MQA Discussion

Lallygagger,
Nah, never needed permission at all from either the administrator or OP except from this guy.


radioactive said:
Jon, your post is more like an ad for the 808 than anything related to the topic of this thread. If you want to send a not to Mike you should just PM him rather than post off topic and advertise for Meridian.

Did you have anything to say that relates to MQA?
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And then the lack of insight in a later post :-

"......Finally, if you read my posts on this forum, you'll see I don't bash, go negative or criticize other's......"

I know the diagnosis but not the cure....well, you've been there.
 
Coming back to the topic at hand, I think RH's editorial on MQA pretty much sums up what had gone wrong with digital in the past and how MQA addresses those issues for now and the future.

I am truly excited by the birth of MQA and what it portends for the future of digital audio and music. :)
 
Ha ha. Hurry up and buy all the physical media you can get your hands on ;) For me, it's my SACD collection which is certainly around 7-800 now.

I wonder if Vinyl and "silver discs" will get more or less expensive.

Edit: The thought occurred to me after reading this that the OP of the article must be referring to only digital music ("silver disks" too), not vinyl which he referred to several times in his article, once literally another time referring to a cartridge for his vinyl rig. Is everyone saying that MQA sounds better than Vinyl too? What about other analog sources (not cassette of course, that's bad analog media).

Mike said:
http://copper.psaudio.com/issue6/6/
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j2020 said:
Coming back to the topic at hand, I think RH's editorial on MQA pretty much sums up what had gone wrong with digital in the past and how MQA addresses those issues for now and the future.

I am truly excited by the birth of MQA and what it portends for the future of digital audio and music. :)
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Gag!:afraid:
 
I believe that all the reviewers who so loudly and lustily are singing the praises of MQA have heard it through the Meridian 808v6 because that is what Meridian uses to demonstrate it.

I wrote to Meridian and asked them the difference between the Explorer 2's MQA performance and that of the 808v6. Here is what they answered.

''Yes, they are bot MQA decoders, however if we consider both devices from their input to their output, all aspects of the 808v6 are superior compared to the Explorer² therefore performance will be considerably better.''

''Considerably'' better!!!

That means that listening to MQA through the Explorer 2 would render an experience that would be ''considerably'' inferior.

So my question is this: in order to hear the oh-so-great performance that people like Harley and Fremer (and others) are so gaga about will it be necessary to have a machine that costs megabucks?

Well, I don't know. But it is safe to say that we are NOT going to hear what they are reporting with the Explorer 2... and perhaps not even with DACs the likes of the MQA upgraded Mytek Brooklyn whose MQA performance has been reported on this forum to be inferior to its DSD performance.

Radioactive wrote this:
''Some DAC's may be highly optimized/designed for DSD and their implementation of MQA may not be the best. Meridian took a mediocre DAC and bolted on MQA, but what about companies that have great DAC's and bolt on MQA and it doesn't optimize or integrate well, but it sounds "pretty good or on par"? I'm just saying it's really all up to the implementation that's all and those will be separate from the PCM implementation within the DAC.''

I believe that Meridian's answer to me, which I quoted above, confirms Radioactive's thinking.

I have a friend who was at the Munich show. He talked to a manufacturer who has implemented MQA. However, he told my friend that he only did it for business purposes and that in fact, he (the manufacturer) was not impressed with MQA and he indicated that he knew of others who were not impressed as well.

At this point I am entertaining the idea that perhaps MQA is not intrinsically better than any other hi-res technology. If it were intrinsically better (by that I mean that the improvement is due solely to MQA implementation) wouldn't MQA sound quality be at least somewhat superior on the Explorer 2 and on the Mytek Brooklyn than any other hi-rez format would be on any other DAC?

Why haven't any of the reviewers reported what they heard when the DAC being used was the Explorer 2? That would at least give us an idea as to how much of the improvement is due to MQA and how much is due to the DAC.

We here have been talking about the potential jump in sound quality provided by MQA itself
But perhaps that improvement is not separate from the DAC using it and, at the end of the day, we can't talk about ''just'' MQA.

It all may just come down to the quality of the DACs... DACs whose output would be phenomenal no matter what resolution you were playing (given that the recording itself was topnotch).


 
I clicked on ''edit post'' because I wanted to correct an error. Now I noticed that a lot of what I wrote has been rendered in different print sizes. I wonder why?
 
rbbert said:
Ooh, some raining on the MQA parade over at Stereophile.com...
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http://www.stereophile.com/content/delving-deeper-munich-high-end#CWeyO77zLFYdltPZ.97

"....Unfortunately, I was seated much too close to, and too far off center from, the Bluesound–Dynaudio Contour system to say more than that the Guarneri String Quartet, processed with MQA as a 24/192 file from the original analog (I hope I've got that right) sounded absolutely lovely, with a very convincing depiction of space. Ditto for Louis and Ella dueting on "They Can't Take That Away from Me...."
 
j2020 said:
http://www.stereophile.com/content/delving-deeper-munich-high-end#CWeyO77zLFYdltPZ.97

"....Unfortunately, I was seated much too close to, and too far off center from, the Bluesound–Dynaudio Contour system to say more than that the Guarneri String Quartet, processed with MQA as a 24/192 file from the original analog (I hope I've got that right) sounded absolutely lovely, with a very convincing depiction of space. Ditto for Louis and Ella dueting on "They Can't Take That Away from Me...."
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And how, exactly, can that be construed as ''raining on the MQA parade?

It sounds more like a confirmation of MQA's prowess even if one is not in the ideal sitting position.
 
lallygagger said:
I clicked on ''edit post'' because I wanted to correct an error. Now I noticed that a lot of what I wrote has been rendered in different print sizes. I wonder why?
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What you wrote was run through the MQA process. :P
 
lallygagger said:
And how, exactly, can that be construed as ''raining on the MQA parade?

It sounds more like a confirmation of MQA's prowess even if one is not in the ideal sitting position.
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Played right into my hands. I laugh my sardonic laugh. Kekeke.

And as we wait for rbbert to explain himself after he is done gagging and gasping, we can digest from the Stereophile report that a reasonably priced Bluesound can make MQA sound "absolutely lovely".

That being so, I am glad I sent the 808v6 back. Can't wait to hear the Bluesound in my system, centred and equidistant from the speakers....

And now, the floor is yours, rbbert.
 
Read the comments, especially by Charles Hansen of Ayre, and Archimago's. Lossy compression (markedly so), excess noise, etc., not even needing to comment on the fact that there have been NO true demonstrations of MQA yet, and that (no surprise) the record companies see this primarily as a way to protect content in streaming sources (not necessarily a bad thing, but that usually works against good sound quality, as appears to be the case here).
 
It's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. To buy an MQA ready DAC now and be ready for Tidal's MQA launch or wait until the launch and see what new MQA hardware is available then.

I think I will wait as most of my digital brands are jumping on board the MQA train.

But I will admit, I'm very anxious to do my own comparisons.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
rbbert said:
Read the comments, especially by Charles Hansen of Ayre, and Archimago's. Lossy compression (markedly so), excess noise, etc., not even needing to comment on the fact that there have been NO true demonstrations of MQA yet, and that (no surprise) the record companies see this primarily as a way to protect content in streaming sources (not necessarily a bad thing, but that usually works against good sound quality, as appears to be the case here).
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Any link, please?
 
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