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Topic: Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA. (Read 147586 times) previous topic - next topic
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Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #75 –
I need help understanding something about this top octave "ringing problem"; perhaps a person who has examined this themselves from a real time display can step in to answer my question aboiut it: Is it a static alteration to the frequency response or does it ripple and fluctuate over time? When I see graphs of it, frozen images of the ripple, would the image be any different if taken say a moment later?

Whatever it is I'd assume the level changing is smaller than the JND for level discrimination at these top frequencies (which only kids can hear anyways). I bet Bob Stuart knows this but strategically ignores it.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #76 –
Quote from: Willakan on
Just what I thought. Revolutionary developments in psychoacoustics my arse.

The funny thing is that, as I understand it, for 44.1ksps you can make a faint case for the potential audibility of said ringing: if you carefully pick your content, and then get some kids with exceptional HF hearing, it's not completely out of the realms of possibility that the ringing might be very barely possibly audible (recalling a post by JJ on SkepticForum).

Of course - and I'm preaching to the choir here, I realise - by the time you get to 88.2ksps ringing is unconditionally inaudible to whatever freak combination of hypothetical listeners and material you could devise. So Meridian's format helps with...what, exactly?

But seriously, is that it? I am bemused as to how people can take this seriously - does nobody in the audience laugh when they try to pull this crap? I'm very, very far from an expert on the subject, but as far as I can tell this is reasonably clear-cut BS. It's not even new BS: issue 16 of "The Audio Critic" (http://www.theaudiocritic.com/back_issues/The_Audio_Critic_16_r.pdf) records Wadia trying to shovel similar shit in 1991 (only their ingenious solution was simply rolling off earlier enough to screw with the audioband, but very slowly...).


Oddly enough, Meridian published this photo from the MQA launch event on their website:



The facial expression of the man in the third row is particularly appropriate.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #77 –
Quote from: Willakan on
But seriously, is that it? I am bemused as to how people can take this seriously - does nobody in the audience laugh when they try to pull this crap?
I experienced that people are polite at those conferences and don't do that sort of thing, even though sometimes it is warranted. It's more constructive to talk to the speaker later in a constructive manner.

Then again I only attended science and not homeopathy conferences. Many people in AES seem to have pecuniary interests, so dog won't eat dog.
It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #78 –
Quote from: mzil on
I need help understanding something about this top octave "ringing problem"; perhaps a person who has examined this themselves from a real time display can step in to answer my question aboiut it: Is it a static alteration to the frequency response or does it ripple and fluctuate over time? When I see graphs of it, frozen images of the ripple, would the image be any different if taken say a moment later?

Whatever it is I'd assume the level changing is smaller than the JND for level discrimination at these top frequencies (which only kids can hear anyways). I bet Bob Stuart knows this but strategically ignores it.


And how often do people confuse the Gibbs phenomenon for ringing?

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #79 –
Quote from: Willakan on
Just what I thought. Revolutionary developments in psychoacoustics my arse.
To play devil's advocate and jump to the other side of the argument for a minute:

The AES paper showed that under (what many here would describe as) extreme conditions, people could just about hear a difference, and proved this with statistically significant double blind test results.

This isn't the night and day difference that audiophiles attribute to hi-res or that marketing departments may proclaim, but it's not "nothing" either.

If I was designing these filters, I would aim for a gentle roll off and minimised pre-ring. Even if I couldn't hear the difference myself. It doesn't hurt, and in some circumstances it might help.


Compare ultrasonic filters with dither. In theory, with clean signals, dither is important. In practice, with real-world dirty signals, dither is rarely audible.
In theory, with clean transducers and most of what we currently know about hearing, ultrasonic filters are inaudible. In practice, with real-world transducers and human ears it seems that the characteristics of ultrasonic filters might be just audible.

Everyone understands dither because you can generate quiet sine waves in almost any audio editor, convert the audio to a lower bitdepth without dither, and see harmonic distortion appear. Yet most audible demos of dither use 8-bits, or vastly boosted listening levels, because it's hard to hear the effect when used normally, and undetectable (un ABX-able) with almost any real audio source at a reasonable listening level.

