Stereophile Series on MQA Technology

[Jud]

4 hours ago, firedog said:

And he's still engaging in endless technical babble and bending over backwards at the auralic thread trying to say MQA isn't lossy. For some reason, he has understood that the rendering phase of MQA has some kind of technical magic that restores the original bits. Neither explanations, nor quotes from Bob Stuart admitting it is lossy make an impression on him.  

 

I keep forgetting: Does MQA use lossy compression, or is it simply as lossy as any other sampling and reconstruction process?

[Jud]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

Since the output of the encoder has half as many bits as the input, it trivially follows that some inputs cannot be losslessly recovered. A sufficiently low-entropy input might be losslessly encoded, but without access to the encoder we can never say for sure. For comparison, certain very simple signals can theoretically be encoded as mp3 without loss, but few (if any) encoders go to the trouble of trying to identify them.

 

Thanks for reminding me again.  So even though all digital is going to be lossy in some sense since we don't have perfect filters (but we can have very good ones), beyond the filtering these folks are actively throwing away bits to do proprietary (and unnecessary) compression.

[Jud]

25 minutes ago, botrytis said:

Well, depending on the DAC, one does not need to use any filters. Some allow you to play music w/o filters.

 

Without interpolation filters, but you always need a reconstruction filter. 

[Jud]

21 minutes ago, mansr said:

All part of the same process.

 

True. I was referring to the need for an analog reconstruction filter even in "NOS" DACs.

[Jud]

3 minutes ago, mansr said:

You can of course omit an explicit filter and let your amp or speakers fill that role. Terrible idea, but some seem to like it.

 

At least one, perhaps more, of the Audio Note kits used a transformer as an analog filter, then was advertised as being without filters (the idea I suppose being to convince people there were no evil filters between them and the music).

[Jud]

47 minutes ago, mansr said:

I guess he's one of those people who rage quit for dramatic effect, then come quietly crawling back later so they can do it again.

 

Couldn't "stick the flounce," as they say.

[Jud]

1 hour ago, kumakuma said:

 

I thought you left:

 

 

 

I'll have him know I am not uniformed!