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Understanding MQA/tidal/ DA conversion

Hi - I have both an oppo 205 and 203, and considering selling one to help fund a Levinson integrated. The new 5802 and 5805 day they can handle MQA and apparently high rates of digital conversion. I find all the dsd/dxd/pcm DoP lingo a bit confusing so the cut through question is can the oppos, when used for streaming tidal, output the highest quality signal from Tidal Masters and can the Levinsons convert that signal to its maximum potential? If yes I think using either of those as a transport would have seemingly equal outcomes of just pushing the digital signal out.

esthlos13

Showing 2 responses by erik_squires

erik_squires
15,902 posts
 

After a lot of listening to modern DAC behavior, I've settled on 96 kHz/24 bit being good enough for my ears.  In particular, modern DAC's are just a lot better with lower rez music like Redbook (44.1kHz/16) and the only improvement I can hear with high resolution files is completely explained by the slope of the anti-aliasing filters at each higher resolution.

There may be some who still hold out for 384kHz/24 bit music, but for me I've not heard anything best 96/24 in a long time.

erik_squires
15,902 posts
 

I have both TIdal and Quboz. They do not have the same albums so having both is worthwhile.

I did quite a bit of listening to MQA and don’t find it’s worthwhile, overall, but I like Tidal’s record collection. On my DAC there’s no way to use it with my preferred filter so I leave it off, but Roon does some of this.

As has been written elsewhere, while MQA may claim to be high resolution, it’s also lossy. See the Benchmark Media paper on it. In a world where 100mBit+ speeds is normal for audiophiles it makes MQA compression less important.

I'm also lucky enough to use Roon which will do 96/24 bit MQA decompression in software so I don't really think much about the whole process. 

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