Any News on MQA Lately?

The big question will be if the market goes for MQA.  Without a large enough catalog of music, I don't see the DAC makers investing in making their units MQA-compatible.

The MQA folks have said that non-MQA-compatible DACs will be able to play back their files (as they are in a PCM wrapper), but from the few articles I've read on the subject, it seems that FPGA-based DAC manufacturers report that the resulting sound quality is not good.

I guess time will tell.  But it seems that there was a real flurry of excitement about MQA earlier in 2016, which seems to have calmed down.

The whole promise of MQA to labels was to give them a way NOT to release music in high-res equivalent to studio master, and still get some improvement over CD quality just enough to make people buy the same music again. This is actually good that it didn't fly- otherwise we won't see any more high-res releases. As to apodizong filter with no pre-ringing, that type of filter is available in some DACs independently of MQA.

PS Audio said they were not at all impressed by it. Benchmark has a long blog post on the matter and just how convoluted the entire process really is.

Meh, the Brooklyn is a very good dac with or without MQA, but I was looking forward to finding yet another veil lifted... or some other ridiculous thing like that. Nothing.

Best,

Erik

I’m sorry Tomcy, your mixing up a few things.

MQA does in fact require the use the apodizing filter. What MQA adds is decoding of the high resolution data as well as their claims to time domain fixes. MQA attempts to compress 384k data (in a lossy way) into a 48kHz signal.

Think of MQA more like FLAC vs. MP3 sort of kind of. :)

The best independent critique I know if how it works is at Benchmark media’s site.

In the case of the Brooklyn, when you have MQA detection and decoding enabled it will force you to use the apodizing filter. If you disable MQA you can pick from 3 different filter types.

Best,


Erik