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MQA at CES


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I would love to be wrong about my impressions of MQA, and in fact they are very minimal impressions so far. I will walk the halls of CES starting tmrw (mostly Venetian, some South Hall stuff) and sure to sit in on all that is MQA. Anything that can wipe away another layer of haze is good for me...although I often enjoy music when there is a haze. :)

you mean purple haze.

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I am pessimistic about the amount of improvement this will garner in terms of sound quality.

 

Last year the AES paper from Meridian had listeners trained to hear filters, listening over an extraordinarily high fidelity playback system with full response to 40 khz at the speakers, in an unusually quiet environment able to correctly identify the good sound about 60% of the time instead of 50% that would have been guessing. This comparing their apodizing filtered 192 khz file vs a ringing 44.1khz or 48 khz filter done with 4 times steeper filtering than is the norm. Doesn't lead one to think from that the difference was one of night and day. Not to mention how much difference is in evidence over your normal civilian playback gear.

 

In addition, just look at all the guessing, wondering, uncertainty about what MQA does, how it works, what will be required to get the full benefit etc in threads like this over all the internet forums. This from people who are audiophiles and interested deeply in a possible improvement. If we are this in the dark, and confused about it Meridian has done a tremendously horrible job rolling this out and explaining what it does. At best your average Joe might in time say, "hey it has MQA whatever that is. Supposed to be good". I don't think it bodes well for the MQA process.

Sacrilege !!!!!

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It's consistent with what Meridian said at the Silicon Valley MQA debut I attended in Mountain View months ago.

 

Meridian told the attendees that, to get all of the benefits of MQA, the listener will need MQA licensed software (music app) and a MQA licensed DAC to get complete MQA decoding.

 

At that event, Meridian said that if you only have MQA decoding in the software, you get some - but not all - of the MQA benefits.

 

I assume that what would be in the Auralic streamer would be the software part of the MQA decoding.

 

Not interested in a closed system .

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A few years ago it was difficult to imagine that we'd ever see streaming in full CD quality. Now we have TIDAL that can stream to us tens of millions of tracks in full CD quality.

 

Now TIDAL is in talks with Meridian about a technology that might allow them to stream us even better than CD quality. I'm thrilled.

 

Those mocking this need to have their heads examined.

 

I'm not mocking it , just don't like the way Meridian treated Auralic .

Thus, I will never in my life buy a MQA enabled dac . Sorry . That's how I feel about it .

Hell, Auralic has to remove MQA from their upcoming

firmware update .

I don't need to buy from a company that is a fickle as this and doesn't appear to have a stable strategy .

It's poor management imo.

 

It's great that Tidal may benefit from MQA though .

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No doubt their marketing team screwed up. But that shouldn't reflect at all on how we assess their engineering prowess or their ability to deliver.

 

I used to work at one of the largest software companies in the world. Our marketing team did a lot of dumb things. Marketing is not a hard science. Sometimes what seemed like a great strategy early on can backfire on you when you begin to execute on your plan.

 

MQA is complicated. They elected to simplify the message, which turned out to be a poor strategy for a sophisticated audience like the audiophiles who have been asking really good questions.

 

I'm sure they now regret this strategy and wish they could take it back.

 

Well Kenny , here's one audiophile that will never buy anything from Meridian after the way they treated Auralic .

I own a small business and know how this feels .

 

Plus my ears aren't that great at my age anyway . Way too many Zeppelin , Who and Black Sabbath concerts .

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I respect that. I'm just willing to give them a chance and see what steps Meridian takes to make this right.

 

I am hoping that Auralic is still able to decompress MQA and that Meridian allows them to list this as a differentiating feature of their Aries lineup. That's a benefit I'd greatly appreciate as an Aries owner if it allowed me to get better than CD sound from TIDAL.

 

I have my doubts that Meridian at this point will allow this Tidal scenario to happen through an Auralic streamer .

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We don't yet know for sure that the fault is entirely with Meridian, do we? What if Auralic jumped the gun and assumed that the Aries would be certified along with the Mini as both run the same firmware? Wasn't it Auralic who made this announcement? Did any other streamers make this announcement and have to pull it back?

 

Maybe we should wait for the dust to clear before breaking out the pitchforks?

 

Jimmypowder weren't you pretty tough on Auralic for not keeping their promises with respect to delivering their LDS for iPhone?

 

Didn't Meridian have advertisements showing Auralic as one of its partners ? I swear I saw this online somewhere or maybe in a magazine . I could be wrong .

 

Of course I was tough on Auralic because we kept getting delay after delay it seemed on the iPhone app .

 

So you are telling me that Auralic had the MQA decoding in their upcoming firmware update without Meridian's approval ? Hmmm . I find that hard to believe .

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Yes as a partner.

 

 

 

 

Auralic had it in the firmware for the Mini which contains a DAC and is therefore eligible for MQA certification. Of course the Aries uses that same firmware.

 

I'm just saying that Auralic has a made a few announcements that didn't hit the mark as far as what they promised.

 

I don't know who is at fault here - I'm just saying we should wait for the dust to settle.

 

But they also had it in the upcoming firmware update for the Auralic streamers too , correct , that now must be removed ?

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Obviously MQA was working with the Aries and an external DAC, otherwise Auralic would have not committed to only play TIDAL+MQA at CES (which I think was the commitment).

 

When I auditioned MQA at Meridian in NYC the MQA versions of the files did sound better. But these were Meridian's picks. I wonder if pre-CES some audio buffs got a preview and were not impressed with content they chose.

 

This is all very suspicious... I presume MQA is really not the hot shtuff it purports to be.

Yeah Miggy ,I think you are right.

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I wondered about this. I will do the same. It all comes back to what some folks around here are calling "the facts" :) Thing is, we only have the marketing/product speak so far to go on from Meridian. Just exactly how does a standard PCM DAC "see" an MQA encoded file and what is the "real" resolution/bit rate in this scenerio? If what you are saying is true, it is not in fact "24/44" but something much less.

 

Tidal is not looking to satisfy "audiophiles" (or anyone else) with SQ, they are looking to start turning a profit so if they think jumping on the MQA bandwagon is a strategy towards that end then they will, even if Meridian requires proprietary hardware on the part of the end user. Of course, it is a new day so who knows what will be coming from Meridian in the next few hours. They should just sell this IP to Apple and be done with it... ;)

 

I understand where you are coming from . I can hear a

difference between Tidal and Spotify quite clearly with my equipment .

If the Tidal audio quality diminishes with MQA , what would be the point of keeping the sub ?

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It is quite possible Tidal have been given a good deal or even been paid to implement MQA in order to drum up demand for DAC support. In MQA's position that probably wouldn't be a bad move.

Yep.All of these moves by Meridian the way I see it is to get in the best position to sell MQA enabled dacs, particularly their own.

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My guess is that Auralic interpreted the license they paid for to apply to streaming devices with onboard DACs, and Meridian interpreted it more restrictively.

 

Edit: The solution would be for both to agree on what devices are included at what price.

 

This is the most logical and likely correct explanation anyone has offered .

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