Tidal/MQA HiRes streaming

I made reference to it in another thread following comments from Andrew Everard in his piece on Gramophone about the Naxos streaming service. Your linked interview was very interesting because we got a lot more information.

I'm excited about MQA because it's the first idea that has come along to address the needs of streaming, rather than physical media. The fact it has broad support from the record labels and a prominent streaming services is great news.

I though the comments about timing, quality and pricing were interesting i.e. this year, 24/96 and the price of CD quality streaming falling a bit to create an umbrella for hi-res. 

Meridian confirmed at CES that software players can playback MQA providing the host has enough power so computer based playback systems should be ok. I wonder how much traction MQA will need to get before Naim fell it's important to support it. 

There's an interesting article in this months Stereophile reference:

“I've Heard the Future of Streaming: Meridian's MQA”

Not sure I understand the claimed improvement in sound quality but I'll would like to hear it

I still remain suspicious.. Why call it lossless, when according to marketing more technical descriptions  it isn't. You see careful marketing works like it appears like a full high definition sound... I dont deny that the lossy data compression is significantly very more advanced that the current perseptive acoustic compression algorithms, but to say it's lossless from what I have read is disingenuous... whether there is a case for trades description issues I'll leave to others. 

This will, in my opinion, just breed confusion, and we might then need to use  the term TrueLossless etc.. 

Simon

Adaptive-coded hi-res? For that matter, what would one call HDCD?

HDCD is a different, but perhaps not by much. HDCD  is not strictly LPCM, as the linearity is adjusted, albeit crudely, with the HDCD control signals, which in them selves are added to the least significant bits of the audio, thereby breaking the 'bit perfectness' of the PCM. 

One could call it "lessloss" music .

Indeed 

MeridIan is a member of the AES, and I being an associate member, have been searching for any technical papers or peer reviews Meridian have presented or invited amongst the audio technical and engineering  community .. I have yet to find any, which unless it's because of my searching incompetence doesn't allay my suspicions.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=17497

Unfortunately I'm not a member of AES, and haven't forked up $20

Perhaps you can now tell us about it.

Did you mean that link? It is about listening tests on various digital filters..

Simon