Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Amazon Hi-Res Streaming

I know there is much criticism of MQA, though I have only skimmed some of it. The critics often exhibit a fervour that makes me suspicious of them and their motives. However, I was careful to say in my post that a higher RES route 'in that sense' should carry more information (I mean in the mathematical sense). Whether it does or not or needs to or not obviously depends on whether there is information present to be conveyed by higher RES that can't be conveyed by lower RES.

I have been fascinated by HiFi for nearly 60 years. When I was younger I could hear up to 22kHz. Now I can only hear up to about 16kHz. My perception of live music has not changed in all that time. Neither, for most of that time, has my perception of the sound produced by the best quality HiFi equipment. 60 years ago that was evidenced by Quad amplifiers and ESL57 loudspeakers, for example. Now there is a very wide choice of outstandingly good equipment and, while they may sound different, they are all good to my ears. However, they are miles away (all of them) from a live performance unless you can hear them in a really big hall when all the ambience that even the best recordings (and microphones) seem not to capture becomes restored somehow by the hall's own acoustics.

BUT when I first heard an MQA restoration I was blown away. It was the first time I had heard a step forward in sound reproduction in all those 60 years that I could truly say was a big step forward in my listening experience over my best reference equipments. By the way, it was of a Mono recording of Louis Armstrong singing. The MQA version was streets ahead of the normal supposedly remastered version.

Why might this be? Well, I speak as someone who originally studied physics and that helped me understand the role that frequency response and phase probably have in our hearing. Evolution demonstrates that frequency response is only important up to a point - if that were not so (consider bats who live or die by having a very extended frequency response) we would have a more extended response than we do.

On the other hand, you would expect that we are extremely sensitive to phase. It is phase differences between our two ears that allow us to locate sounds in space around us, even when things are behind us (for phase think of the time of arrival of sound wavefronts to each of our ears at the frequencies we are able to detect).

Having a very acute ability to detect phase differences (hence the location of sounds) must have been very important to our survival over the millennia: think of that sabre toothed tiger behind you that, unfortunately for it, rustles a leaf just before it attempts to pounce on you. Your spatial locating ability saves your life.

There is no doubt that electronics distorts (smears in MQA speak) the phase relationship of sounds and, worse still, does it in a frequency dependent way. I think this is an important reason why recorded music just doesn't sound as lifelike as it should even if it is 'clear' (good frequency response) and its individual wave forms are not distorted in shape (harmonic or intermodulation distortion).

MQA claims to restore phase relationships back to those of the master recording. How much it may need to do this must depend on the extent to which the phase relationships have been smeared (so MQA will not improve what you hear to the same extent in each case). My experience is that it does do this and I like it very much.

But back to the original topic. Are Amazon right to overlook MQA? Probably they are, sadly. Marketing is about selling people what they believe in and their target market does not listen to music in a terribly discerning way. They will understand High Resolution (even if they can't hear the difference - the words speak for themselves because High Definition video really does look better as any fool can see) but they will have turned to their smart phones to find something more interesting before the first few sentences of an explanation of MQA have been uttered - and they are just not listening to the music that carefully.

Never mind though. Fine art (in all its forms) has never been a mass market product and Amazon wants a mass market.

I just hope there are enough of us to keep MQA viable.