[Baldr]

  Yggy user here. Given that Schiit has been vocally and almost militantly against MQA/DSD previously, difficult to see them backing away from their stance, though I'd love to see them pragmatically adapt to support MQA as I now use Tidal for 90+% of listening.. #fingerscrossed

 
I'm not backing away at all, in particular since Tidal is now offering 0.01% of their catalog with MQA. Thankfully, they have made them also available in a 96K/24 bit version which requires no MQA enabled D/A converter. After a bit of listening, my partner and co-founder Jason has pointed out many, if not all of the MQA processed recordings are obviously remastered, compared to the "normal" versions on Tidal, making it very difficult to determine whether any differences are due to the remastering or MQA itself. This leads to two questions:
 
1. Why does Meridian offer no convenient way to compare MQA/NoMQA on the same mastering of the same recording? After all, they want royalty dollars.
2. Why should we not continue to do our best for the other 99.99% of the market? I will not force the 99.99% of our users to subsidize the 0.01% of the curious who have no clearcut way to judge their MQA as being either gold or detrius proper to landfills.
 
Until Meridian offers us a fair, clear way to adjudge MQA/NoMQA with the same (not remastered) material, I smell something, well, very off.

 

[Astral Abyss]

I can tell you for certain I have zero interest in MQA or even remasters. In fact, I seek out original recordings when at all possible. I just bought 6 new CDs this past week. Been collecting them since the 80s and have no desire to move on to anything else.

 

[Berdine]

I don't understand why DAC hardware is expected to have anything to do with MQA.  MQA is a compression scheme for transmission and perhaps storage of digital music, that encodes higher sampling rates into low order bits.  The use case for this is streaming, which implies a computer of some form, which ought to be responsible for the decoding.  If I download a file over the internet and some protocol uses compression, my disk drive does not need to be able to uncompress the file.  Why is there a difference here?  Perhaps some people would rather have a dedicated box to perform the decoding, which is also fine, but then that is a digital to digital converter, not a digital to analog converter.

 

[gefski]

I'm fine waiting in the weeds for mqa's distribution to develop (or not). In the meantime, the uDO/Dante/ethernet fed Yggy wrings incredible detail from "lowly" 16/44 files and I can't stop listening.

 

[theveterans]

   
I'm not backing away at all, in particular since Tidal is now offering 0.01% of their catalog with MQA. Thankfully, they have made them also available in a 96K/24 bit version which requires no MQA enabled D/A converter. After a bit of listening, my partner and co-founder Jason has pointed out many, if not all of the MQA processed recordings are obviously remastered, compared to the "normal" versions on Tidal, making it very difficult to determine whether any differences are due to the remastering or MQA itself. This leads to two questions:
 
1. Why does Meridian offer no convenient way to compare MQA/NoMQA on the same mastering of the same recording? After all, they want royalty dollars.
2. Why should we not continue to do our best for the other 99.99% of the market. I will not force the 99.99% of our users to subsidize the 0.01% of the curious who have no clearcut way to judge their MQA as being either gold or detrius proper to landfills.
 
Until Meridian offers us a fair, clear way to adjudge MQA/NoMQA with the same (not remastered) material, I smell something, very off.

 
if one can somehow show proof that both are mastered exactly the same with the only difference being in 16-bit container against MQA
 
I don't think this will happen since it'll probably sound the same as the 16 bit 44.1 KHz

 

[watchnerd]

 
 
Until Meridian offers us a fair, clear way to adjudge MQA/NoMQA with the same (not remastered) material, I smell something, very off.

 
That smell might be WMG/RIAA/MQA collaborating: http://about.7digital.com/news/warner-music-group-and-mqa-enter-long-term-licensing-deal

 

[latestyle]

I'm not backing away at all, in particular since Tidal is now offering 0.01% of their catalog with MQA. Thankfully, they have made them also available in a 96K/24 bit version which requires no MQA enabled D/A converter. After a bit of listening, my partner and co-founder Jason has pointed out many, if not all of the MQA processed recordings are obviously remastered, compared to the "normal" versions on Tidal, making it very difficult to determine whether any differences are due to the remastering or MQA itself. This leads to two questions:


 


1. Why does Meridian offer no convenient way to compare MQA/NoMQA on the same mastering of the same recording? After all, they want royalty dollars.


2. Why should we not continue to do our best for the other 99.99% of the market. I will not force the 99.99% of our users to subsidize the 0.01% of the curious who have no clearcut way to judge their MQA as being either gold or detrius proper to landfills.


 


Until Meridian offers us a fair, clear way to adjudge MQA/NoMQA with the same (not remastered) material, I smell something, well, very off.

I get this rationale, thanks, Baldr. Let's see if Meridian or any of the studios will indeed provide unequivocal clarity for the consumers.

