MQA - Time for a rethink?

[philr]

@Xekomi

“lossy” and “lossless” have agreed-upon meanings, just like, say, the word “blue”.

I commented on this a little while ago here.

New TIDAL tiers and MQA

Yes definitions are important and are there are no clear standards here which is part of the problem. Generally a 44.1/16 bit CD has been considered lossless and anything less than that is lossy and anything more is “HiRes” MQA is lossy in the sense that it does not preserve all the bits in a 94/24bit file. That is obvious if you look at any of the “origami” descriptions of how MQA works. In the same way of course CD is also lossy in that it does not preserve all the bits in a 94/24 bit file …

If your definition of lossless is maintaining all the bits in a mastered file any file that has less bits than the mastering format is lossy. Since most mastering these days in done in DXD most distributed audio files are lossless to some extent.