Well one CD company, Chesky has already decided to release an MQA CD - i.e. sub CD quality (aiui) for those who don't have an MQA enabled DAC, and MQA quality (whatever that actually is) for those very very few who do have an MQA DAC.
And their plans ...?
"If all goes well, we'll do all our future issues like this."
So for most people such a CD will no longer deliver CD quality. And the worse they just happen to make the the sub-CD bit sound, the better the MQA bit will possibly sound, so the comparison is rigged as well.
Nyquist must be spinning in his grave—at variable r.p.m. obviously.
I have about 3,500 CDs. I guess that's several lifetimes.
But I'm currently listening to Sean Rowe's latest album in MQA on Tidal Masters. It's excellent.
So I guess the sort of people they're aiming MQA at might include me.
Interesting and good to know, I'll make certain not to buy any!
Suspect it will play on a std cdp just as audio
Interesting and good to know, I'll make certain not to buy any!
And moreover, when asked to say more about his personal impressions of the format, Chesky said:
"Listen, what is real and what is not real? You sit in front of two boxes in your home, and it's a magic trick. But we can't say live is always better, because some halls are over-reverberant, excessively dry, or just plain bad. Sometimes, the recording sounds better than the live experience. MQA addresses digital harshness, and gets the timing and transients right. It's like walking through the woods and smelling the trees vs putting Febreze in your house."
So all his conventional recordings on the Chesky label sound like toilet air freshener, and suffer from unadressed digital harshness, wrong timing and wrong transients. So don't buy any of them either.
Was in the Guildford branch of Sevenoaks last Thursday afternoon & asked if they had had any interest in MQA. They had a demo laid on for them & the guy I spoke with said "Even I could hear the improvement!" I merely pass this on.
Was in the Guildford branch of Sevenoaks last Thursday afternoon & asked if they had had any interest in MQA. They had a demo laid on for them & the guy I spoke with said "Even I could hear the improvement!" I merely pass this on.
I've been into that branch a few times, pretty sure the staff were on loan from B&Q as was their hifi knowledge.
Who laid on this demo?
Where did a get a copy of the master that was used to generate the MQA version so they could compare them?
I've been into that branch a few times, pretty sure the staff were on loan from B&Q as was their hifi knowledge.
My impression was it was done for them rather than by them - my interest in MQA is currently low enough not to give it my undivided attention, Jim. I was more interested in the NAD Masters series.
Have you ever listened to MQA using a good MQA enabled DAC in a good stereo setup?
So for any listening tests to mean much beyond "that sounds OK" these factors need to be taken into account.
FWIW I'm not surprised or concerned that someone may have some MQA files, played as MQA, and get likable results. But that doesn't tell us if a carefully made non MQA version could sound as good - or better. When a comparison is made, we'd need to know the full details for both versions to look for other possibly causes of a 'difference'.