If we can "cheat" in this way to make dither easily audible for a demonstration, why not "cheat" in a comparable way to make ultrasonic filters easily audible for a demonstration? Imagine we run the linear phase vs appodizing filter test at 10kHz, or even 5kHz. That's equally cheating (if not more so) for a filter test as raising the level by 46dB is for a test of a small amplitude effect (dither), but if you did this almost everyone would hear the difference. Then we extrapolate that the same thing happens ~22kHz, but we don't hear it in the same way (or at all) unless something we don't really understand yet happens. But because it's audible in a non-representative case, we decide it's a good thing do anyway.



For me, there's not really sufficient rigorous evidence to start claiming this as fact yet. But it's not an unreasonable theory, and gentle filters with minimised pre-ringing are not bad in themselves, so why not?

The questions I would like answering are:
1. Is the ABXable effect reported in the AES paper due to pre-ringing, or the lack of ultrasonic content?
2. If pre-ringing, is this detected due to artefacts in the amp and/or speakers, or air transmission, or some mechanism in the human ear?
3. If pre-ringing (by whatever mechanism), what is the threshold of audibility?

Cheers,
David.

P.S. remember krabapple's point: even if people can detect a difference, this isn't the difference "heard" by audiophiles in sighted tests or the difference heard when hi-res release use different masters/mastering.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #80 –
One more thing to me is that in the listening test result they used words like 'round' sound for descriping the difference.
I don't have the paper. Maybe the lowpassed versions even sound better in a way
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #81 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Quote from: Willakan on
Just what I thought. Revolutionary developments in psychoacoustics my arse.
To play devil's advocate and jump to the other side of the argument for a minute:




All good and reasonable (and thanks for the shout-out).  Sure, if we *can* design to account for corner cases, and especially if it can done cheaply,  why not?  But for heaven's sake just stop (not you, David, I mean 'audiophiles and marketing departments' and audio journalists/bloggers)  making outlandish claims about the importance and audibility of these effects.  The demonstrable fact is, they are typically miniscule if not inaudible, under normal (or even 'audiophile') home audio conditions.  And STOP implying that 'hi rez'  of itself, means we 'finally get what the musicians heard in the studio'.  That *only* happens if engineers don't radically remaster the audio for consumer delivery (and of course it actually *never* happens, because we are never in the control booth listening to the same system the musicians did). 

There are comparatively *major* audible problems consumers face with home audio that by any rational evaluation deserve more attention than 'audibility of digital filters'.  Hi rez cheerleaders need to switch teams!

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #82 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Quote from: Willakan on
Just what I thought. Revolutionary developments in psychoacoustics my arse.
To play devil's advocate and jump to the other side of the argument for a minute:



For me, there's not really sufficient rigorous evidence to start claiming this as fact yet. But it's not an unreasonable theory, and gentle filters with minimised pre-ringing are not bad in themselves, so why not?

The questions I would like answering are:
1. Is the ABXable effect reported in the AES paper due to pre-ringing, or the lack of ultrasonic content?
2. If pre-ringing, is this detected due to artefacts in the amp and/or speakers, or air transmission, or some mechanism in the human ear?
3. If pre-ringing (by whatever mechanism), what is the threshold of audibility?

Cheers,
David.

P.S. remember krabapple's point: even if people can detect a difference, this isn't the difference "heard" by audiophiles in sighted tests or the difference heard when hi-res release use different masters/mastering.
David
These are interesting and thoughtful points, but I think the "not bad in themselves" assertion is problematic. I'm sure you know all this much better than me , but .....
Unlike dithering whose adverse effects are confined to raising the overall noise level which  can be comfortably dismissed as insignificant in most cases, any filter which is non-linear phase and slow roll off has inevitable downsides in terms of aliasing, phase distortion and non- flat frequency response. Surely all of these can be shown to be detectable in corner cases, just like ringing.
So unfortunately in the absence of established evidence of audibility, there is no agreed compromise. You only have to look at the MQA paper to see Stuart and Craven selectively asserting that aliasing can be ignored if the products are below a certain level, in order to justify their choice of filter (whose benefit is ?). Applying a consistent approach to each of the potential downsides would leave them floundering.

Many people still think that applying an orthodox sharp linear phase filters make sense.

