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RE: MQA questions

The problem is that there is no standard for playback filtering. This means that there is no way to guarantee that the listener gets the same signal as was sent to the monitoring amplifiers in the mastering studio and approved by the producer(s) and artist(s). This problem is not solved by knowing what A/D is used to produce the master. What matters is the DAC that was used to play this master and have the producers and artists sign off on it. Furthermore, most new recordings are actually tracked and mixed at high sampling rates where filtering is not such an issue. There may be multiple ADC's or (or software converters) in the signal path. The mastering engineer may deliberately chose or adjust the conversions to get the sound he wants.

Trade show demos are not suitable for evaluating new formats. They are nothing but a marketing side-show. The claim that MQA can improve the sound of existing digital recordings requires independent evaluation of the process under controlled conditions using music source files chosen by the testers. If is very easy to "rig" a demo, especially if there are multiple users and the operation of "group think".

If MQA were open and came with a complete specification and source code for encoders and decoders, then it would be possible to evaluate this system fairly. This is not what was done or appears to be done. A good model of this process would be the FLAC CODEC.






Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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