Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music "MQA" 818v3 is here!!

So your best guess would therefore be that the 24/192 MHR Stream output to the D7k2SE's is "unlikely" to be a "standard" 9.2MBps 24/192 PCM stream... and is therefore more likely to be a "folded" or "fractal" stream with the higher res info being folded into an actual lower bitrate stream [perhaps 2x]??

Just want to emphasise here that I'm not criticising Meridian in any way... I'm just trying to fully understand what we are actually seeing here,

That is exactly what I think is happening.

Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied.

Happy to confirm the accuracy of the report by Altus.

On a personal level It took me a lot of reflective thought to digest what I heard.

7200SE / 818v3 sounded very good but it was hard to ascertain where the difference was coming from compared to my 808.5 to 7200.1 setup.

Of course it might just be the room.

Everyone listening is conditioned by past experience, and IMHO the Beryllium Tweeter in the 72000SE is the biggest difference irrespective of source / file etc.. But at a price!

For me the loss of depth, intimacy and sense of expectation (conditioned response) was disturbing.

My favourite Gretchen Peters tracks which have in the past reduced listeners to silence had little effect but maybe that is just the technical sales pitch pressure.

Different rather than better?
Hector with Old Ears

So just to clarify, Altus and Hector, Rick isn't able to play any MQA tracks through this demo system...?

Why not? Surely that is the point of this upgrade (and the reason I was considering upgrading my 818 to v3).

The OP titled thus thread "MQA" 818v3 is here!!, so naturally I assumed his enthusiastic comments on SQ were based on a test listening to MQA material.

Was I mistaken?

Neil

Not mistaken... you just didn't read the posts closely enough

Quite right Nick!

I've not had time to follow all the detail of this tale of intrigue recently, but launching the much anticipated MQA version of its flagship controller, at a time when there is apparently no MQA material available to play on it (not even the demo tracks so many of us enjoyed a few months ago), seems frankly bizarre, even by M standards!

I think that was why I felt the need to check that my eyes weren't deceiving me...

Neil

Not bizarre at all.

The 192/DSD capabilities of the 818v3, and the new upsampling of 44kHz material, are worth the asking price alone IMO.

Do we know this? The tests showed the speakers receiving 88k MHR for RBCD material, so at least we can say that the up-sampling has not changed from 2x to 4x.

Yes we do know this. Meridian have said that the upsampling of CD-quality input is completely new in the 818v3, and has benefited from what was learned during the development of MQA.

Ah, okay. Well I don't actually own any hi res source material so the former advantage means nothing to me. I'm intrigued by second point though, as that will presumably apply to my large CD collection which is ripped into my Sooloos system? A non-technical explanation of this new upsampling process and its potential advantages would be much appreciated, if anyone would care to oblige?

Perhaps I was putting too much emphasis on this being marketed as the "MQA 818v3"...?

Cheers, Neil

I'm potentially in the market for this upgrade but I'm a bit confused.

Will there currently be any benefit to most of my collection (red book CD files on Sooloos)? Is it worth investing in the hope MQA files will be available any time soon - what is the status of that? I had expected 2-channel Room Correction, which would have been a big upgrade incentive by itself, but it seems that has now vanished from the spec? Do we know yet how this will behave with legacy DSPs and MQA or higher sample rate material?

Sorry for all the questions, I'm struggling to get my head around this one.

Separately, I was wondering if, given the new DSP card, etc., whether the v3 would now be sort of the ultimate ADC for analogue sources. Is there an option for balanced analogue inputs, or a phono input card, or anything like that?

Cheers.