Any News on MQA Lately?

Hi @bradf

I used a Mytek Brooklyn. Yes, MQA was properly identified when played. My sources came from 2l.no

In my case I comapred 96/24 to MQA and I honestly could hear no difference at all. Not a bad thing considering MQA is a lossy and complicated format to reconstruct. Still, it has no value for me at all.

The Brooklyn IS a very good DAC, and to my ears, plays Redbook much better than most DACs from even 5 years ago. MQA is currently disabled so I can play with other filters. There is an odd bit of interface troubles. If you enable MQA you can't change filters. :-)

Best,


Erik

 

The big question will be if the market goes for MQA.  Without a large enough catalog of music, I don't see the DAC makers investing in making their units MQA-compatible.

The MQA folks have said that non-MQA-compatible DACs will be able to play back their files (as they are in a PCM wrapper), but from the few articles I've read on the subject, it seems that FPGA-based DAC manufacturers report that the resulting sound quality is not good.

I guess time will tell.  But it seems that there was a real flurry of excitement about MQA earlier in 2016, which seems to have calmed down.

The whole promise of MQA to labels was to give them a way NOT to release music in high-res equivalent to studio master, and still get some improvement over CD quality just enough to make people buy the same music again. This is actually good that it didn't fly- otherwise we won't see any more high-res releases. As to apodizong filter with no pre-ringing, that type of filter is available in some DACs independently of MQA.

PS Audio said they were not at all impressed by it. Benchmark has a long blog post on the matter and just how convoluted the entire process really is.

Meh, the Brooklyn is a very good dac with or without MQA, but I was looking forward to finding yet another veil lifted... or some other ridiculous thing like that. Nothing.

Best,

Erik