That takes us to the list of questions needing answering, which of course they do. I would suggest that c. ( threshold of audibility) bears some refinement- it seems often to be assumed that what matters is the length of pre- ringing in time ( as shown by the impulse response) , but surely the amplitude and frequency matter. If the energy in the pre-ringing s the energy in the transition band, then surely a really steep filter will have less energy in the ringing- even if it goes on longer. If so surely that might at least sometimes be less audible. Apologies if I have got this wrong. Perhaps a real world example might help here

On your last point I don't think it's coincidental that the supposed time domain benefits of relaxed filters never seem to be demonstrated or even illustrated with real examples, because if they were it would serve to show implicitly how rarely they would apply in most music.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #83 –
Quote from: adamdea on
That takes us to the list of questions needing answering, which of course they do. I would suggest that c. ( threshold of audibility) bears some refinement- it seems often to be assumed that what matters is the length of pre- ringing in time ( as shown by the impulse response) , but surely the amplitude and frequency matter. If the energy in the pre-ringing s the energy in the transition band, then surely a really steep filter will have less energy in the ringing- even if it goes on longer. If so surely that might at least sometimes be less audible. Apologies if I have got this wrong. Perhaps a real world example might help here


Agreed. I was discussing this with a friend who is a long time audio engineer and more of a perfectionist than I. My argument is that there are three reasons why 44 KHz low pass filter ringing should be inadible which seems to amount to be a paraphrase of the previous paragraph:

(1) The ringing takes place at a frequency that is generally considered to be ultrasonic, which is to say too high of a frequency to be audible

(2) The ringing has a relatively low amplitude compared to the impulse which further decreases its potential audibility.

(3) The ringing is subject to temporal masking which most authorities show (albeit at far more audible frequencies but also a longer masker) to extend several milliseconds before the loud noise, and even longer afte rit.

Quote
On your last point I don't think it's coincidental that the supposed time domain benefits of relaxed filters never seem to be demonstrated or even illustrated with real examples, because if they were it would serve to show implicitly how rarely they would apply in most music.


It appears to me that the ringing can be "tuned" by adjusting the width of the transition band, the steepness of the filter,  and the maximum/linear/minimum phase properties of the low pass filter.

The concept of the Apodizing filter seems to me to be a technological step backward. Why not just tune the low pass filter itself for the best possible audible performance (presuming as has not been proven, that the current practice of linear phase filters is somehow audibly suboptimal).  The Apodizing filter is just an add on that seems to be designed to correct something that can be done correctly (if this is even warranted) for no additional cost in terms of complexity. 

These are digital filters and making them right seems like an easy enough thing to do. Again, it seems to be controversial to claim that they are currently suboptimal.  I don't see any compelling evidence to support that claim.

If I were a skeptic, I'd say that the Apodizing filter was contrived to create a patentable device, given that prior art probably precludes patenting just doing it right.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #84 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
My argument is that there are three reasons why 44 KHz low pass filter ringing should be inadible which seems to amount to be a paraphrase of the previous paragraph:

(1) The ringing takes place at a frequency that is generally considered to be ultrasonic, which is to say too high of a frequency to be audible

(2) The ringing has a relatively low amplitude compared to the impulse which further decreases its potential audibility.

(3) The ringing is subject to temporal masking which most authorities show (albeit at far more audible frequencies but also a longer masker) to extend several milliseconds before the loud noise, and even longer afte rit.


Apart from your 3 points, I have my doubts as to whether actual music excites that ringing in practice. When people demonstrate the pre-ringing, they invariably use either a step function or a sharp pulse of one sample to excite it, and show a plot or oscillogram of it. The latter presumably to approximate a Dirac pulse. Since digital audio is a bandlimited system that cannot represent frequency content beyond the Nyquist limit, such signals can not mean what people apparently think they mean. They are neither a step function, nor a Dirac impulse. They are something with a spectrum that is limited to 1/2 the sampling rate. If you try to come up with a waveform that obeys this bandwidth limit, and at the same time touches all sample values from the original signal, you will invariably arrive at something that shows pre- and post-ringing. That is not an artefact created by the converter, it is something that must have been in the signal to start with.

In one word: The Gibbs-Phenomenon. Something that is excited by a step function can not occur in real-world music, because real-world music doesn't contain step functions, and digital audio signals can not encode step functions. If that's what people mean with pre-ringing, it is a red herring.

