Testing MQA: Is it worse than FLAC?

[Brentz]

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  On 4/4/2021 at 6:39 PM, saturdayboy said:

My underlying position is that MQA, and people preferring it, is an entirely insignificant and harmless phenomenon.""

 

IMHO - this sums it up! Perfectly!   I may add, that I consider it also unnecessary (propery encoded FLAC is good enough) and a undesirable distraction: the time and money spend on this topic + on the relative hardware could be better used elsewhere.

 

Nevertheless, MQA was an interesting and ingenious attempt to find a HQ compression solution to a problem that has largely disappeared =  limited bandwith in times of ADSL.

 

A bit more dubious is the 'profiling' approach: it pretends to copy the basic image profiling approach into the audio domain [to reproduce a picture you need the picture+input profile of the camera and compensate for the expected limitations of the printer/paper = the output device profile]  However, we do not how the input profiles (mastering) are obtained and it has output profiles only for one small part of the output chain:    MQA only takes DACs into account with their output profile (second unfolding) and does not worry about the devices that 'make the music' (amps/headphones/loudspeakers).

 

Because of these omissions, I consider the MQA approach pseudo scientific  and ultimately a marketing ploy.