 

[bigfatpaulie]

  You must be running very sensitive headphones/iems for that kind of setup to sound good. Less in the path is one thing for sound quality but not enough to properly drive you cans also will negatively effect things. 
 
Just from looking at the specs they both output 4v balanced and 2v single ended. But the yggy has an impedance of 75ohm and the Bricasti M1 has an impedance of 40ohm so that could cause a matching issue with what you are driving. 

 
Not at all.  The M1 pairs extremely well with HD600's, for example.  Others use He1k's and Utopia's.
 
An impedance issue is certainly something to consider, but I was more interested in damaging the Yggy.

 

[SeaWo|f]

It wont cause damage to the yggy. Schiit sells the mani which is a fully passive preamp/switch with no option for gain, in part for use with powered monitors as stated on their page. 

 

[watchnerd]

  It wont cause damage to the yggy. Schiit sells the mani which is a fully passive preamp/switch with no option for gain, in part for use with powered monitors as stated on their page. 

 
You mean the Sys.
 
The Mani is a phono stage.

 

[Jozurr]

  It wont cause damage to the yggy. Schiit sells the mani which is a fully passive preamp/switch with no option for gain, in part for use with powered monitors as stated on their page. 

 
Maybe you mean sys which has the volume control? Just schiit selling a preamp does not make it safe to be used with Yggy to drive headphones.

 

[SeaWo|f]

Yea that's the one. I forgot which was which. I guess I'm not getting something.. I thought the risk was to the headphones not the DAC? And since he is currently running on a DAC with less output impedance than the yggy would that not be ok?

 

[Currawong]

 

  Yggy user here. Given that Schiit has been vocally and almost militantly against MQA/DSD previously, difficult to see them backing away from their stance, though I'd love to see them pragmatically adapt to support MQA as I now use Tidal for 90+% of listening.. #fingerscrossed

 
I'm not backing away at all, in particular since Tidal is now offering 0.01% of their catalog with MQA. Thankfully, they have made them also available in a 96K/24 bit version which requires no MQA enabled D/A converter. After a bit of listening, my partner and co-founder Jason has pointed out many, if not all of the MQA processed recordings are obviously remastered, compared to the "normal" versions on Tidal, making it very difficult to determine whether any differences are due to the remastering or MQA itself. This leads to two questions:
 
1. Why does Meridian offer no convenient way to compare MQA/NoMQA on the same mastering of the same recording? After all, they want royalty dollars.
2. Why should we not continue to do our best for the other 99.99% of the market? I will not force the 99.99% of our users to subsidize the 0.01% of the curious who have no clearcut way to judge their MQA as being either gold or detrius proper to landfills.
 
Until Meridian offers us a fair, clear way to adjudge MQA/NoMQA with the same (not remastered) material, I smell something, well, very off.

 
Part of the deal seems to be the re-mastering in particular. There's a possibility that most stuff on TIDAL could eventually be re-encoded as MQA, more or less doing to customers what Apple did with AAC.
 

I can tell you for certain I have zero interest in MQA or even remasters. In fact, I seek out original recordings when at all possible. I just bought 6 new CDs this past week. Been collecting them since the 80s and have no desire to move on to anything else.

 
Original recordings are "mastered" in some way. Ideally, a re-master is one that fixes any issues of the original mastering.
 

  I don't understand why DAC hardware is expected to have anything to do with MQA.  MQA is a compression scheme for transmission and perhaps storage of digital music, that encodes higher sampling rates into low order bits.  The use case for this is streaming, which implies a computer of some form, which ought to be responsible for the decoding.  If I download a file over the internet and some protocol uses compression, my disk drive does not need to be able to uncompress the file.  Why is there a difference here?  Perhaps some people would rather have a dedicated box to perform the decoding, which is also fine, but then that is a digital to digital converter, not a digital to analog converter.

 
Licensing. Money. The big question is why can't we have the re-mastering without the MQA scheme, but ... same answer.

 

[bigfatpaulie]

   
Maybe you mean sys which has the volume control? Just schiit selling a preamp does not make it safe to be used with Yggy to drive headphones.

 
Yes.
 
 

  Yea that's the one. I forgot which was which. I guess I'm not getting something.. I thought the risk was to the headphones not the DAC? And since he is currently running on a DAC with less output impedance than the yggy would that not be ok?

 
I mean no offence (I really don't) but perhaps more reading/knowledge is needed on a subject like this before giving advice - especially if a $2000+ piece of hardware is at stake.  

 

[buke9]

I've heard several people talking about running straight out of the output of dac and thought they were crazy and still do even though I haven't tried it myself. I'm sure it is ok for most headphones as a lot of preamps have headphone outs on them. I guess it just has to do with the analog output section of the dac. I guess you could also control volume with the computer if that is your source. I just don't think the output section of the dac was meant to work that way I could and have been wrong before though.