this stage Naim passed on it. One thing seems certain though, NO ONE appears willing to offer a clear cut  A vs B comparison.

Once Rob Watts of Chord electronics finishes his Advanced ADC converter, I am not sure there would be a need for MQA .... ?

But maybe it has some use on DVD and Blu ray encoding.... 

Nice idea, but seems the complications of it have made it a non starter. 

And then we have the Chord Mojo and Hugo, which works with every CD already made....

Bert Schurink posted:

What I heard I liked, but I like to hear an A-B to be convinced.

Convinced of what? That you liked it?

Isn't MQA just another way of marketing digital music replay? There's redbook CD, HDCD, and SACD. The lowest format resolution seemed to have won that war, eventually loosing out to MP3. Meridian would have done best to sell the MQA technology to Apple - maybe they tried and Apple saw no future in it. According to Aussiesteve, Naim also passed on MQA, though that could have as much to do with Naim not wanting to throw a bone to a competitor.

While I get the streaming efficiency aspect of MQA, and some may well like the SQ, I can't see this as more than a flash in the pan.  The streaming world is all about convenience and not about SQ for the vast majority of buyers. Storage is cheap and accessible via cloud. I don't see a large enough market concerned with MQA technology, wonderful as it may be..

What's MQA?
Thanks,
Max

Jon, thanks for the reply. Yes part of my understanding of MQA ( although I may well be wrong) is that it's reall strength is matching construction filtering of the digital encoding process with the reconstruction filter of the DAC process thereby making more accurate and less artefact prone the whole replay system chain... so to my mind if music is not being originally recorded and mastered in MQA it defeats much of the point.

Simon

Meridian's proposed lossy high-res audio file format. A lot of hoohah around it being more than an upscale mp3 but in the end, bits are binned in favour of a smaller file size.

EJS, yes I wasn't even thinking of the lossy high end encoding part of the spec.

Thanks.

M

Massimo Bertola posted:

What's MQA?
Thanks,
Max

When my butler comes in I'll ask him to post an explanation for you.

SJB

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

EJS, yes I wasn't even thinking of the lossy high end encoding part of the spec.

 

Simon, The Absolute Sound online mag has a lot of detail explaining MQA. It is free online to look at (and has great reviews) so you might enjoy. It is over my head this MQA, but you guys get it.

EJS posted:

Meridian's proposed lossy high-res audio file format. A lot of hoohah around it being more than an upscale mp3 but in the end, bits are binned in favour of a smaller file size.

Actually, I think if you read the articles concerning MQA you will see it specifically stated that MQA is lossless and furthermore no bit are binned in favor of a smaller file size .. through some kind of origami wizardry bits are actually folded under the noise floor during transmission, being unpacked at time of replay.  This, too, is explained in far more detail in the abundance of articles you'll find on't web.

A Comprehensive Q&A With MQA's Bob Stuart

If you go to the home page of Computer Audiophile web sit you will get a A Comprehensive Q&A With MQA's Bob Stuart.

Edward

Bob Stuart says....could he be the next........

Notch on the belt?

Does look a bit tight admittedly, and with some overhang.

John Willmott posted:

EJS posted:

Meridian's proposed lossy high-res audio file format. A lot of hoohah around it being more than an upscale mp3 but in the end, bits are binned in favour of a smaller file size.

Actually, I think if you read the articles concerning MQA you will see it specifically stated that MQA is lossless and furthermore no bit are binned in favor of a smaller file size .. through some kind of origami wizardry bits are actually folded under the noise floor during transmission, being unpacked at time of replay.  This, too, is explained in far more detail in the abundance of articles you'll find on't web.

Can't claim to have read all articles, but MQA is definitely not lossless. Essentially, based on the premise that higher frequency sound occupies a small part of the audio information space, the high frequency info that Meridian deems useful is preserved, and the rest discarded. The relevant information is then 'folded under the noise floor' as you put it to further reduce the file size. The folded bits themselves are preserved, but again, the information space in which they are plugged is lost. Whether all those lost bits are truly only noise or inaudible, you may argue about - but they won't come back until Meridian finds a way to tap into 7th dimensional space.

EJ