MQA: Yes or No? | Stereophile

Audiophiles at Axpona 2017 share their thoughts on Master Quality Authenticated (MQA).

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[matthewv]

What MQA does is add lossy noise in the audible spectrum in an attempt to partially reconstruct things that nobody can hear (particularly not the middle-aged guys who purport to care about frequencies above 20KHz when they usually can’t even hear anything above 15). People are probably liking the additional high-frequency audible noise that gets added. Of course a mastering engineer could have done the same with a little EQ etc. if that’s what they had wanted, but it’s not what they wanted, so they didn’t. MQA is just a snake-oil attempt to extract licensing fees from everyone.

MQA is a particularly bad lossy compression format, with less-accurate sound than either MP3 or AAC at the same bitrate. It’s even less efficient at reducing size than FLAC, and FLAC is lossless!

[darthdurkelthewise]

And 2 years later this has not aged well...
MQA is not lossless and is definitely not “subversive”. I almost fell out of my chair when I heard that comment.
If your ears tell you to spend that money then go for it.

[MrCatalysis]

Qobuz has just launched Studio level, which allows subscribers to stream their entire hi-res repertoire in Flac, be it 24/48, 24/96, 24/192 or whatever. So there’s the space saving argument buried, which was the only killer app. I say it’s DOA.

[phototristan]

MQA is simply not needed. Also MQA is not lossless.

[kierenmoore]

Particularly enjoyed the completely unbiased opinion from Dr Vinyl ... :P

[Akegata]

It's interesting how extremely convinced some of these people are even though they have obviously not made an actual analysis of the format.
I guess if you buy an expensive DAC it's easy to convince yourself that it makes things sound amazing, otherwise you will just have wasted your money.

[NexuJin]

MQA would have been awesome back in the days of 14k4 modems. Generally speaking: bandwidth nor storage is a problem anymore if you have the money to afford a $20k+ Hi-Fi system. Just give us uncompressed audio data.

[aviatoFPV]

Auch the roon guy not coming out clean, I had higher hopes for such a tech oriented software. The border patrol guy.. what a legend, "I'm deeply suspicious of any form of compression".

[roscoejones]

And Stereophile is STILL shilling MQA, even though It's been proven to be a scam.

[prep]

Here's a good question. Why do MQA players have a light to let the listener know it is "authenticated"? If MQA does do what Stuart claims why is the indicator even necessary, we should know just by hearing right?

The truth is that the indicator plays into expectation biases and placebo effects, just like hi res players. It is marketing 101 and a necessary part of the product as there are no convincing controlled tests to show that hi res sounds better than CD, even after 30 years and Meridian make it very difficult to do proper tests with MQA.

The best controllled test of MQA to date below (ie double blind, level matched, same masters etc) actually shows most people prefer 24/96, though the difference is not statistically significant to say listeners can tell the difference at all.

[wyup]

MQA as a convenience of compression/bitrate is going to be superseded by FLAC from the moment average internet bandwith is no longer a matter.

[joseauger]

MQA arrived late. According to Meridian its purpose is to facilitate the transmission of streaming of high resolution files (they do not specify what resolutions but Tidal is streaming 44.1/16 files in MQA!). With th availability of high internet speeds that exceed 1GB, I think that MQA is not needed. For example, Qobuz is streaming 192/24 files with ease and without problems. In addition, in one of Steve Guttenberg’s YouTube videos he mentions that the biggest opposition to MQA is coming from recording engineers because they don’t want anybody to change their production. Furthermore, MQA requires developers and manufacturers of dacs to give MQA their coding and many that have their own coding and fpga, instead of readily available commercial dac chips, are not going to give away their developments.

[onebylandtwoifbysearunifby]

Very interesting to look back at the "experts" who fell for that con of a "new" format. Turned out that "improvement" was distortion. And MQA execs were far from honest. Even Wikipedia got it right. Three cheers for Shiit Audio and the others who came in on the correct side of this (Lynn Audio and SACD/ DSD inventors/engineers as well). [ MQA was covertly pitched to the music industry as a way to keep "master quality" recordings *OUT* of the hands of consumers for copyright protection. ...Oh so you guys didn't know that or you did? What was your relationship with Slippery Bob over at Meridian?! You can't hide from History in the digital age boys! ]

[mrthermal]

1:45 that guy is a genius... 100% on the ball

[janezzumer]

My system is simply too schiity for that :)

[huskydogg]

So apparently women have no opinion on MQA, interesting.

[WimHulpia]

Well, after buying a 3k € "mqa-DAC" (Matrix Element X) and after comparing non-mqa with mqa, I can confirm there's a huge difference, but it's not what I expected.

One has to be aware that in order to do correct comparisons between mqa and non-mqa, one has to have subscriptions to both Tidal and Qobuz. That's because the majority of the mqas on Tidal are created from hi-res pcms, and those hi-res pcms can only be found on Qobuz. Tidal only offers 16/44pcms and those are half the size then most mqas! No kidding.

Also filter choice is VERY important. As mqa always uses a minimizing slow filter, one has to select such a filter when playing non-mqa to make comparisons valid. Most DACs will default to a linear fast or linear slow filer (which are better filters than minimizing filters by the way) but since you cannot select a different mqa filter, you have to select a minimizing filter when playing pcm for valid comparisons.


So I started comparing between Tidal and Qobuz... with the minimizing slow filter selected on my DAC when playing pcm (filter 2 on matrix element x) and I made sure pcm and mqa were from the same master (same number of tracks on the album, same number of samples for each track, same samplerate, same bit depth, etc...)

Conclusion :
I spent over a year looking for an mqa that sounded better than it's pcm master, and I haven't found a single one. I did find plenty of mqas that sounded worse. Therefore : MP3 < MQA < PCM. I no longer play mqas on my 3k DAC, only PCMs.
Ow and btw, I play them using the linear fast filter (filter 3) because it sounds more natural, as the artist intended.
Glad Qobuz offers the real hi-res material. (The same hi-res material that was used to create lossy compressed mqas from !)

[histubeness]

The guy at 6:33 gets only 3 seconds to say he's not impressed. --WHY is he not impressed? More time needed for him to state his case, whatever it may be.

MQA? No thanks, Flac 24/96 please. I'll pay money for the music, not the container.

[deborah-weiss]

These people pro-MQA either are paid to say good stuff about it (i.e. their companies have a partnership with MQA) or are borderline senile needing to get their ears checked. It's clearly just a marketing stunt and if your ears work half fine you can just go to listen to the same song on Tidal MQA and then on Qobuz Hi-Res and hear the scandalous difference between bass-boosted eq lacking in depth and real hi-res and clarity. I recommend listening to David Bowie's albums, the difference is really staggering.