2 posts were split to a new topic: How do you block people whose comments start with ‘dude’- and variations of?
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t subscribe to streaming and mainly only listen to my collection of CD rips. The only high-end equipment I have is my surround setup, and I mainly use that for listening to my multichannel music either from BluRay or ripped from SACDs; of which I don’t have that many. Most of the time I’m perfectly contempt with 256kbps AAC.
That being said I can definitely see why MQA is an issue. It’s marketed towards audiophiles as a way to stream high-res audio that’s authenticated to be of the highest quality; when in reality it’s not. MQA has no benefit over lossless 44.1khz the majority of the time, and in some cases can actually be worse since the “folding” process is not lossless. There is simply no need for MQA, especially when you can stream a 192khz 24bit FLAC file with only a ~10mb/s connection.
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Clearly you should take some time to listen to MQA before you post negatively on it. You are welcome to come round and listen on my system when Covid allows… You may be surprised…
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I do wonder sometimes if your unflagging support for MQA has anything to do with owning Meridian gear, and not wanting to admit the founder(s) of that company could possibly get something wrong? Or perhaps MQA just sounds better on their gear vs other brands?
I get it - I’m in the Naim cult, though I will criticize their occasional missteps (and their users sometimes near religious fervor for all things Naim) just as much as I will MQA.
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Are you kidding me? The music industry executives, paragons of virtue? The people who sold $25 CDs for albums we already had, and then when Napster came along, instead of trying to figure out how to make a living selling tracks or listing music online decided to sue college kids?
People more dedicated and want to make music accessible? Seriously?
[Moderated]
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MQA sounds great on my Bluesound gear also…
I like the Meridian philosophy, always have as it just makes so much sense. I like the Meridian sound on all the pre owned gear I have enjoyed over the years and MQA is a natural extension of this that just sounds great. All this from a small UK company who have always gone against the grain rocking the Hi Fi world.
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That $$$$ gear cannot even play a true 24 / 192 pcm.
The max input Meridian DSPs can handle is 96k.
Playing a 192 kHz pcm results in playing a 96k down sampled version so they creating timing errors themselves by doing so.
So maybe it’s very likely the Meridian gear responsible for making pcm sounding worse on those systems.
On my system - that is able to play mqa AND pcm at ANY sample rate - even up to 705.6kHz or 768kHz - PCM always sounds better. (3000$ Matrix Element X).
I bought myself in mqa for 3000$ and I’m still waiting after 2 years where the quality gain is.
Everytime I hear a difference it’s because mqa sounds worse then pcm.
Goldensounds video explained why.
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You make your choices I make mine. I’m glad you are as happy with your system as I am with mine, it’s a shame your system denies you MQA benefits… mine is superb, but there you go, you pays your money and make your choice…
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Yeah, I have the Matrix Mini-i Pro 3 in the office (fed with a microRendu 1.4 with Teddy Pardo LPS) and PCM sounds better than full fold MQA on that as well.
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Perhaps ■■ should have stuck to that instead of attempting to monopolize the streaming industry…
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That’s an opinion but I don’t consider that’s his motive. As many MQA detractors keep telling me, Spotify, Amazon Qobuz etc do not use MQA, so we have plenty of choice. The problem with engineering is, when you are right, you are right and the Luddites will take their time to catch up and appreciate this, as they are now doing with active speakers and DSP, areas in which BS and Meridian pioneered and lead the world.
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Said in 2016. Interesting but impractical 
So, it occurs to me that if MQA is really an improvement, there should be other technical experts in the AES coming out and saying so. I mean, other than BS, who has significant conflicts of interest here. Has anyone prepared a list of those folks?
Say, for instance, the members of the AES high-resolution audio technical committee?
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ROFL. And there we have it, you’re not getting it.
Storing the bits coming out of the ADC “losslessly” into a file really isn’t that big of an accomplishment.
MQA is going back the chain reverting the “errors” made in the ADC stage by various methods and quite obviously will not be a bit perfect representation of what came out of the ADC. Calling it lossy is also a bit ludicrous.
MQA also of course adds some lossiness by encoding the additional data in the portions of the bits you can’t hear.
The question is why people treat the bits that came out of the ADC as if it was a holy virgin 100% representing the original music. It isn’t, and we know it isn’t.
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ROFLOL Your drawing is faulty : MQA is not made from analogue music (A)
The mqa encoder uses a DIGITAL input file (D) so the mqa process starts AFTER the ADC
I corrected it for you.
ROFL.
It was a representation of what MQA does with math. Something you completely failed to grasp.
It restores what the ADC (including filters) does to the bits. It kind of counts backwards.
We know there are errors in the original bits out of the ADC and MQA restore some of that to a more accurate representation of the original.
And here come the lossless evangelists claiming the original bits are more accurate and anything not exactly those original bits must be the devil. It’s kind of funny if it wasn’t so sad.
ROFLOL even more. You are talking marketing BS. MQA is changing bits because it’s lossy, and they try to hide it by saying they weren’t correct in the first place. That is the easy explanation and the correct one as it seems. Maybe you should look at the video by GoldenSound. It shows that mqa is just a scam.
No it’s not marketing, it’s math. Operations are reversible. Simple as that.
The bits out of the ADC have known flaws we can hear. Using math the missing pieces are calculated and stored in the file in an area we can’t hear.
Goldensound caused the (automatic version of the) encoder to misbehave (and it looks like he did it intentionally).
He ignored the errors he got from the encoder. He ignored the response from MQA. He really didn’t give MQA a chance to fully respond.
He published the data he knew was misrepresenting MQA and cried wolf.
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Yes, that was so flagrant as to be embarrassing… but there are agendas and people are scared of the new or poorly understood, trying to explain it within their own paradigm which is obsolete.
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