You are very considerate in your choice of words. In the end it means nothing other than that the marketing statement of MQA and their apologists of the end to end processing is in the vast majority of cases simply a fairy tale or translated into modern language “alternative facts”.
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No, it is simpler than that - they just use the black box term of “psychoacoustics” to explain whatever “improvements” MQA brings.
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Exactly why spend hours crafting your art agreeing the sound in the studio then giving it to MQA to convert it to say that’s what you should have heard in the studio as the one you did was inferior due to limitations of your ADC chain
The latest launch of MQA titles on Tidal by Warner’s are 16/44.1 only over 7000 titles were archived digitally by Warner’s with state of the art ADC’s which also catered for irregularities in the digital chain, why would you do them again ??
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That digital master can be found on qobuz…
I listened to both (title of this thread). And the PCM on Qobuz wins hands down.
I noticed some blur in the mqa, probably caused by it’s short filter.
Luckily I could select a linear filter when listening to the PCM version, and all blur was gone.
Unfortunately mqa doesn’t offer me the choice to switch filters.
When is mqa releasing firmware to make this possible? 
(retorical question)
And tell me how does studio authentication exactly work?
I know the artist is not involved, (Neil Young can confirm this), so…
They play an mqa in the studio using an mqa dac, so it sounds “as in the studio” (obviously)
and then they give it a “blue dot” award?
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Yup a digitally recorded album on very early SONY equipment. Effective 14 bit resolution. Final mix archived on analogue tape.
You like sending people to Sound on Sound, go read this article: https://www.soundonsound.com/people/madonna-virgin
Article written by a guy that was actually at the recording sessions
That is lipstick on a pig if ever there was one.
Nobody claims that an MP3 file unconverted and saved as a FLAC file is suddenly lossless (except for MQA that is) Basically the fairytale that MQA tells is (again) not true
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That article is from 2016. As I stated before, they appear to be using some kind of compression to enhance the quieter sounds, along with a 3D type plug-in of sorts to increase the soundstage. Listen to the Jack Johnson albums, which are available in 24/96 on Qobuz and in MQA on TIDAL. JJ’s voice is pushed back in the mix and there is this weird, “hollow” effect to the music from the MQA version. It sounds like the same effect you get from 3D plug-ins. It isn’t the same as you get from a DAC which has a proper reconstruction filter where you can clearly make out the size of the room where the music was recorded. 3D filter plug-ins are readily available for various music apps if you don’t have the money to spend on an actual high-quality DAC.
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What’s that supposed to mean? There IS no such thing as “the sound in the studio” (if you insist this has nothing to do with the master). Are you referring to what the musicians hear in the recording room? Or the singer in the vocal booth? Or what they hear via their headphones? What are you referring to if some of the tracks are recorded separately (perhaps even in different studios)? Do you mean what comes out of the studio monitors in the control room? If so, at which point during the production process?
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Wow, lots of questions by many - that’s good!
Although I am a fan of MQA and appreciate the improvement in sound quality a lot, I cannot answer what exacy happens in the studio. That’s in the hands and ears of the mastering engineers.
As mentioned many times: MQA deblurs the original master and to me and many others, this brings back the original analogue ‘feel’ Ever since the introduction of the CD, I annoyed myself to the harshness and it’s clear that early, steep digital filters are the cause of this phenomenon.
It may well be that others prefer a clearer sound, but I don’t and prefer the MQA filter, although it’s not a real filter as this article describes
“Being an end-to-end solution, MQA takes into account the sound of the ADC and the DAC and uses different kinds of “filters” to compensate for the sound of the gear; but they aren’t really filters in the conventional sense because there isn’t necessarily any bandwidth limiting in an MQA ADC or DAC”
Also interesting:
“using brick wall filtering based on Shannon-Nyquist results in individual frequencies becoming temporally unaligned, or shifted in time with respect to one another, which we hear as a smearing of the sound.”
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If only that were true…
Hi Phil, so you are asking me why the record labels are encoding tens of million of songs in MQA…
I suppose it is not to please MQA or Tidal, but acknowledging that the ‘holistic’ end-to-end approach authenticates and improves the sound quality and assures delivery of the music to the consumer.
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And how many mastering engineers get involved in that process?
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Yes, I’ve read that article as well and the early digital recording of “Like a Virgin” is indeed 14 bits, not more.
But there are clear rules described in the document by Grammy with regard producing an analogue mix from a digital master. Once the endproduct is analogue, it is logical that a final digital master will be made at a much higher resolution. This is somethimg different than a simple upsampling procedure.
