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RE: Furthermore

Posted by Charles Hansen (M) on September 20, 2017 at 04:43:55

In Reply to: Furthermore posted by Des on September 19, 2017 at 19:00:49:

> > I see DAC manufacturers wishing to get on the MQA bandwagon have to hand over the design/workings/etc of their products < <

As the Chinese manufacturers have shown, it is pretty much impossible to keep someone from copying just about anything. People have tried all kinds of things in the past, from potting in epoxy to grinding off the markings of parts. But even a simple ohmmeter allows almost any circuit to be traced out and the parts written down. Normally this requires actually purchasing the product, but in the case of MQA the manufacturer apparently has the pleasure of paying MQA to hand everything over in a form that requires no work at all. (I don't know as I've not seen the MQA agreements.)

One of the only protections left is to use programmable parts such as FPGAs. Even then it is trivially easy to copy the program exactly, as the program is typically stored in an external chip and the program can be intercepted when the unit is powered on. What is much more difficult is to reverse engineer the program and understand *why* things were done in a specific way. Therefore the copycats will always be at least one step behind. Also there are some parts made now with the program memory stored inside the main chip. These can be extremely difficult to reverse-engineer. Usually it is easier to either do the work yourself or bribe one of the competitor's employees. And of course there are many stories of schematics and other IP being retrieved from trash bins and so forth.

Usually there isn't nearly enough money to be made in the audio business to warrant any of this. And now that Bob Stuart is officially divorced from Meridian (as of 4 September 2017), there is likely not a lot of incentive for him to do anything with what he learns.

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