Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music Thoughts on MQA after event at BlueVision - Marietta GA 6-12-15

MQA + Tidal definitely perked up my ears because I like the idea of having access to higher quality without having to re-buy my content. I'm totally fine with "renting" it. Now, if we saw widespread availability of purchase options for back content while streaming availability of that content wasn't available and didn't seem like it would be anytime soon, then perhaps I would buy.

I guess a key question is just how much content will be available in MQA format. If it's on par with SACD, which has still yet to reach 10k titles, then it's probably going nowhere.

On the other hand, I did read that Apple has ALL of it's 30 million tracks in 24/96 format. Doesn't that mean that in theory you could simply run a seriously huge mass conversion of those to cut them into MQA? Sure, would require a lot of CPU and processing time, but my guess is probably not much in terms of actual manual input.

It wouldn't be full MQA in that case, as it's being processed after the fact. You'd need access to the original files, before the studios parcelled them out to Apple as 24/96.

Cheers

George

Fully agree Mr M. I think I said the same in another post this week. 96/24 in Apple Store could mean absolutely anything.

That's an interesting remark. Meridian says that even in the event that the precise technical origin is unknown, the analyzer in the encoding software is often able to work out what time related errors there might be. However, they were not willing to tell more about this magic process, only that one of the factors is an analysis of the noise floor. But than again, the 96 kHz sampling rate would not suffice to achieve the goal of less than 10µs time smearing.

A panel discussion about the future of Hires with Sony, Tidal, MQA and HDTracks representatives.

Quite a good discussion but no real consideration of storage and MQA file size, or did I miss it.

As for the the repetitive comment of "raising the floor" it won't affect me too much but VK may have to take care.

"Raising the ceiling" or even "raising the roof" might be better.

Hector

That was a good listen. Chris

Thanks for posting, Crion

Sadly, this discussion gives no further concrete information about the availability of MQA.

The future of HD sound seems to be moving away from Meridian systems. From what was said, the market of the future (the next two years) will be concentrated on more sophisticated mobile phones and better headphones.

That's where it has to be if it is to survive I believe, hence the Explorer 2.

The high end will always still get a better experiance, but will have to pay more for it.

Great DSP systems now will probably sound better without MQA than cheap systems with it, so enjoy the music now.

If it makes you dance, it's good enough...

The law of diminishing returns will always apply.

Thoughts, Chris

I tend to agree with Chris.
Listening to the different opinions on the panel left me with one clear outcome.
Mass adoption of improved high quality mobile devices is the best chance for MQA taking off big time.

It may well be that the oft-criticised comparisons Bob and others used between MP3 and MQA could well have been cleverer than I thought.

If it convinces enough people in the right places that the relatively modest bandwidth required for the highest quality audio is a viable option en mass then we're all winners.

At the high end, as ever, audio nirvana costs as much as we wish to believe makes a difference

Odd that the MQA representative had several opportunities to say "yes, I agree with you all, and that's exactly what MQA is offering"... opportunities missed IMHO.