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RE: There is this:

> > MLP is the standard lossless compression method for DVD-Audio content < <

Yes, it seems that is Bob Stuart's goal - to be in the position of a Dolby, where he makes money forever and ever based on licensing and royalties. If DVD-Audio hadn't been a total flop, he might have had something there. But when you start to think about it, why in the world doesn't everyone just use FLAC?

The answer is obviously "politics" - aka "money". If you ever actually had a DVD-Audio player, you will realize that almost NONE of them referred to the audio track as using "MLP" ("Meridian Lossless Packing"). All of the Japanese majors behind the DVD-Audio format (led by Toshiba and including almost every Japanese major manufacturer except Sony) referred to the audio as "PPCM" for "Packed Pulse Code Modulation". They flat-out refused to put an advertisement for a pesky little British company on the front of their products. The only money that Meridian ended up making money with MLP was by selling it to Dolby - who re-branded it as Dolby Tru-HD, and part of the bargain was that Dolby ended up with digital engineer Rhonda Wilson, who was the person that actually developed MLP - Bob Stuart had nothing to do with the technical end of it. Just the politics of getting it accepted as the default format for DVD-Audio.

The cost of entry for DVD (Audio or Video) was hideously outrageous - about $150,000 of up-front licensing fees and $50,000 annual maintenance, PLUS a royalty on each unit sold. The politics were such that all of the true high-end companies of the day (eg, Audio Research, Conrad Johnson, Rowland Research, Convergent Audio Technologies, Jadis, Classe - when Dave Reich designed their class-A amplifiers, and even down to "mid-fi" companies like NAD and Adcom) were virtually locked out, and only the largest of corporations could afford to be fully licensed. In the high-end arena, it was only Harman (Harman-Kardon, Levinson, Madrigal), Meridian, and I think maybe Arcam that ever jumped through all of the hoops to be licensed.

It was one of the things that actually put an end to a lot of true high-end companies, as before DVD nobody took the sound quality of any of the Japanese giants seriously. But when the only choices came from the Japanese giants, people thought "it must be good enough" and now every garage in China is making "high-end" audio equipment. Look at the recent thread in the Amplifier forum about Emotiva - everybody agrees it sounds amazing for the money, but it is not really special or anything to write home about or aspire to own or truly "high-end". Just something that gets the job done when cash is very tight. (See link below)

When everybody is using the same exact chips in the same exact way, why should it sound any different or better? That was the problem that Levinson had with their preamps 15 or 20 years ago. You could buy an Adcom preamp with the same exact op-amps as a Levinson that cost 10x the price. The main difference was the chassis, connectors, and power supply. But the Adcom was considered "mid-fi" because of its price, while the Levinson was considered "high end" because of its price. This was the beginning of the end for much of true high-end audio.

High end shouldn't be about price, it should be about doing something new and innovative that advances the art and allows for better sound quality than others have never achieved before. Much of that has been lost over the last 20 years.

Just look at the analog circuitry in any piece of Meridian kit. They still use the 30 year old Signetics 5534 op-amp they've been using since they were founded. To Meridian, analog is already perfect - kind of like Julian Hirsch's mind frame. I'm surprised they are making a big deal about their digital filters for MQA, as there is nothing measurable about them that is better except when prodded with signals which shouldn't be encoded in a digital file in the first place. I would expect that kind of thinking to end up in the same dead-end as Julian Hirsch, where the *only* thing that matters any more is the loudspeaker and possibly the room acoustics.

Strictly my opinion. YMMV.


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