MQA is bad for music

Audio Gear Talk MQA
41

I love the perspective you bring from your experience and I wish you well.
People seem to get very exercised about things that, in reality, just don’t matter. We do seem to love the drama though.
Is MQA bad for music? No, I don’t think so. Music is music and MQA is just one way to deliver it. I thank goodness that I am able to continue to enjoy it.

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42

There’s has been debate whether high aliasing in MQA resulted high amount of distortion. Does this distortion actually affect how we listen to MQA? I’ve an article below:

http://www.soundstagehifi.com/index.php/opinion/1104-mismatched-masters-and-false-frequencies-is-mqa-better-worse-or-just-different

Finally we got a glimpse on some graphs, whether MQA trade off frequency domain noise vs time domain transient response, these two are always in opposing terms. In any other word, if you want to get excellent low noise in the frequency domain, you can’t have a good time domain response because of steeper filter used. MQA has chosen to trade off frequency domain noise(aliasing) in favour of improved time domain response. No perfect solution here.

43

That’s an unusually rational article about MQA.

I think the one thing that isn’t raised enough in all the debate is that, there was never much chance that all the record companies would get behind hi-res streaming and give us access to the best available masters without something like MQA to help market it, so it would have probably been years before we had access to the 7,000+ albums on tidal in anything above cd quality.

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44

Linn has a vested interest in slamming MQA.

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45

Stereophile has done part 2 review on MQA, it is interesting to note that Jim Austin failed to tell the difference between a DXD and MQA! Even though the measured performance is somewhat 20dB more noise than DXD recording. In my AB test between MQA and DXD I can consistently tell the difference using a Mytek Brooklyn DAC.

In the ‘More In MQA’ people is more concern that MQA will ‘someday’ supersed all available formats, we no longer able to get original master downloads…

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46

The encoding/folding article is very insightful and the best description of the process (in layman’s terms) I’ve seen so far. Thanks for sharing.