davkj
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- Apr 2, 2016
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Thanks for the link. Fair amount of hypocrisy and sour grapes there. Andrea while at Sony was behind SACD: Sony and Philips' attempt to renew the CD cash cow that had gone away with patents running out of time. It also went all out creating a format war with DVD-A at precisely the wrong time: when MP3 and conveniences of it was coming to market. And he talks about DRM? SACD's #1 claim to fame that Sony heavily advertised to other labels was that it did not allow playback on PCs! It had strict copy protection technology down to the drive. Yes you were not by license even allowed to play it let alone rip it. Now all of a sudden he gets religion over DRM, proprietary formats, royalties, etc. This was all good for him while helping Sony but is bad if Meridian tries it?
There is also of course bad blood going back to those format days with Meridian providing MLP lossless compression for DVD-A (and now to Blu-ray's Dolby TrueHD) and PCM format versus them pushing DSD.
The issues he raises may be real but he should be the very last person to write about them.
P.S. I am dubious that labels are paying for MQA. They are the kingmakers here. If there is any fee to be paid on the encoding side, they would stick it to the content distributors.
It's not lost on me the Koch wrote his own 'Let me interview my-self' and yes there may be sour grapes but it is informed with the past kings clothes.
MQA is no more solving a consumer problem than DSD did.
Cost of bandwidth has come way down
I had to look him up to see who he is...
Cost of bandwidth has come way down but yes, it is still not free. And CDNs (caching networks in the middle that push the content to the edge) will charge for bandwidth *and* storage costs. So all else being equal, MQA is a big win for them relative to streaming uncompressed high-res.
Lossless encoding gives you about 2:1 compression or so. MQA gets 4:1 compression. And the baseline CD rate can also be flac compressed although probably not with as much gain.Nothing that FLAC hasn't solved vs MQA.
Lossless encoding gives you about 2:1 compression or so. MQA gets 4:1 compression. And the baseline CD rate can also be flac compressed although probably not with as much gain.
FWIW - I've stated in other threads, my assessment that the primary performance objective of MQA is the establishment of a required time-domain optimized encoding/decoding chain. Time-domain optimized in the sense of minimizing anti-alias filter and anti-image (interpolation) filter transient response. One of the factors required to achieving that goal is the capture of significant ultrasonic bandwidth, to provide the necessary wide transition band for those transient optimized (lazy) filters. In it's fullest implementation, MQA's recording and playback filters form an holistically integrated system.
Where Meridian refers to these filters as 'triangular', they refer to the shape of the impulse response. It is shaped like a geometric triangle, having no ringing behavior. This is same impulse response as has a moving average filter. When two FIR filters are cascaded the impulse response of the two are inherently combined via convolution. So, upon playback, the triangular impulse response of the DAC interpolation filter combines with the triangular impulse response pre-encoded in to the music track when it was originally recorded. The net result is an overall quasi-Gaussian shaped overall total system impulse response. Gaussian type low-pass filters feature 'relatively fast' frequency roll-off for a filter which also features a non-ringing impulse response.
Ken - I think the "triangular" reference by MQA also applies to spectral level vs. frequency. This is something Stuart has brought up frequently. See figure 7 in this link:
http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mqa-time-domain-accuracy-digital-audio-quality