An analogy just occurred to me for the part of MQA that captures characteristics of DA, AD and other tools and filters used in the studio in MQA metadata.

Quoting from a Real HD Audio article by Mark Waldrep

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In the meantime, Robert walked me through the thinking that went into the MQA development. He laid out the production path from recording or mastering studio to home listening as an �analog to analog� signal path with a challenging digital chunk in between. Their goal is to preserve the exact sound of the that final analog experience (even if it is being sourced from a digital audio workstation like Pro Tools) including the individual characteristics of the Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog converters. If the engineer, producer, and artist are listening in a studio equipped with dCS or Apogee converters, then the metadata about those devices will be �encapsulated� into the MQA sound file so that the playback mirrors exactly the experience in the studio�and at approximately one tenth the bandwidth.

This sounds to me like the color profile that photographers sometimes send along with their photos to the printer. The color profile contains for example the calibration of the monitor used to edit the photos and the color space in which the photo was captured.

From wikipedia

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In color management, an ICC profile is a set of data that characterizes a color input or output device.

Color profiles are used in a so-called color managed photography workflow that ensures consistency and predictability for how a photo appears.

Seems to me the MQA features that capture processing device characteristics used in the recording chain in metadata do for digitial audio what color profiles do for photography. Roughly speaking, anyway.

Apologies if this is obvious or has been posted elsewhere.

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