However, if we assume that nonlinear processing happened in the digital domain, particularly clipping, then the ringing might be the result of that. But that's another issue.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #85 –
Depending on where and what we are filtering, of course musical content can make ultrasonic filters ring...
http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=68524
I agree that just showing the impulse response of a filter, and moanng about the ringing, is misleading.
Cheers,
David.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #86 –
As for whether these gentle filters are ok in themselves, it depends. Flat + linear phase-ish to 20k, dead by 22k is fine. The stuff in the second AES paper is another thing entirely. How close MQA is to that paper I do not know.

Cheers,
David.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #87 –
Quote from: pelmazo on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
My argument is that there are three reasons why 44 KHz low pass filter ringing should be inadible which seems to amount to be a paraphrase of the previous paragraph:

(1) The ringing takes place at a frequency that is generally considered to be ultrasonic, which is to say too high of a frequency to be audible

(2) The ringing has a relatively low amplitude compared to the impulse which further decreases its potential audibility.

(3) The ringing is subject to temporal masking which most authorities show (albeit at far more audible frequencies but also a longer masker) to extend several milliseconds before the loud noise, and even longer afte rit.


Apart from your 3 points, I have my doubts as to whether actual music excites that ringing in practice. When people demonstrate the pre-ringing, they invariably use either a step function or a sharp pulse of one sample to excite it, and show a plot or oscillogram of it. The latter presumably to approximate a Dirac pulse. Since digital audio is a bandlimited system that cannot represent frequency content beyond the Nyquist limit, such signals can not mean what people apparently think they mean. They are neither a step function, nor a Dirac impulse. They are something with a spectrum that is limited to 1/2 the sampling rate. If you try to come up with a waveform that obeys this bandwidth limit, and at the same time touches all sample values from the original signal, you will invariably arrive at something that shows pre- and post-ringing. That is not an artefact created by the converter, it is something that must have been in the signal to start with.

In one word: The Gibbs-Phenomenon. Something that is excited by a step function can not occur in real-world music, because real-world music doesn't contain step functions, and digital audio signals can not encode step functions. If that's what people mean with pre-ringing, it is a red herring.

However, if we assume that nonlinear processing happened in the digital domain, particularly clipping, then the ringing might be the result of that. But that's another issue.


Nonlinear processing in the digital domain still seems to be subject to some limitations that keep it from being as strong of a stimulus as the idealistic stimuli favored by proponents of this alleged problem.  For one thing, any signal in the digital domain still has spectral limits that are imposed by the sample rate. the common situation is that the nonlinear processing "Tries" to create energy that is out of band, but it gets inherently mirrored or aliased down into the system's normal Nyquist Frequency imposed limits.  Secondly, Most real world nonlinear processing whether intentional or accidental does not create the theoretical maximum possible amount of energy.

So, this creates a 4th limiting condition in addition to the 3 listed above:

(4) Real world stimuli generally excite the system far less energetically than a theoretically ideal maximized impulse.

In short, advocates of the audibility of this alleged ringing are not asking people to experience the worst day of their life, but rather to concurrently experience the 4 worst days of their life on the same day. Two words: Mission Impossible.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #88 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Nonlinear processing in the digital domain still seems to be subject to some limitations that keep it from being as strong of a stimulus as the idealistic stimuli favored by proponents of this alleged problem.  For one thing, any signal in the digital domain still has spectral limits that are imposed by the sample rate. the common situation is that the nonlinear processing "Tries" to create energy that is out of band, but it gets inherently mirrored or aliased down into the system's normal Nyquist Frequency imposed limits.  Secondly, Most real world nonlinear processing whether intentional or accidental does not create the theoretical maximum possible amount of energy.

So, this creates a 4th limiting condition in addition to the 3 listed above:

(4) Real world stimuli generally excite the system far less energetically than a theoretically ideal maximized impulse.

In short, advocates of the audibility of this alleged ringing are not asking people to experience the worst day of their life, but rather to concurrently experience the 4 worst days of their life on the same day. Two words: Mission Impossible.


Even though the energy of such artefacts is going to be rather low, that doesn't mean they must be inaudible. However, it would be unfair to blame the filters or converters for that. After all, it is the spectral effects of the nonlinear processing that creates those artefacts. Garbage in, garbage out.

