Meridian MQA Poll

Most "music fans", aka buyers of music, can't tell the difference between Spotify, XM, iHeart, or a CD. Are they really going to love it?

 

Don't ask me! They have no delussions about going after "most" music fans. They want to tap into the same
market as everybody here..buyers of hirez or lossless FLAC etc. There is no new market.

 

They may be claiming that a turd can be polished up a bit - to a certain extent. My guess is that the agreement with Warner will result in catalog reissues without remastering, but we'll see. If they did go to the trouble of digging the original tapes out of the vaults one more time for delivering the highest potential MQA improvement, there would be an incentive to purposely do an audiophile-type remastering without the dynamically squashing loudness moves.

 

Having actually heard it and having done some pretty serious comparisons, it's enjoyable. For the comments about "streaming" really TIDAL is the compelling aspect of this because you won't have to buy "Kind of Blue" again.
I've also heard beta of MQA and Tidal and it stands up. The Warner announcement is good because you can actually hear real music rather than just esoteric audiophile pressings or the latest Lyn Stanley record.

Without trying to create a lot of major hype, it just sounds more analog than even my favorite 24/192 tracks. Smoother, more ease, more natural, less digital like.

And Qman your guess is wrong. They are not going back to the catalog without remastering. That's part of the point of MQA. The releases they have from WB have been approved and signed off on by the artists. Where some of the
high res masters are already of good quality, the diff between MQA and recent remasters is not as wide. On some that haven't been done (or never been done) the difference is pretty big.

As more studios start to adapt (if they choose to do so) MQA from the recording perspective, it does give more hope for even better sound out of new and upcoming releases for the artists that are taking care with their recordings,
not just playing the loudness game.

It will be interested to see how it all shakes out.

 

From everything I've read, the artists have "signed off" on all of the dynamically squashed remasters or recent original releases out there now. That doesn't fill me with excitement.

 

Cool.

 

Recording perspective? You mean labels will natively record in MQA and bypass PCM recordings?

That would be truly scary.

 

I doubt it, I think it's more likely that they'll have it as an additional processing option, not a replacement. Not everyone will have the right gear so they'd exclude a large portion of the consumer base.

 

We need the best open standards, playable on a wide range of platforms. No proprietary closed formats.

 

Time and again, we have seen corners cut. Many hi-res downloads are nothing more than upsampling. Many SACDs and DVD-A back in the day were nothing more than CD's upconverted. Modern pop/rock hi-res from HDTracks/Qobuz are the same masters as the hypercompressed CD release and deserves nothing more than 16/44...

You honestly cannot believe that they're going back to custom remaster everything and each time ask the artist to "authenticate" to be released in MQA, can you? Look, until demonstrated otherwise, the vast majority IMO will end up being just a re-encoding of whatever "original" 24-bit source through the MQA encoder if we're lucky. Just like maybe if HDCD were alive today, it'd just get encoded with the appropriate flags and whatnot through the proprietary DSP box.

Agree with McLover - propretary formats not preferred in 2016.

 

According to Bob Stuart any existing digital file can be processed via the MQA algorithm which can correct any temporal damage caused by the original ADC if the ADC used has been documented so there's no need to re-remaster.

 

OK, so there is a lot less high frequency content in the undecoded MQA file than in the downsampled DSD file, correct? It doesn't really tell us about the spectral content of a decoded MQA file, though.

 

Yep, and that's what many purchasers of non-MQA hi-res music have found, too. It's all in the mastering!

 

No, there is substantially more high-frequency noise in undecoded MQA file than in, say, TPDF or S-TPDF dithered 16/44 RBCD material (stemmed from 24/352 LPCM original DXD recording). So claims of undecoded 24/44 MQA being better than 16/44 RBCD are questionable, IMO...

 

Agreed that is what your analysis shows.

BTW, "undecided" in my quote above is an iPhone autocorrect fail. It should read "undecoded." So much for predictive text!

 

The more I read about MQA, the more it looks like vapor ware. I'm sorry but they consistently refuse to explain what it does or how it works and just keep repeating phrases like "temporal repair" and then refer you to reviewers. It seems like some sort of jitter repair augmented with a fake sound staging algorithm but unless I have missed something recent, there is absolutely nothing out there concrete.

If they didn't want people to think it's just another money grabbing technique, they could sit down and describe what they are doing with words and pictures and not fancy terms like "temporal repair"

 

To make it really simple and easy to understand, I just tell people it is proprietary DSP. 100% software based, if I am not mistaken.

 

WMG claims to be first major to have streaming as its largest source of recorded music revenue »

"Warner Music Group reports that streaming is now its largest source of recorded music revenue and claims to be the first major to achieve this.

That's according to WMG CEO Stephen Cooper, who announced the news in the company's second quarter earnings call today.

"Just five quarters ago, streaming was the third-largest revenue source in our recorded music business, behind both downloads and physical," he said. "Today, we are the first major music company to report that streaming is the largest source of revenue in our recorded music business."

Other labels may have to seriously consider MQA to keep up in the streaming revenue department.

 

There is an explanation of MQA technology in the latest issue of Absolute Sound. It may not be to the satisfaction of highly technical folks, some of whom inhabit this forum. However, I seriously doubt that a more advanced explanation than what appears in print or online so far would get the attention of very many. There are some complex mathematical algorithms in the software design which Meridian contracted. How many honestly want to get into the theory that far? And if you want things explained in simple laypersons' terms, it probably wouldn't be much more than "special propritary signal processing to improve time-domain performance and signoffs to verify mastering chain specs and artist approval." Unless you want someone at Meridian to take the time and effort to write a lengthy tutorial monograph and give the information away to competitors for free. The Absolute Sound article seems to me to strike a moderate balance. Of course it raises questions for the more technically curious. Two things impede acceptance by skeptics, it seems to me - unconvincing technical explanatiions and no auditions. I see very many posts on the forum, as is typical for any product, where the former (unpersuasive technical argument) leads to dismissal and disinterest in the latter (actually hearing it). I admit I like to have a good rationale and understanding as well.

 

My interest is more financial than technical. Although it does beg a technical explanation.

I've bought into hi-res, and also The Other Proprietary Tech, HDCD. The results are sometimes discernible but always profoundly unremarkable on my mid-fi gear. I'm removing myself from the corporate revenue stream as much as I can; I'll support artists.

If MQA is restricted to streaming services, it will be easy for me to ignore. But if, like HDCD, MQA is embedded into new physical and/or download releases with no existing-tech option, I'll stop buying anything.

My concern is that, like HDCD before it, MQA MIGHT deliver a degraded signal without proper decoding. And like HDCD, extremely difficult to test and compare. Mostly for the slight-n-subtle differences. If they even exist at all.

If my existing DAC can take a cheap/free firmware update, swell. I feel confident that will never happen. $$$

Too much money for too little gain.

 

That may be ok for analog recordings, but how will that help for everything that is digitally recorded and mastered?

 

There'a always an ADC if the music goes through a digital "step"

 

That is right. A "digital" recording still includes analog inputs from microphones etc.

It IS possible to create a full digitial recording, without vocals.

 

Yes but it will be mixed (possibly with material using different ADCs), and mastered (equalization, compression, fairy dust, etc). How will the MQA algorithm be able to handle or add value after everything that goes into creating the final master?

 

You're preaching to the choir here, but there seems to be a significant groundswell supporting MQA...