I didn't even know this is a thing before I saw the SU-10 supports MQA CDs.
Yeah, 13 bits of high fidelity, but not to worry, their lossy encoder tries to ensure ~32 dB SNR ... up to 7 kHz anyway.
Bob ensures audiophiles that this is audibly transparent. What more do you want, guys?
I've been reading a lot at the Steve Hoffman forum recently and there is a thread called "UHQ MQA CD".
<snip>
So turns out they are taking classical and Jazz recordings in pcm or DSD and convert that to MQA... Because the noise gets pushed ouf of the audible range this is supposed to all sound better.
What a bunch of nonsense, but hey, it makes sense: the same music can be resold
once again and Meridian again takes a rake-off for being so gracious to let content providers mangle their content with Meridian's encoders.
If this isn't it already then the next stage of MQA will be shipping the lost bits through a side channel, such that MQA will finally be on par with the 20 years old FLAC, at least when it comes to fidelity limited to 17 bits. I will never beat the free, open-source and patent-free nature of FLAC though.
I'm absolutely serious here: in some cases MQA can be lossless up to 17 bits anyway, and audiophiles celebrate ... that they can finally pay for something that is worse than what has been available for free for decades.
They will say that this is new tech, allowing low bitrate streaming and also lossless decoding ... except it's everything but. We've had free codecs that can significantly reduce the bitrate (through lossy compression, for example by bit depth reduction with noise shaping similar to that part of MQA) for portable/streaming use while being able to incorporate "delta" files for lossless decoding on a PC/server (which has more disk space than those portable devices) for
many years as well.
For example, see lossyFLAC. Initial release 14 years ago.
It really is reinventing the wheel, except that it deliberately takes Meridian a couple of stages to get their patented square wheels back to something that's round.
But at least we will listen to a recording with the dynamic range of 5 that was 12 about 30 years ago on DAC with a sinad of 130db+ and worry about 192khz files.
It's absolutely insane.