Any News on MQA Lately?

@emailists

Well, read Benchmark's blog on the matter. To them it IS a seriously flawed system. Their points are accurate too, but I'm not sure about audibility.

Personally I was really excited about the "digital origami" idea, when I thought it was lossless.

The good news is that if this is a good idea, then undoubtedly some one will produce an open-source version of the same idea without the flaws or licensing requirements.  Personally I would love to have my music collection take 1/4th it's current size if it could be done without any loss of quality.

Best,

Erik

The "re-mastering" comment is (to my way of thinking), key.  If I understand the advantages of MQA, it's that the removal of "blur" requires that they go back to the "analog to digital" point in time and fix it at that point, so when the DAC does the "digital to analog" conversion, it's somehow "linked" to that earlier point in time...in the way the DAC does its job.
It would seem to me that the only way to do that would be to "re-master" the music.
I suspect that "re-mastering" is not cheap, so I wonder if the "business case" might preclude most labels from producing much MQA...especially since the majority of people of OK with MP3 on their phones, the hi-quality audio market is just a small sliver of the overall music consumption world.

@ejr1953  That's pretty much how I understand it, based on MQA and Benchmark data.

How Warner Bros. will do this I have no idea. I know MQA provides a "generic" AD de-blur setting in case the original converter data is not available, but as I understand it, once the tracks are mixed together there's now way to de-blur that.

To avoid confusion, there are also de-blurring, or compensating steps at the DAC end too. It's easy to confuse them together. :)

Best,


Erik

Hi @ptss You asked a question I did not fully answer.

How is MQA superior (significantly) to HDCD

At least on spec, HDCD compresses dynamic range, in addition to providing other frequency dependent tools. That is, the equivalent of more bits in a CD.

MQA attempts to pack a 384k/24 signal into 48k/24 and improve the overall fidelity by carefully matched de-blurring filters on the AD and DA process. So it's benefits are to file/stream size as well as fidelity.

However, this is all specmanship. Sadly I have heard no improvement in MQA recordings, and don't have an HDCD capable player either so I am unable to render a subjective comparison. It kind of bugs me that there isn't an HDCD software decoder for me to use. :)

Best,

Erik 

Lots of great info here, thank you everyone for what has been contributed.

In my travels, one of the audio salesmen I encountered said that "remasters" oftentimes were the reason why newer versions of the same old music sounded better, especially when they could go back to the old "analog" tape.  If that is true, I suspect what he's saying is that going from the original analog multi-track source to the now new original digital would make that conversion much better (with a newer analog to digital converter in the path).  He also said that starting out with original multi-track digital source, to digital master could also be an improvement, but (in his opinion), not as much of an improvement as starting out with an analog multi-track source in the first place.

Thinking of MQA, I'm guess something similar applies?  If the engineer can mount an original analog multi-track tape and master from there, the first analog to digital conversion would have the advantages of MQA, with the "de-blurring" happening there?  Would there be some sort of similar MQA benefit when the original multi-track recording was itself a digital source?