Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music MQA... explained beautifully

BTW, the inside line on the DRM patents is that it was relevant five years ago, but the record companies have "got over DRM", so the patents are no longer relevant.


YouTube MQA Part 2 How it Works

Very good!

Thanks for that Joel... a quite visual and easy to follow explanation of most of the aspects of MQA, particularly how the 'compression' works.

Yes, I enjoyed parts 1 and 2. Passed them on. Chris

Apologies if this is considered off topic but am I to infer from this that 192/24 is considered to be superior to 96/24 regardless of MQA?

If so have I been misled as I was under the impression that 192/24 was inferior to 96/24 and that as such when the temporal information of MQA was included in the codec that 96/24 would still be the superior format.

Does this mean that despite not owning SE speakers I can expect the mooted software upgrade to 192/24?

Cheers,

Tony.

I feel stupid for asking this but the linked video does not seem to support this statement. Have I missed something?

Cheers,
Tony.

Excellent explanation in the video.

@Anthony-Howard - The implication (at least from where I was sitting) seemed to be that 192/24 was equal to MQA in sound quality (and that both are superior to 96/24). He also seemed to say that 144/20 was all that was really needed, but the hi-fi world chose more bits mostly for marketing reasons (I'm not really sure I buy the technical reasons).

However, the impression from what I had read elsewhere on this subject was that the impulse response of MQA was greater than that of 192/24 and that this increased response was necessary to get the improvements in imaging people have heard in MQA.

I guess time will tell...

PS one afterthought: didn't the demo speakers show an encoding frequency of something like 384 KHz?

I thought it was because they make money selling storage servers that 192/24 is superior

The explanations are getting clearer and more people seem to be catching on that this is a superior way to digitize and stream audio with superior fidelity. Time will tell how many systems this will positively affect but they are certainly making the ceiling higher!

The authentication part of MQA is highly appreciated too, in the age of buying files and streaming over the internet. Like digital signing of software packages it confirms the provenance of the audio file.

The Term "misled" seems a bit strong being as Meridian make equipment to the highest standard based on the scientific knowledge available at the time. One assumes your happy with the sound and auditioned before you bought it.

None of this changes, but our collective understandings of science evolves over time thanks to the research of many great minds, Bob Stuart included, and as such, things may change.

Many people chase the 'Bigger Numbers Is Better' mantra, but for no other reason than marketing. Few companies actually do the research and publish the evidence and change the paradigm like Meridian.

Just thoughts, Chris

Hi Tony

My understanding over the years has been that 192/24 offers no greater useful frequency response or dynamic range than 96/24, which is why Bob wouldn't go down that route... massively increased onboard processing power required, for no sonic gain.

It's only the very recent research in neuroscience that has shown that temporal resolution is actually very important too... and in that respect, 192k sampling does have an advantage over 96k, hence the overhaul in thinking about the subject.

Cheers
George

FWIW, Bob has said that 192/24 is not quite enough in terms of time resolution transparency (vs. what the best human hearing can discern); but it is close.

If MQA takes off, I expect 384/24, at least, to become the digitization standard.

Edit: See this chart. Note that the quality of "conventional PCM" is still rising after 192k sampling. With MQA (not shown on the chart), there are still marginal gains to be achieved with 384k vs. 192k.

I think Bob was explaining how he managed this...