drmatt wrote: > I don't think it can be a bad thing to qualify individual ADCs and DACs > such as this process entails in an end-to-end manner. >
The claim has been made that MQA covers the reproduction system end-to-end, but that claim breaks down in reality. We have before us are claims that streaming files from a MQA server provides the advantages of MQA with any DAC whether MQA quslified or not. Obviously most people who are talking about the alleged benefits of playing MQA files don't have MQA qualified systems from end to end. For example how czn a Steely Dan recording recorded and mixed some decades ago be end-to-end MQA qualified?? Where is the list of MQA- qualified speakers or room treatments? > > This format may well be a faltering "step one" towards a very much > required audio standard that will stop the "fat sausage" mastering of > digital audio and improve quality for everyone. Fat sausage mastering is so popular because there is a perception that it helps sell recordings. When recordings are played near the ambient noise level (e.g. portable player in high noise environment or as background music in an office) it makes the recording more clearly audible. Of course it sucks the life out of recordings when played at the levels many use when doing dedicated music listening, but that mode of usage is not the rule. Furthermore, since it is a superficial analysis, analyzing a recording to see if it has the volume envelope of a fat sausage can be meaningless. For example, the fat sausage visual effect can be removed with equalization or even all-pass filtering, but that processing does not change the lifeless nature of the hyper-compressed recording. If one wishes to study the problem of hyper-compression and frequency response mangling, I've found that digitized CDs of classic Motown recordings provide many examples. In general the Motown label CDs of classic Motown hits are hypercompresssed and also have some pretty intense frequency response mangling. Some more recent versions of these on other labels (e.g. Polygram) the same identical songs have been remastered and in some cases remixed which generally provides a significant audible improvements in sound quality. It should be noted that each of the reworked recordings are hand made by skilled experienced individuals with sophisticated equipment for dealing with these issues and with access to masters that are not available to the public. Application of reason suggests that no way a globally-applied automated process like MQA can provide comparable results. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ arnyk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=64365 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=105070 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
