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Didital Things
Topic: Quintessence

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Posted by Romy the Cat on 01-06-2015
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Streaming is good and live streaming is great as it gets rid the participation of all of those idiots in the file distribution change and prevent them to edit files. To stream large file is had and here is Meridian Audio come up with own Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) technology that reportedly use a new type of lossless compression. I never heard it but my expectations are not high, there are many reasons why. So, far the MQA descriptions that I heard has a lot of buzz words and talk a lot of dim-witted things about music but does not explain how the  MQA works, or at least the consents of it. That is very troublesome sight. Also it comes from Meridian, which means a lot negatives…. There are many other little stinky signs that I see in MQA. Well, let wait until somebody illuminate about it. 

Posted by steverino on 01-06-2015
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MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated and is Meridian's answer to delivering high resolution quality in a lossless compressed proprietary format that squeezes down even 24/192 files to roughly the size of CD-quality files.
MQA, or Master Quality Authenticated, brings together the three ideals of studio-quality sound, convenience and end-to-end authenticity. It uses a completely new concept of capturing the total essence of an original recording and conveying it all the way to the listener, assuring that what they are listening to is identical to the master recording.

So if you want the essence then MQA is for you. If you don't like what you hear don't blame Meridian. They merely brought you the essence of the mastertape and that is what you don't like.

Posted by Romy the Cat on 01-06-2015
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 steverino wrote:
So if you want the essence then MQA is for you. If you don't like what you hear don't blame Meridian. They merely brought you the essence of the mastertape and that is what you don't like.

I am sorry, is it satire or you are serious?

Posted by steverino on 01-06-2015
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 Romy the Cat wrote:
 steverino wrote:
So if you want the essence then MQA is for you. If you don't like what you hear don't blame Meridian. They merely brought you the essence of the mastertape and that is what you don't like.

I am sorry, is it satire or you are serious?


This is what happens in matrimony. You lose the ability to distinguish between serious and satire.

Posted by Romy the Cat on 01-07-2015
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Steverino, can you have some dignity do not highlight it in public?

The Cat

Posted by steverino on 01-07-2015
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Romy my friend,

  Someone should have told you that old age is not for sissies nor the dignified. My non satirical opinion is that this subject is not worth the filespace. It is sort of like MP3 for hi-rez. Happy New Year BTW and all the best to the famiiy.

Posted by xandcg on 12-06-2015
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I found this description of how MQA works:

http://www.hifiwigwam.com/showthread.php?127311-Tidal-Announce-MQA-Streaming&p=2217736&viewfull=1#post2217736

It is not a secret, what MQA is and does.

Here we go, in decreasing levels of abstraction.

1) MQA is a kind of origami.

That doesn't help you.

2) MQA is about substituting triangles for rectangles.

That probably doesn't help either, although it is a brilliantly succinct way of describing MQA.

3) A bit more practical then.

Start (ideally) with a 192/24 recording.

Reduce this to 96/24 by means of a very short (i.e. fast) low pass filter.
Such a filter allows some aliasing to happen, but since we assume that there is not
much real audio in the 48-96kHz region the amount of aliasing is low.

Now take the 96/24 recording.

Grab the lower 24kHz band, at 24 bits, and noise shape it into a 48k/16b format.
Put the result in a 48/24 container. Hey, we now have 8 unused bits per sample!

Go back to the 96/24 original. Grab the upper band, i.e. 24 to 48kHz. Resample it at 48kHz.
This is lossless because the sampling theorem says that any signal with a bandwidth smaller than Fs/2 can be
sampled at Fs. So we end with the ultrasonic information in a 48/24 format. We now assume that, again, there isn't really much ultrasonic info at all, so why let it occupy 24 bits? Not needed, so slam it down to 8 bits. We now have 48/8. Scramble these into pseudo noise and store the result in the lower bits of the 48/24 container we created in the previous step.


Voila: 192/24 packed into 48/24.

For replay: undo in reverse order.

Very smart. Utterly useless

Posted by Amir on 06-27-2016
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http://archimago.blogspot.com/2016/01/measurements-mqa-master-quality.html
Posted by at
"So what is the meaning of Meridian/MQA wanting to convince us that the final sound should be "authenticated" if it's not really capable of ensuring actual sound quality? Well, all that is left in my opinion is a mechanism that locks consumers into a specific digital processing chain which controls the flow of data (thus "authenticated" as in "controlled"). IMO this whole mechanism is like creating a Rube Goldberg contraption to process audio signals with supposed benefits (smaller size for hi-res, putative improvement in time-domain performance) but at the same time apparently introducing technical limitations (being locked into 16-bits dynamic range is a significant one I think) and of course loss of freedom to use any DAC for the full experience. Honestly, I don't see anything all that positive except for Meridian/MQA benefitting from control over the closed ecosystem they create with potential royalties through software licensing, and in the hardware decoding side. A beautiful business model to generate revenue to be sure! All they need to do is create the hype, hope consumers bite, and manufacturers implement yet another feature..."



http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/beyond-high-resolution/

it seems it is not lossless

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