@ptss did you make a purchase based on someone else’s words or are you just bothered by someone else’s words. I don’t know anyone who did make a purchase based on MQA being present although I’m certain there is a long line of Meridien owners who may have thought it was a thing. |
Perhaps the single thing MQA was doing, which Pono also did (I miss that player) was to authenticate bit streams. If Qobuz is meddling around with the bits somehow by using lossy compression, or some processing we are not expecting we have no way of telling if we are listening to the released recording or someone’s doctored version of it. Kind of like cryogenically treated cables. No way for me to tell either way. |
What makes you think that Qobuz is meddling around with lossy compression? Do you have any evidence of this? Qobuz is very clear that they are using FLAC to compress the data stream. Why would they do anything more than use FLAC? Their entire raison d'etre is to stream non-lossy CD quality files. I can't imagine that they would risk their reputation by trying to squeeze out a few less gigabytes of bandwidth using some sort of lossy compression. If they were doing that they absolutely would have been busted by now. I have compared at least half a dozen Qobuz streams to the corresponding CD, where I was sure they were the same version, They all sound identical. If Qobuz is messing around with the file, I sure can't hear it. I've also read several forum and reddit threads about Qobuz streaming quality and the most credible people, such as recording engineers who have looked carefully at the Qobuz files, say that they appear to be identical to their CD counterparts. Qobuz streams at about 900 KBps which is normal for a FLAC file. Qubuz sneaking in a lossy compression scheme would be like Mobile Fidelity having a digital step in their "One Step" vinyl record process. I don't know how much damage that did to MoFi but I'll bet it was a lesson to everyone else in the industry. Your dirty little secrets will always get out. |