Given the mistakes and the propaganda that circle around those issues, my conclusion has been, that each and every time someone uses impulses and/or rectangles in an argument about digital audio, heightened suspicion is in order. Quite frequently the argument contains a more or less well hidden violation of a basic precondition of sampling. The connection between the time-domain view and the frequency-domain view of digital signals is simply too tricky for most people, and even experts sometimes get caught. This makes it very easy to show suggestive diagrams that are bound to be interpreted in a manner that's both false and intentional.

Some kinds of diagrams, which are used frequently even by experts with no hidden agenda, contribute to the false intuition. For example, I have come to dislike the stairstep diagrams of sampling. They are a wrong depiction of what's happening. They are the output of a DAC with zero order hold. As such they can be a signal that might be observed at some point in a circuit, but it is most definitely not a correct rendering of the digital signal, and hence such a diagram shouldn't be used in places where a faithful depiction of the digital signal is expected.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #89 –
Quote from: pelmazo on
Given the mistakes and the propaganda that circle around those issues, my conclusion has been, that each and every time someone uses impulses and/or rectangles in an argument about digital audio, heightened suspicion is in order. Quite frequently the argument contains a more or less well hidden violation of a basic precondition of sampling. The connection between the time-domain view and the frequency-domain view of digital signals is simply too tricky for most people, and even experts sometimes get caught. This makes it very easy to show suggestive diagrams that are bound to be interpreted in a manner that's both false and intentional.

Some kinds of diagrams, which are used frequently even by experts with no hidden agenda, contribute to the false intuition. For example, I have come to dislike the stairstep diagrams of sampling. They are a wrong depiction of what's happening. They are the output of a DAC with zero order hold. As such they can be a signal that might be observed at some point in a circuit, but it is most definitely not a correct rendering of the digital signal, and hence such a diagram shouldn't be used in places where a faithful depiction of the digital signal is expected.



I agree with your points.

My distrust of square wave testing goes back to long before the advent of digital audio.  I saw it being used to support what seemed to me to be illogical conclusions about tubed power amplifiers in the 60s for example.

OTOH the concept of impulse response has a very solid theoretical footing, but eyeballing the response of gear to impulses is really not any part of its effective use. Furthermore, most impulse response based evaluation of audio gear and listening environments is not based on the actual use of impulses!

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #90 –
I've Heard the Future of Streaming: Meridian's MQA

Quote
JA
- Returning to the triangle of musical information in fig.1, the old question is why do we need to preserve and reproduce frequencies above the limit of human hearing, even if we can do it? Bob spent some time discussing this in his presentation and it comes down to the fact that the ear-brain doesn't just operate as a frequency analyzer. Evolution has fine-tuned the system to be able to detect temporal differences that are equivalent to a bandwidth considerably greater than 20kHz and that the anti-aliasing filters in A/D converters and reconstruction filters in D/A converters introduce temporal "smearing" that it is considerably greater than what our ear-brains are tuned to expect from natural sounds: this "smearing" is, I believe, responsible for so-called "digital" sound.

The MQA encoder and decoder together have been designed to have a transient response of the same form and order as that of the temporal sensitivity of the ear-brain. And if at the MQA-encoding stage, the temporal effect of the A/D converter can be compensated for, the complete system offers a transparent window into the original musical event. Meridian describes this as "taking an original master further, toward the original performance, in an analogous way to the processes expert antique picture restorers use to clean the grime and discolored varnish from an Old Master to reveal the original color and vibrancy of the work."


This, from someone who attended this what can really be done with "Hi Rez" and compressed streaming demo 

It gets better: Meridian's MQA: One Listener's Impression

Quote
JS
- In Audio High's exceedingly dry listening room, we began with an 24/88.2k file of Hilary Hahn playing what I believe was a movement from J. S. Bach's Violin Concerto No.2 in E, BWV1042. As compelling as the untreated hi-res file sounded, I literally laughed at the difference when the MQA version began. Not only did it feel as though a veil had been lifted, with far more color to the sound, but instruments also possessed more body. With more meat on dem bones, I also noticed less of a digital edge on the violin. I've heard Hahn in concert several times, and this was the closest to real I've ever heard her violin sound on recording.


