The fact that Atkinson showed up here

[Miska]

16 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

Actually, when listening less than casually, hence as (louder) background music, you may notice that it is never too loud at a party - hence, that digital does not disturb where it usually does.

 

Yeah, I notice this with DSD512 and powerful amps (250W in to 8 ohm). One can easily listen it dangerously loud without ever feeling the sound being disturbing.

 

[Miska]

8 hours ago, Shadders said:

Maybe MQA has elements of Q Sound :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QSound

 

QSound though doesn't require any special hardware for "decoding", works fine through normal playback gear. I have only one QSound album, Roger Waters' Amused To Death, Master Sound anniversary gold disc. Also employing Sony's SBM which is also better than MQA and doesn't require special "decoding" hardware and works through normal playback gear.

 

[Miska]

3 hours ago, Shadders said:

To clarify, maybe the MQA encoded files have an element of QSound.

 

At least they seem to have some amount of EQ, so other things like QSound-style processing is also a possibility (encoder side). Although it doesn't sound as strong effect as QSound in my opinion.

 

Since the encoder is largely a black box and seems to be very hard to gain access to, it is difficult to evaluate all the effects it has.

 

[Miska]

11 minutes ago, mcgillroy said:

I'd bet against it though. Can't see Apple letting an entity like MQA into their ecosystem.

 

Only way they could, would be a buy-out of the MQA Ltd. MQA is a control freak, but Apple is even more. And they are not short of money for such small purchases.

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, Tony Lauck said:

 Assuming the digital sampling has extra guard bits they can afford to provide headroom to prevent clipping.  However, unless the output of the upsampling is then reduced down to the actual resolution of the converter circuitry there will be clipping.

 

Top of the line Wolfson DAC chips have a configuration option for this. Described as "Anti-clipping mode control. Attenuates PCM gain path by 2 dB". This feature is disabled by default. 2 dB is not always enough either...

 

For other chips the behavior varies...