Audio quality vs convenience

[thumb5]

[Not sure where is the right place to put this thread, but this seemed best.  Perhaps we need a section for "things of interest, not directly related to Devialet"?]

This post from Archimago's Musings caught my eye, partly because it starts off discussing the weird "underwater" diagram PONO invented (which amabrok started a thread about some time back) and then turns to the quality/convenience diagram invented by Meridian to promote MQA.

In general I agree with Archimago's argument and the re-worked version of Meridian's diagram.  What do you think?

[GuillaumeB]

[Not sure where is the right place to put this thread, but this seemed best.  Perhaps we need a section for "things of interest, not directly related to Devialet"?]

This post from Archimago's Musings caught my eye, partly because it starts off discussing the weird "underwater" diagram PONO invented (which amabrok started a thread about some time back) and then turns to the quality/convenience diagram invented by Meridian to promote MQA.

In general I agree with Archimago's argument and the re-worked version of Meridian's diagram.  What do you think?

Great, thanks for sharing! I think the re-worked diagram is pretty much spot on.. well I haven't heard reel to reel so I'll have to take his word for that bit.

I still find quite a chasm between CD quality FLAC and lossless streaming services, this might be partly due to my choice of streamer though which is optimised for MPD-only playback and as a result makes streamed FLAC from my NAS sound magnificent. 

Speaking of MQA my local dealers have the Meridian kit next week so I'm hoping to go and have a listen. I really want to compare a regular HD track to an MQA one, as opposed to MP3 v MQA which seems to be their standard demo! 

Guillaume

[f1eng]

I would also say Archimago's re-worked diagram is as near as one can get to good. I have been an amateur recordist for 50+ years and have lots of reel to reel tapes, cassettes and DATs of my own recordings, which I monitored live on headphones so I have heard pretty often the sound added by recorders.

Having written that of course not all recordings are equally good, and IME the difference in quality between the thousands of recordings I own exceeds by a considerable margin the difference in sound quality of the mediums on which they are distributed. My best recorded LPs sound better than modern pop CDs and my best, mainly older and classical, CDs knock LPs into a cocked hat.

Here the best sound probably comes from my Goldmund 36+ into the AES/EBU input.

I am disappointed to say that the Meridian diagram looks to me like marketing puff aimed at appealling to the existing prejudices of well heeled audio enthusiasts of the "Whats best forum" ilk.

[Damon]

Cool; He's in Vancouver too! Makes me feel totally hip and in the centre of things.

But I also think the article is very good and informative. I'm not knowledgeable about recording techniques or file format technicalities, but I find there is a huge variation in sound quality within any format that I have. I have some CD's that sound great and others are completely flat and lifeless. Some downloaded files we have, from who knows where, are really good, and others are crude.

As f1eng notes in his second paragraph, the differences in recording and processing quality are far greater than the sound quality of the format, or in my experience, the format.