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MQA and classical music

While I still had an active Tidal subscription a few weeks ago I was able to A/B Tidal's MQA vs Qobuz's 24/96 on a great new recording of Diana Tishchenko "Strangers in Paradise." About 2:54 into the 1st piece the difference can be heard when concentrating on the piano part. The HiRes sounds clean and sharp while the MQA becomes "watery" as if a slight pedal was used. This reminded me about an earlier experience with mp3, which I had used to rip some piano music to conserve disk space a few years back. I had no idea at the time that a lossy format like mp3 would affect piano music negatively. I have since re-ripped all my piano CDs to FLAC. 5 times more space taken, but hey, I happen to really care about sonic nuances. 
The recent experience reminded me that MQA, like mp3, is lossy. Quoting from TechRadar: "In hi-res competitor format DSD is 306MB while the MQA file is just 40MB. This compares with 73MB for the 24-bit/96kHz FLAC file and 142MB for the 24-bit/192kHz version."  Thus MQA file size is just about 54% of HiRes FLAC size; there is no going around information theory: less information is less information. And for some music, definitely not all, it can be heard.
Initially, when I started comparing streaming services in October 2019, I thought MQA was some great new music format; "Master Quality Authenticated" is a great name! It invokes associations with master tapes and mastering, and "authenticated" I took to mean something like "guaranteed." That's an effectively misleading naming. Wikipedia has a good article on MQA. I can now understand why some DAC companies like Chord, RME, Schiit, and likely more, will not support MQA. More popular brands like Bluesound and Fiio, do support MQA, as there is popular demand for native decoding of the format. If we spend thousands on dacs/amps/speakers/cables and discuss the tiniest sonic nuances that upgrades of them make, then digital format differences should not be overlooked either.
ghjuvanni
clearthink
1,421 posts
 

audiozenology"Do you have anything to add to this conversation, or are you just here to Troll me again and sideline and hijack the conversation?"

I will do neither of you're proposed actions and will instead alert the moderators to you're silliness hear.
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mattcroatia
2 posts
 
I wonder if there is a relationship between the set of persons who don’t hear improvements in MQA and the set of persons whose ears grew up hearing digitally encoded recordings?  I am 62 and my ears grew up on live music and music recorded on analog tape machines and pressed into vinyl. One of the other posters above referred to the sound of a cymbal.  At the price I am willing to pay for a DAC I have not heard a DAC that does not produce a cymbal sound not found in nature.  It is possible that crunchy sound is preferred by some listeners but to me it is not what I hear when I go to the symphony hall.  Whether MQA would be better if it were uncompressed, interesting question. What I like about it comes, I assume, from the pre-ringing correction, and for me it makes all the difference. My two cents.
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