You've already answered that when you said
"If you are referring to the recent CA thread".
Given that you're asking for recommendations for DACs supporting MQA, then you must have liked what you've heard!!??
I wasn't asking.
Who's fooling who? look at MQA Partners, they can't all be fooled !! Some of the best names in Digital !!
And many have stated that they are adding MQA to their products at the request of their customers. I guess the customers have been fooled. What is more, it was shown that you could remove the high-freqency content and still fool MQA DACs into indicating that you were listening to a high-res MQA file.
If you are referring to the recent CA thread maybe look at the Darko website where he conducts a recent interview with Stuart(at Munich),which was probably done in reply.
There is also one on Stereophile, where Bob Stuart speaks a bunch of meaningless gibberish. It has been
proven that MQA is both a: lossless, and b: not high-res, and, worse still, c: lower than even CD quality.
This site has supported many negative views on MQA from day one by some who clearly had not heard it !!
Computer Audiophile? From what I've read it has threads where detailed analysis has been done of MQA sufficient to prove that their initial claims about it are demonstrably false.
I could recommend a couple of DACs which support MQA but as they don't get a menton from the 'names' on this site, then I'd be wasting my time !!
So have I heard MQA processed music? Yes I have. I have a TIDAL subscription (where a large quantity of MQA music is available) and have the second of two MQA decoding DACs here.
Some examples of the
many very audible issues: One album I've listened to side-by-side with the non-MQA version had a significant pitch change (INXS). Other albums, as has been shown by analysis have been run through some kind of compression algorithm which makes
the music sound different, in many cases adding obvious distortion (eg: Getz and Gilberto) . Something to understand: It is NOT the file type that makes the difference, it is processing done to the actual tracks, many of which
still have audible artefacts from their initial processing (ie: are clearly not from unprocessed master tapes) ie: we are most definitely
not listening to a "mastering quality" track. Anyone can, with enough study and practice, remaster music to make it sound "better". There used to be a member here who would "remaster" (if you can call it that) regular music tracks and gained quite a bit of acclaim for what he did. However MQA is obviously running everything through some kind of computer (there is no way, given the quantity of music involved, that this is being done with any significant care) so they can show people that it sounds different.
This is just SACD all over again. Remember SACDs? Analysis of those found that many of them were the 44.1 CD version up-sampled to DSD64 and had no high-res content.
) things get different when you get into the realm of the smaller guys. I listen to mainly death metal. In many cases there you're talking about smaller more home bread recording houses, all the way down to singular bands and even one man gigs. They tend to actually utilize the perks of the higher sampling fates and bit depth far more properly, especially when you get into the more progressive stuff. Those tend to not release with that silly MQA badge, while actually being the real deal, as I'm sure there are a few in in the more mainstream side of things.
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