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RE: Benchmark weighs in on MQA

Mr_Steady: "I have a hunch that if MQA is adopted at all it will be because the owners of the music want the Digital Rights Management if provides. I bet it galls the heads of the record companies no end to think that someone somewhere is ripping 16/44 streams onto a hard drive. It's probably giving them ulcers. How MQA sounds will probably have nothing to do whether it is adopted. Oh they may use that to sell it to you, and get you pumped up about it, but that won't be the real reason."

I think what galls the heads is that their "crown jewels" - 24/48, 24/96, 24/192, etc. "studio master" files are being distributed and copied.

MQA is a compromised format. PERIOD. It promises time domain "de-blurring" but cannot do anything about speaker time alignment issues even if it does something good in the digital data. It claims resolution like 24/192 but in reality it *cannot* achieve the same 24-bit resolution. AND we know that above the baseband 22kHz (44kHz sampling rate) or 24kHz (48kHz sampling rate), the rest of the ultrasonic spectrum is lossy reconstructed.

By doing this, the record labels happily sell you this hybrid of lossless/lossy without giving away the full crown jewels on the basis that this is somehow good for streaming (which I contend is ridiculous because it eats up 50% more bandwidth than Tidal 16/44 and is less compressible than just straight 24/44 PCM).

At some point in the future, the record labels will happily sell you again something better than MQA and closer to 24/96 or 24/192 that we already can obtain today.

We might not call it DRM in that we do retain the right to copy MQA files I suppose. But it is a form of control of user rights in that we have to buy MQA sanctioned/licensed DAC hardware. And we cannot access the hi-res portion of the MQA file without such hardware. This means people currently using HQPlayer or do convolution DSP for room corrections will not have access to the full resolution digital for playback.

Needless to say, I feel MQA is a step backwards and the points above do need to be expressed openly. The audiophile press seems to have a hard time being critical of something which is so obviously flawed!


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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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