Is Roon supporting MQA? What are the pros and cons of MQA?

[andybob (Andrew Cox)]

Jussi noted in January 2016 that 18 bit, 96 kHz FLAC files were smaller than MQA:

MQA General Discussion

At least based on the analysis I’ve done with the currently available MQA material, it is below RedBook quality… Although larger files than normal 18/96 FLAC would give, which would have one bit more than what MQA uses (17) and enough dynamic range for the original DXD source material.

This is Jussi’s blog post on CA with the tests that @danny was enquiring about:

Some analysis and comparison of MQA encoded FLAC vs normal optimized hires FLAC

And this is a later post on CA but not sure if it is the one Jussi is referencing:

So essentially it is 17-bit after decoding which is what they begin with. After a bit of “mastering analysis” of the 2L content I ended up selecting 120 kHz sampling rate and 18-bit resolution to preserve everything (all frequency harmonics and all dynamics). Encoding that as standard FLAC results in file smaller than the MQA file. And using more typical sampling rate of 176.4 left ~30 kHz unused bandwidth and 18-bit TPDF dithered samples (in zero-padded 24-bit container) results in completely typical FLAC that is very tiny bit larger than the MQA file (16.7 MB vs 17.0 MB).