MQA is Legit!
@mofimadness Measurements do show us frequency response, and every DAC that supports MQA that I know of has degredated PCM performance, in terms of their slow-sloping filter that introduces aliasing. Get a Benchmark DAC3 or Chord Qutest and compare PCM on those versus a MQA-compatable DAC (make sure they are level matched). |
@mofimadness I find "almost" without fault that the MQA tracks sound better than their standard CD counterparts. Not all the time, but pretty much. Is MQA perfect, hells no, but I sure do hear an improvement. Every MQA-compatible DAC I have seen has degredated PCM performance. It’s not the manufacturers playing a trick, one stating it simply is a drawback of merely having the capability. So it’s no wonder you hear PCM as worse if using an MQA-compatible DAC. Look at the Stereophile measurements of the Mytek Liberty when fed a 44.1kHz PCM signal, it’s filter response is absolute garbage and causes aliasing (here’s the filter response of the Chord DAVE as a reference). |
@dweller MQA is half lossy and half lossless, interior to the quality of CD in my opinion, it also can’t know what happened in the mastering of the track. A quote from someone more knowledgeable than me: An input signal is truncated to 17 bits (and the input sample rate), and is then split into a high and low-frequency band. The lossless portion of the LF signal (13/44.1) is added as-is to a 24/44.1 container (FLAC or otherwise), and is nominally compatible with any Flac decoder. The remaining signal is a lossy encoding of the high-frequency content, and lives in the lower 8-11 bits of the FLAC. Somewhere in the encoding process, specific instructions for what reconstruction filters (low-pass filters to prevent aliasing of audio) should be used during decoding. Not to mention it prevents digital volume control and DSP. |
@rbstehno If you don’t have good ears or a good quality system, then you probably won’t hear a difference. The most common and cop-out response in this area of discussion. So you are totally dismissing any fault on your end? If you hear a difference, there has to be one? Maybe you’d also recommend essential oils and ginger root over chemotherapy. 16Bit vs 8Bit test, if you can get >70% confidence with 25+ trials (I can random guess and get >70% if only say 10 trials), I’d love if you could screenshot it and link to it. Even if you can get >70%, now imagine 16Bit vs 24Bit. Lots of claims which can be attributed simply to placebo. |
