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MQA - One Filter to Rule them All?

Hi Everyone,

Just thought I'd start another flame....er, discussion. I've been reading some about MQA.  It has several components, but I want to focus on one in particular. The digital filter compensation.

The other two parts are compression and authentication.

We don't have a lot of DAC's to listen to with MQA right now, but here's my understanding.

By measuring time or amplitude errors in ADC's AND DAC's MQA seeks to correct the behavior, making the entire A/D --> D/A chain closer to ideal. It's pretty ambitious. What I'm wondering is, assuming this is real and not snake oil, does this mean all MQA DAC's will begin to sound alike? Will otherwise mediocre DAC's step up, and great DAC's not have that much to contribute anymore?

If so, maybe this will usher in another great era of tone controls being built into our preamps or DAC's instead of having to make tonal changes via cables and tweaks.

What say you? Assuming MQA is not snake oil, (could be, haven't heard it) doesn't it mean all DAC's will sound the same?

Best,


Erik
erik_squires
erik_squires OP
16,444 posts
 
OK, I just gave up on MQA. Stereophile's latest article starts with such shameless hyperbole that it's gone off into the land of cold-fusion, dark energy reactors, and healing cancer with magnets.

It's not like I didn't know Stereophile has to make a buck to stay in business, but this level of bs is higher than my waders. I can't be polite and smile anymore.

Now I'm going to go try to do some DSD streaming and see if I find a compelling reason to eat up all my hard disk space with DSD downloads.

Best,

Erik
mahler123
3,446 posts
 
I didn't think that Stereophile's latest was nearly as orgasmic sounding about MQA as Robert Harley at TAS.  If MQA bombs, Harley really ought to leave the business after such shameless shilling.
  My take on MQA is that it is a high Res format that allows for more compression than other high Res formats, which rely on tremendous amounts of over sampling , and therefore take up more data space.  Streaming companies will love it because they will save bandwidth.  
  Casual listeners don't care about better sound.  Those of us who do care won't be able to hear any superiority from other high resolution formats because the differences will be minor, subjective, and system dependent, like many other Audio Tweaks.  Manufacturers will ( are) chafing and being under Meridian's Thumb and will subvert the implementation .  It will join SACD as barely hanging on by a thread in the market place, until some wizard behind the booth attempts to get us to repurchase our collections with the latest 'breakthrough '
sevs
301 posts
 
Stereophile, in my opinion, gives pretty negative spin on MQA: they just  ask polite Q and let the guy do the talking. The answers smell bull to high heavens! Thanks for the tip, I will try to read TAS take on this, i cancelled TAS subscription a year or two ago.

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