peterjgross
New Head-Fier
I personly dont want to discuss if someone can hear the difference or not, we know this type of discussions... all i want to say is that MQA tracks very often are very high quality. One of the problems with high end gear (iDSD Pro and good headphones etc) is that one could very clearly hear if a track is poor quality. I am kinda searching for good recordings with good mastering, since there is a very special and exciting listening experience to good quality tracks for me. Yes, there is MQA with very bad and poor quality aswell. For excample there are some rap songs with MQA label, but very poor quality. The point is, most of the MQA tracks are very very high quality. One could hear, that the tracks is recorded and mastered on very high level. For me, it is good entertaining listening to very high quality tracks, even if it is not even my music genre.
What i want to say is, MQA very often delivers excellent quality tracks and therefore alone i like to listen to it. Sometimes there are MQA tracks in my playlist between all those nonMQA tracks and even when i am not activly watching what i am listening to, i very often get that exciting feeling when Tidal changes the track. Very often my eyes are going for a quick look at the iDSD Pros display and i immediately know why i am excited for that track. iDSD Pro then shows MQA in the display.
It is not only the format or container the music is stored in, in my mind it is the philosophy behind MQA, delivering the best possible music quality. And in my opinion this starts with a good quality recording and ends with good quality mastering.
Sometimes there are tracks (MQA and nonMQA) where i ask myself if these tracks where mastered with beats headphone...
To do MQA (in the recording and mastering process), i could image, there is some special gear necessary to it and not every studio or musician can do it. So the gear, knowledge and passion in the process of making these tracks are also important.
It is not always inevitably the case that MQA only is the reason for good quality. Like is sayed, there is bad MQA aswell. And nonMQA tracks could also be very very high quality. But there is something to MQA for me i like very much.
"...most of the MQA tracks are very very high quality. One could hear, that the tracks is recorded and mastered on very high level." I must admit that ii don't know the full process of creating MQA files. But I do know that there are many MQA files out there with recordings that were made long before MQA existed. That said, i assume that in order to create MQA the recordings might have to be remastered. But the recording is the original recording.
I am not sure what happens if a recording is done today, with this technology present. From the descriptions i read MQA is designed to fully recreate the sound in the mastering studio. But that is not the same as recording. Recording can happen in different studios for one and the same album or even one and the same track.