aerosuffly
Head-Fier
- Joined
- Oct 22, 2009
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No need for MQA hardware if Tidal can decoded via software- what was the fuzz about mqa enabled DACs
My understanding is that Tidal software decoding only "unfold" MQA stream (24bit/48kHz) to higher sampling rate (the current Tidal decoding seem to limit the maximum unfolded sampling rate at 96kHz). MQA promise the correction for timing and quantisation errors in the ADC when the song was recorded, and they claimed that this correction can only be done in the DAC because it DAC dependent.
Having heard the MQA demo by Meridian, same here. It's a step backwards in sound quality compared to playing 24/96 FLAC and DSD files.
Did the demo compare the same system with MQA on and off? If you are comparing, for example, Meridian Explorer 2 with Micro iDSD, of course the iDSD will sound better. Our familiarity with the system is also important - a great system that we do not like might sound not as good as our home system. I am not trying to defend MQA here, but I think it is a little early to make a judgment on any tech when you can only compare apple to orange for most of the time.