Any News on MQA Lately?

I hope MQA never gets off the ground.   It's not that the format is flawed, just the people who created it.   

The original plan was to also allow streamers to unpack it and send high res to the DAC of your choice.  Since they now chosen to remove the ability Im no longer interested.  

MQA is bad for music lovers!  Let's let Warner bros know .  

@emailists

Well, read Benchmark's blog on the matter. To them it IS a seriously flawed system. Their points are accurate too, but I'm not sure about audibility.

Personally I was really excited about the "digital origami" idea, when I thought it was lossless.

The good news is that if this is a good idea, then undoubtedly some one will produce an open-source version of the same idea without the flaws or licensing requirements.  Personally I would love to have my music collection take 1/4th it's current size if it could be done without any loss of quality.

Best,

Erik

The "re-mastering" comment is (to my way of thinking), key.  If I understand the advantages of MQA, it's that the removal of "blur" requires that they go back to the "analog to digital" point in time and fix it at that point, so when the DAC does the "digital to analog" conversion, it's somehow "linked" to that earlier point in time...in the way the DAC does its job.
It would seem to me that the only way to do that would be to "re-master" the music.
I suspect that "re-mastering" is not cheap, so I wonder if the "business case" might preclude most labels from producing much MQA...especially since the majority of people of OK with MP3 on their phones, the hi-quality audio market is just a small sliver of the overall music consumption world.

@ejr1953  That's pretty much how I understand it, based on MQA and Benchmark data.

How Warner Bros. will do this I have no idea. I know MQA provides a "generic" AD de-blur setting in case the original converter data is not available, but as I understand it, once the tracks are mixed together there's now way to de-blur that.

To avoid confusion, there are also de-blurring, or compensating steps at the DAC end too. It's easy to confuse them together. :)

Best,


Erik

Hi @ptss You asked a question I did not fully answer.

How is MQA superior (significantly) to HDCD

At least on spec, HDCD compresses dynamic range, in addition to providing other frequency dependent tools. That is, the equivalent of more bits in a CD.

MQA attempts to pack a 384k/24 signal into 48k/24 and improve the overall fidelity by carefully matched de-blurring filters on the AD and DA process. So it's benefits are to file/stream size as well as fidelity.

However, this is all specmanship. Sadly I have heard no improvement in MQA recordings, and don't have an HDCD capable player either so I am unable to render a subjective comparison. It kind of bugs me that there isn't an HDCD software decoder for me to use. :)

Best,

Erik