MQA explained: An introduction

Spencer Chrislu summarises MQA and what it will mean to listeners and the industry.

[sietchtabr]

mqa is a toll, flac is not
Flac is lossless, mqa is not
what else?

[ddostesting]

I've listened to MQA -- It's pretty good. They seem to be doing 2 things:

1) They fold high frequency sound in what would be the noise floor in a digital representation of an analog file. They discovered that we don't hear the noise floor in the first 44khz-ish of the sound, so they replaced that noise, digitally, with the folded sound from higher frequencies.

[EpicSaint]

Ok I think mqa is 15% better than cd quality without a dac. And with a dac mostly near or sometimes precisely as the original recording.