Oh no, yet another post on MQA! Grab your popcorn! đżđŹ
I honestly haven't paid too much attention to Meridianâs MQA (Master Quality Audio) format, for the simple fact that it doesn't affect 90% of my listening. While I do have a Tidal Masters subscription, most of my material still comes the "old fashioned" way, via music I've purchased either via physical media (CD) or online download. And from a sound quality perspective, I fail to see what all the hype is about - at its core, MQA is about trying to get hi-res (i.e. 24/96) quality to people using a standard 16/44 amount of data. Despite all the talk of "revealing every detail of the original recording" or whatever, it's not giving you any more than what you could get by downloading a hi-res file to begin with. So it's primarily of benefit to people who want to critically listen to music via streaming sources, which of course is an entirely valid use case, particularly for economical reasons. (You can stream Tidal Masters for a month for less than it costs to purchase and download a single 24/96 or DSD album.)
Anyway, my current playback flow - Roon + PS Audio DAC via Bridge II network interface - does finally support full MQA playback, and judging from rumors on the internets thereâs a decent amount of consumer commotion about MQA in general. But there's still a ton of confusion what hardware + software it takes to get the full benefits of MQA, and what those benefits even are.Â
What MQA decoding looks like with Roon 1.5 and PS Audio Bridge II
Given my level of personal commitment to the format (near zero), Iâm really trying to avoid researching and writing a treatise on this. And donât ask me for comments on sound quality - I havenât conducted any listening tests yet. But I do feel some obligation to at least understand it a bit, so here's my current "MQA for dummies" takeaway:
At its heart, MQA is a bunch of different technologies  - lossy compression, sampling and filtering techniques, encryption, etc. - packaged together to get hi-res content in a standard-res package that is backwards-compatible with regular hardware. It's an end-to-end solution that covers original encoding, packaging of the data, and decoding all the way to the final analog signal in your living room.
"Unfolding" vs. "full decoding": Unfold is one of the major steps to parse out and decode the hi-res data encoded in an MQA file/stream. Roon, for instance, will do the first unfold for you in software, then pass along this signal with the rest of the MQA encoding intact to your DAC.Â
Full decode means getting to the final analog signal with the original resolution of the master. This requires integration with the DAC hardware, and cannot be accomplished with software alone. Some view this as a sneaky attempt at digital rights management (DRM) because it avoids exposing the full-res uncompressed stream, but it is what it is.
The highest res "master" signal you can get is 24/96 for software decode/unfold, and 24/192 if you do full decode in hardware. However it's unclear to me if you can get to a full 24/192 master decode with the software unfold/hardware decode route as with Roon + PS Audio Bridge. Reading posts like this though, It might not matter much to final sound quality, plus I havenât been able to find anything higher than 24/96 on Tidal anyway.
For a simpler explanation of the playback options, I found this post to be reasonably clear and useful:
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#1130: If I Had A Million Dollars? A Top Five List
RECORD STORE TALES #1130: If I Had A Million Dollars? A Top Five List
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If I had a million dollarsWell, Iâd buy you a fur coatBut not a real fur coat, thatâs cruelAnd if I had a million dollarsIf I had a million dollarsWell, Iâd buy you an exotic petYep, like a llama or an emu
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Fur coats? Exotic pets? No thank you! If I had a million dollars, Iâll tell ya exactly what Iâd buy!
1. AVâŚ
Like PS Audioâs Paul McGowan, Iâve been accused of deleting unflattering comments. I think Paul nailed it here.
If youâre incapable of commenting without saying someone is âdeafâ, a âNaziâ, or an opinion is âcomplete BSâ, then Iâm not wasting my time having a âconversationâ with you. Neither is Paul. Go elsewhere to spew it. Paul sums it up pretty well here. âBoink! I donât talk like that, andâŚ
PS Audio AirLens Digital Music Streamer (Gear Review)
The new @psaudio AirLens streamer produces excellent sonic results at an affordable price.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Fifteen years ago I was introduced to digital music streaming when I bought the Logitech Transport (I still have it!)âa brute of a box that played Internet radio stations and CD-quality music files stored on my computer. When higher resolution PCM and DSD sources began proliferating, I moved on to streamers capable of playing such files and added subscriptionâŚ
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Here comes Paul McGowan with a question for you audiophile metalheads!
As a non-audiophile, this will never be my bag, but itâs interesting anyway. âWall of soundâ â thatâs what I want. Heâs right that most of those albums are loud and compressed. Hereâs how to maximize the sound of your heavy metal.
Youtubinâ: PS Audio â Why audiophiles hate electronic music
The title of this video by PS Audioâs Paul McGowan is misleading. He doesnât hate electronic music â at all. In fact PS Audio are releasing some on their label Octave Records. They key, says Paul, is âplenty of bottom endâ.
I sure would love a tour of their listening rooms. Once in a lifetime experience for a guy like me.
Youtubin': PS Audio - Does the CD layer of an SACD sound better?
Paul McGowan is back with another question Iâve always wondered about. Audiophile customers at the Record Store would claim that the CD layer of Super Audio CDs sounded better than a regular CD. That didnât seem likely or even possible. Paul clears it up here, and Iâm not surprised at all.