In the early days of digital recording, it was also common practice to make an analogue safety master as well.
So all this is in the hands of the record label and they are restricted by rules in order to prevent false upsamples. The 24/192 flac version is available on Qobuz by the way.
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Wim, the basic principle of MQA is that the ‘filter’ during decoding conjugates with the ‘filter’ used during MQA encoding.
I reccently discovered some very interesting similarities between HDCD and MQA and posted this in my MQA audio group. It shows that back in 1999 prof. Keith Johnson acknowledged the same which MQA is adressing now. MQA is taking it a step further now with more advanced DSP technology.
“true fidelity in critical listening situations requires a dynamic range in excess of 120 dB, as well as a way to mitigate the effects of the “brick wall” filtering commonly used in 44.1 or 48kHz A/D conversion.”
“changing a design parameter produced a clear perceptual correlate that eluded quantification by measurement.” They refer to the system they came up with as a “conjugate system of encoding and decoding,”
“You want to have flat frequency response out to at least 20 kHz, but you can’t have any energy above 22 kHz or you will get alias distortion. This requires a very sharp multipole filter with a very steep transition between the passband and the stopband, which has a number of distortive effects on the signal. It smears transients and causes significant ripples in the passband."
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And of course, there is no monetary incentive for Bob Stuart and Peter Craven involved…they are purely objective. We all know that there has never been “research” or “papers” influenced by monetary interests, 
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Because it is a way to milk extra money out of the system and to prevent consumers from having access to acutal masters.
Why would anyone think the major record labels give a whit about SQ? They clearly don’t. Only $$.
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I don’t buy the argument that it’s all for the money and not sound quality. The record labels are more and more aware that they need to preserve and authenticate the best master tapes and we are living in the times of streaming music. Things have changed a lot.
As an end-user, I really don’t care who is making money and how much. I only hope that the artists will be paid well enough. People blame me that I am being paid by MQA, which is just as much nonsense as telling MQA is lossy without explaining that it is 100% lossless up to 48 kHz. Only above that frequency, it folds lossy. The same persons are telling that MQA is only 1 fold and the rest is upsampling, which is also false. Someone else stated that MQA does not deliver frequencies above 23 kHz, again totally incorrect.
I am only interested in MQA from the perspective of “what’s in it for me” and if they would not offer a better sound quality than the original masters, it would not interest me as much as it does now.
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Better than the original? Doesn’t that contradict your previous argument?
How can changes made after the mastering process get us closer to what you call “the sound in the studio”? And what happens if the mastering engineer doesn’t like the changes and doesn’t think they’re “improvements”?
Who knows? Some Louvre visitors might like Mona Lisa a lot better if she had blond hair or if the painting were a tad bigger…
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So basically You acknowledge that MQA is misrepresenting a 14 bit recording as a true 24 bit/192 recording.
You Wrote: “But there are clear rules described in the document by Grammy with regard producing an analogue mix from a digital master. Once the endproduct is analogue, it is logical that a final digital master will be made at a much higher resolution.”
Several problems in this. The analogue transfer was done in the mid 80’s the “paper” was done in 2018. How does the fact that an album is stored analog any indication of that a digital master will be of a higher resolution ?
It seems that You do not understand much about how this works. Which would explain how You can defend MQA so vehemently.
Let me dumb it down, if a recording contains 700.000 points of information in the digital domain. Is transferred to an analog tape there is a quality loss. Let’s say that the analogue copy now have 500000 points of information. Then the missing 200.000 points are lost - gone forever. No process digital or otherwise can recreate this information. If You then digitize this copy at 24/192 (theoretical 4.600.000 points) the resulting file is still only containing 500.000 points of information. The same goes for the many 24/44-48 recordings that MQA parades of as 24/88-96 recordings (they even turn on a little light to confirm the lie)
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Somehow Your commenting reminds me of the Stockholm Syndrome
All kidding aside, please Peter go to an Audio Note dealer listen to their NOS DAC’s with 16/44 files. You will experience all the things that You praise about MQA. Without to upcoming DRM and MQA tax
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It’s quite possible that early implementations at the introduction of CD were the problem, not the filter type. To use a faulty analogy, no one claimed wheels shouldn’t be round just because early cars were poor. The car’s interesting; perhaps MQA as Wankel Engine would be an analogy? New tech can be quite seductive, but different isn’t the same as better.
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