Just keep in mind as you rush to spend money on the latest tech that MQA will fail. Bob's stated aim is to change all music production to AD-Processing-DA with MQA not just DA over PCM.
Secondly, MQA is not "better than" the PCM source in 99% of intentionally distorted and compressed pop music. That's just their marketing to get MQA in the door then take over later. I would know, I make the source files. MQA knows this too. Only for super natural acoustic/natural music based in realism is there even a tiny opportunity for advantage with the MQA round trip. And not nearly as important as a better amp, speakers, DA, etc. Pop music and classical music from tape or digital PCM to MQA? Forget it.
From Michael of Berkeley Audio, who is on board with MQA: I spoke with Bob Stuart about your concerns regarding the marketing of MQA and he conceded you have valid point. He also said that “de-blurring” (the MQA time-domain filter fixup) can be omitted during encoding and that doing so would be appropriate in situations such as yours where what could be considered technical artifacts of the A/D conversion process are part of a large number of factors that were combined deliberately to produce the precise sound of the mastered recording. "
Including and adjusting for the AD artifacts is part of the gig in mastering. I suggest people push for streaming of master files or use the services coming on to stream them. If you want to have a nice 16 bit file, use dbPoweramp to shrink your files, it's far better than MQA.
SRC comparisons here:
http://src.infinitewave.ca/
Secondly, MQA is not "better than" the PCM source in 99% of intentionally distorted and compressed pop music. That's just their marketing to get MQA in the door then take over later. I would know, I make the source files. MQA knows this too. Only for super natural acoustic/natural music based in realism is there even a tiny opportunity for advantage with the MQA round trip. And not nearly as important as a better amp, speakers, DA, etc. Pop music and classical music from tape or digital PCM to MQA? Forget it.
From Michael of Berkeley Audio, who is on board with MQA: I spoke with Bob Stuart about your concerns regarding the marketing of MQA and he conceded you have valid point. He also said that “de-blurring” (the MQA time-domain filter fixup) can be omitted during encoding and that doing so would be appropriate in situations such as yours where what could be considered technical artifacts of the A/D conversion process are part of a large number of factors that were combined deliberately to produce the precise sound of the mastered recording. "
Including and adjusting for the AD artifacts is part of the gig in mastering. I suggest people push for streaming of master files or use the services coming on to stream them. If you want to have a nice 16 bit file, use dbPoweramp to shrink your files, it's far better than MQA.
SRC comparisons here:
http://src.infinitewave.ca/