MQA is Vaporware

[rothosand]

16 hours ago, Brinkman Ship said:

My hat off to you sir.

And my hat off to you for the MQA listening test...

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/reference-level-system-mqa-listening-results.729556/

[rothosand]

Has anyone noticed the letters to the editor published in the July issue of Stereophile ?

5 of them are about MQA, and all are far from positive towards the format.

 

Things are really (but slowly) beginning to change in the audiophile press...

 

 

[rothosand]

19 hours ago, mansr said:

Posted by @jhaagenstad of EXOGAL in another thread:

 

"We have been evaluating MQA technology and watching the wider MQA ecosystem since early 2016. After much research on the fundamental technology and more importantly on the market demand for MQA, we have reached the decision to cease the pursuit of adding MQA to our products for several reasons:

1)     Our products by themselves exceed the performance of our products with the inclusion of MQA,

2)     Regardless of the breathless hype by the audio press, actual consumer demand is just not there.

3)     Regardless of the announced support from record labels, a suitable base of playable content is not widely available.

4)     As for the technical details of our evaluation of the technology vis á vis our own technology, we prefer not to violate our NDA’s with MQA and Meridian.

5)     Much like Wadia's technology before us, EXOGAL technology is already oriented in the time domain and does not suffer from the time-smearing effect which MQA is supposed to eliminate.

Suffice it to say we were never able to achieve the advertised level of performance using the MQA technology and thus it does not meet our standards for inclusion in our products."

 

That's pretty damning. We need more manufacturers making clear statements like this.

 

Auralic is of course one of them, see the comments by Xuanqian Wang in the Auralic community forum :

https://community.auralic.com/t/when-will-we-finally-have-mqa-decoding/1251/7

https://community.auralic.com/t/mqa-changes-in-new-firmware/1167

 

And Trinity (Über-High-End DAC manufacturer) is another one :

https://trinity-ed.de/mqa/

[rothosand]

Breaking news : LS will interview BS !

 

https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2019/05/09/munich-2019-munich-dreaming/

 

Quote

Here are a few things I personally have in the works…

• An interview with MQA inventor Bob Stuart.  I’ve been studying this fascinating technology for a while but this will be my first interview with Bob.  I’m looking forward to learning more about the progress of MQA and gaining a deeper understanding of the underlying technology.