Let me say that MQA suffered from bad promotion and consequently bad press...
There are many aspect involved. First of all, yes it's not bit perfect respect the original master it derives from but:
- It's always lossless in the audible sonic part
- it has custom DA process, nothing too different from various filters available on many dac's but with particular care of impulse pre ringing management.
- MQA 44.1KHz 16bit are identical to 44.1KHz 16bit masters they came from, just a flag tells to decoder to use MQA proprietary process (upsampling and antialias filtering), if such process is not available, MQA data = flac data
- MQA from hi-res masters, yes they are lossy but on ultrasonic part only and absolutely lossless up to 20KHz.
Six less significant bits from 24 are dedicated to store in lossy way the relatively poor contents in ultra sonic part.
I agree that can be not loved by purists but it saves much bandwidth.
- MQA can be not folded at production stage and dedicated to full bandwidth in a lossless way, with just the flag telling to compatible dac to use the custom process.
I think that if the MQA makers didn't want to give it a miracolistic aura, it would have been seen in a different way.
Royalties were a little problem also.
hometheaterhifi.com