So there you have it. MQA sounds better that the original (24/88) Hi Rez file.

cheers,

AJ

Loudspeaker manufacturer

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #91 –
Quote from: ajinfla on
It gets better: Meridian's MQA: One Listener's Impression

Quote
JS
- In Audio High's exceedingly dry listening room, we began with an 24/88.2k file of Hilary Hahn playing what I believe was a movement from J. S. Bach's Violin Concerto No.2 in E, BWV1042. As compelling as the untreated hi-res file sounded, I literally laughed at the difference when the MQA version began. Not only did it feel as though a veil had been lifted, with far more color to the sound, but instruments also possessed more body. With more meat on dem bones, I also noticed less of a digital edge on the violin. I've heard Hahn in concert several times, and this was the closest to real I've ever heard her violin sound on recording.


So there you have it. MQA sounds better that the original (24/88) Hi Rez file.

cheers,

AJ


It's only audiophile if it's inconvenient.
 

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #92 –
Everything they stand by is spot on IMO. I'm glad they're doing this, just what industry needs.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #93 –
Quote from: ajinfla on
It gets better: Meridian's MQA: One Listener's Impression

Quote
JS
... ... ... I literally laughed at the difference when the MQA version began. Not only did it feel as though a veil had been lifted, with far more color to the sound, but instruments also possessed more body. With more meat on dem bones, ... ... ...




Is anybody else thinking, "That's exactly what I experience when I  turn up the volume a touch" ?

I'd like to think that would be just too obvious for an experienced reviewer, but...
The most important audio cables are the ones in the brain

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #94 –
Quote from: giro1991 on
Everything they stand by is spot on IMO.

Nothing wrong with capitalism, though some might question the morality of legal fraud.

Quote from: giro1991 on
I'm glad they're doing this, just what industry needs.

What "industry"?
The grime and discolored varnish master restorer? The audio$cam one, or...??

cheers,

AJ
Loudspeaker manufacturer

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #95 –
The thing that I find amazing is the list of superlatives that people use to describe the improvement. I've been lucky enough to hear studio master recordings several times. It would be a lie to say they always sound great, but they often sound better than the released versions. Other than where the released versions are obviously butchered, I've never heard a large enough difference to justify the kind of words people use to describe the improvements. People did this with SACD, 24/96, and now MQA.

I can usually hear and appreciate the difference when people take more care in bringing the sound of the master tapes to the release (first generation tape, properly adjusted tape machine, scrupulous care to avoid over-use of compression and EQ, etc), but the CD release is then so close to the master tape, that it doesn't leave room for the quantity of improvement suggests by these superlatives.

I'm obviously deaf, or enjoying music is a completely different way. I find being happy and/or emotional is a much greater contributor to musical enjoyment than better speakers.

Cheers,
David.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #96 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
I find being happy and/or emotional is a much greater contributor to musical enjoyment than better speakers.

Hear, hear!

It's a real shame so many people posing as intellectuals, seem to forget that life works more or less on a logarythmic scale; i.e, after reaching a certain quality standard, it takes a huge ammount of money and effort to actually move on to the next stage and reach any real, tangible difference in terms of quality.

Listen to the music, not the media it's on.
União e reconstrução

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #97 –
Quote from: ajinfla on
Quote
JS
- In Audio High's exceedingly dry listening room, we began with an 24/88.2k file of Hilary Hahn playing what I believe was a movement from J. S. Bach's Violin Concerto No.2 in E, BWV1042. As compelling as the untreated hi-res file sounded, I literally laughed at the difference when the MQA version began. Not only did it feel as though a veil had been lifted, with far more color to the sound, but instruments also possessed more body. With more meat on dem bones, I also noticed less of a digital edge on the violin. I've heard Hahn in concert several times, and this was the closest to real I've ever heard her violin sound on recording.


So there you have it. MQA sounds better that the original (24/88) Hi Rez file.

cheers,

AJ


let me guess without clicking through: JS = Jason Serinus. 



Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #98 –
Quote from: ajinfla on
Quote from: giro1991 on
Everything they stand by is spot on IMO.


What "industry"?
The grime and discolored varnish master restorer? The audio$cam one, or...??

cheers,

AJ



you know...*the business*  Amir kept telling us about, that we don't understand but he does.

Meridian and Stereophile are just giving us *the business*.

Meridian Audio's new... sub-format called MQA.

Reply #99 –
Serinus in full flower :
Quote
Not only did it feel as though a veil had been lifted, ....


*Another* one? How many f*cking veils are there to lift, anyway, before audio reproduction becomes 'transparent'.

It seems like a new one is found every few years, by Stereophile , TAS, and their paymasters.