The simplest answer is that the classical specs are indeed horribly inefficient. It is a rectangular format: in a 24/192 file, it allocates the full 24-bit resolution all the way up to 192 kHz, and you certainly do not have any full-volume signal at 192 kHz, and you don’t have any meaningful signal in the least significant bit at 192 kHz either. By discarding these unused portions of the signal space, the transmission is lossy in a data transmission sense, i.e. you can’t recreate the signal including random noise in the bottom bit. But since these portions of the signal space are unused, discarding them can be lossless from an audio perspective.
The complete story is more complex, but this is the simplest answer to your specific question about signaling efficiency.
Cheers for the answer, I am not an audio-tech guy so I don’t know exactly how the audio is D/A and A/D converted. But the ‘192 khz’ is sample rate right, and not the maximum frequency sent to the amplifier? And 24 bit is the resolution of the amplitude for a frequency? Or is 192 khz both sample rate and maximum frequency?
192k is the sample rate, by classical theory it can transmit half of that frequency, or 96k.
As discussed here and there, we want that not because we can hear that far but because of other improvements it gives to the sound, directly and indirectly.
But the rectangular data space was always a ridiculously inefficient way of transmitting that.
Although some people get hung up on the word “lossy”, equating it to the Antichrist.
It’s a good bet that MQA uses non-Shannon sampling (information from adjacent sampling periods convolved with a kernel, and reversible) which means that the information density per nominal sample is greater than that from conventional regular sampling.
So this is my first time in Roon and I’m loving it so far. I previously tried amarra luxe and though sounded great, horrible ui. I did notice though that when I’d play a master album such as Ed Sheeran’s Divide on Amarra it would end up being a higher sample rate than Roon on my Chord Mojo. Other master albums seem to work fine; it’s just a handful of albums that show up as 44.1 in Roon. Any thoughts on the different sample rates!
Roon doesn’t yet decode MQA so rates will always be displayed as 48/24 or in a few cases 41/24 which is the bit rate of the originating MQA file. Amarra does a ‘first unfold’ so partially decodes the MQA file. We think Roon will have the same capability as Amarra soon for those Master files.
That was February 10th of this (now rapidly ending) year.
Are you trying to sit this one out?
Don’t get me wrong, MQA for me personally is pretty close to scam and I need MQA like a second opening on my backside and I wish MQA would vanish faster than it was built up.
Imagine what could have been done with those marketing millions wasted to convince people of MQA
But obviously it is still a topic for many and communication on this matter was “silent”…
My biggest wish is that the record companies DON’T turn their whole catalog into MQA and only offer MQA material for Streaming. That would definitely end my Streaming endeavers and I would exclusively go back to my local Music.
I don’t think the marketing amounts to millions. In fact if it did MQA would sink without trace because it would be all about marketing. They have used social media quite cleverly and that is why we are having this discussion now. It hasn’t cost them a penny and the initials MQA are trending across the internet on virtually every music related forum and platform! Cheap and effective!
I’ll pick that up Christoph and add some links to dev posts in related MQA threads below.
There are more MQA related threads than I would ideally like as a mod, hence the scattered nature of information, but they have adopted lives of their own so we have not aggregated them as aggressively as we could have. It has also been an extraordinarily long saga and users queries like yours are absolutely valid.
I don’t know the ins and outs of why discussions and negotiations with MQA have taken so long, but I do have some knowledge of the current position, and all I can say is that as a user I am very pleased with the broad outline of what lies in store for us. I had become pessimistic that we would see software decoding in Roon at all. Now I am confident it will happen. As to when, I’m not expecting it as quickly as the next major release but I know the Roon devs want to get it to us asap.
