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MQA - One Filter to Rule them All?

Hi Everyone,

Just thought I'd start another flame....er, discussion. I've been reading some about MQA.  It has several components, but I want to focus on one in particular. The digital filter compensation.

The other two parts are compression and authentication.

We don't have a lot of DAC's to listen to with MQA right now, but here's my understanding.

By measuring time or amplitude errors in ADC's AND DAC's MQA seeks to correct the behavior, making the entire A/D --> D/A chain closer to ideal. It's pretty ambitious. What I'm wondering is, assuming this is real and not snake oil, does this mean all MQA DAC's will begin to sound alike? Will otherwise mediocre DAC's step up, and great DAC's not have that much to contribute anymore?

If so, maybe this will usher in another great era of tone controls being built into our preamps or DAC's instead of having to make tonal changes via cables and tweaks.

What say you? Assuming MQA is not snake oil, (could be, haven't heard it) doesn't it mean all DAC's will sound the same?

Best,


Erik
erik_squires
ahendler
416 posts
 
I have heard MQA with a Meridian Explorer2 and I like it. I believe the quality of the dac will still be important. Since when they encode an album with MQA they do not know which dac it will be played on they will use a generic catch all process. This says that different dacs with MQA will still sound different
Alan
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,394 posts
 
http://schiit.com/news/news/why-we-wont-be-supporting-mqa
erik_squires OP
15,670 posts
 
@ahender you are not alone, however I think there's a bit of a mistake there in terms of the generic process.

It's a 2 part process.  During encoding they attempt to remove any effects from the ADC but after this it's expected that the MQA decoding process takes into account the DAC and attempts to compensate for it.  It's most certainly NOT generic. The DAC must be measured, corrected and submitted to Meridian for certification. 

Meridian _do_ have a generic ADC compensator however, for encoding previously recorded high resolution sources when the correct filters are not known. I think that's maybe what you were thinking of. 

Best,


Erik 
erik_squires OP
15,670 posts
 
@kijanki Great, thanks! :)

Interesting reading. 99% of that writing has nothing to do with sound quality but marketting and branding concerns, which are very very real. I do worry it’s just a way of taking money out of the market, like GMO corn seeds.

If I read it correctly for Schiit it boils down to being some one new to pay money to, in addition to questions about how well they would be treated as a minor (in volume) manufacturer.

I think Schiit is playing it safe. MQA is brand new and by 2017 could be useless. If Tidal goes down, or worse, gets bought by Apple, it may be all over.  One other point is differentiation.  MQA could very well be the opposite of this, if all DAC's will be forced to sound much more similar than before. The value proposition is going to have to be high, because honestly I don't think most people will fully understand what's going on with it besides compression. 

There’s also the possibility that the algorithms will be analyzed and, using that knowledge, better, open source solutions will be able to leap frog over them. It’s a very dynamic situation.

Best,


Erik
cvalle
6 posts
 

Given the amount of time that's passed, it's interesting that so few hardware partners seem to have come out with MQA compliant equipment. If you do a search here on Audiogon for "MQA", you get the same 3-6 listings (from the same seller) for the Mytek Brooklyn.

Besides that, there's the Meridian Explorer and a couple of portable players plus the Mytek Manhattan II. Anything else?

CV

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