In my previous post I covered Tidal at the RMAF streaming seminar. This post is the MQA portion with Bob.

Bob took nearly two thirds of the allocated time of an hour for his talk. Rather than discuss technical details on how MQA works, he focused mainly on why it is needed.

At some point, RMAF will post this presentation online. I cannot do it justice. Since most everyone on the forum knows most of the basics of MQA, I will post what technical details I can remember that I had not heard before.

Since the audience for this seminar was quite aware of music that is encoded higher than 16/44, Bob talked about what increasing sampling rate brings. A 96k sampling rate makes most of the difference, but each successive doubling of the sampling rate up to 768k makes some difference. That makes sense given the SE Meridian speakers sample up to that rate.

Bob reiterated that 20 bits is really all that you need for the highest res there is.

The highest resolution recordings Bob is aware of, which there are just a few of, are effectively 19 bits. The noise of the recording venue and recording microphone are the limiting items. There are not that many more effective 18 bit recordings and you are doing well to get 17 bit or 16 bit.

Bob brought up the time domain studies that were a big breakthrough in the development of MQA. Those of us on the forum that have read about MQA technical details know the importance of 8ms time domain performance. Bob continually referred to this portion of MQA encoding as de-blurring. Pal at Tidal did that as well. Although both Bob and Pal emphasized its importance, de-blurring was not otherwise explained.

Bob indicated MQA encoding was unique in one more important way. Every other form of digital encoding adds noise to the recording. MQA adds none. Bob was quite emphatic on this. Absolutely none. All other digital encoding adds it to various degrees to their sonic detriment.

MQA offers the unique ability to fix a to d conversion and microphone errors in the original recording, as long as you know the devices originally used and the specs of the devices are known. When you get a recording that does this, it is referred to as white glove service and will be MQA authenticated. Studios can, of course, skip this step and still refer to that music as MQA. Bob says not all music is worth the cost of white glove so studios will decide.

On the subject of when studios will release MQA, Bob made a funny joke about how much any one man can do talking to as many studios as Bob has talked to. MQA will happen. Studios will release as they see fit.

Bob does see MQA content for download coming. No details yet.

While waiting for MQA content, Bob indicated that all the work to make the 818 MQA compliant improves the performance of your existing digital files. Did I hear the word stunning?

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