Tidal MQA

Posted by: Graeme MacArthur on 12 November 2015

I see the latest Tidal update allows for streaming MQA files, subject to a subscription upgrade. Does anyone know if this is something that might be incorporated into Naim streamers?

Posted on: 15 November 2015 by sjbabbey

alan,

That figure of 3Mb/s seems a lot larger than the bit rate for compressed lossless CD given that the bit rate for uncompressed 16bit/44.1kHz wave is only about 1.4Mb/s.

Indeed uncompressed 24bit 48kHz files would only have a bit rate of 2.3Mb/s.

Posted on: 15 November 2015 by alan33

smb -

yeah, I see your point! I was just scanning the article on stereophile to be sure it was the one I remembered ("audio origami" indeed), and the author wrote 1.5 Mbps per channel...which I doubled instead of mis-believing! Point remains that Meridian have a numerical signal folding algorithm to do lossless encoding equivalent to hi res, hi rate then streaming at achievable rates. My error for quoting a rate probably two times too high. Good catch! (And thanks for letting the "hear" instead of "here" Freudian typo slip... Haha)

regards alan