Meridian MQA

[Confused]

I'm not sure that I really get the point of MQA. I think you have to consider the whole chain from recording studio (or live recording) to your hifi. Lets say something was studio mixed and recorded in 24bit, and ended up as a master file in 24/96. How can you get any better than having your own exact copy of this 24/96 file? This is the philosophy behind Linn Records "studio Master", although it is not unique to Linn. The one frustration with this approach is that the majority of record companies almost never disclose the format of the "studio master". There is a lot of stuff out there being sold as 24bit, DSD, etc. with no indication of what the "master" format is, a format that more often than not will be a poor starting point for the format it is being converted to and sold as. But this is a digression, the concept is sound. If the record company advised that the studio master copy was 24/48, would you not want your own copy to be unconverted, uncorrupted and also 24/48? What could be better? So what place does MQA have here? Well if the studio master copy is in any format other than MQA, then as far as I am concerned, MQA has no place in the audio chain whatsoever, all it can do is colour or corrupt the sound. If MQA was the original format for the studio master, this may be a different story, but how much material is, or will be, originally mastered in MQA? Not much at the moment, that is for sure.

Then we have the question of MQA being a better format for streaming in high quality, with MQA nicely reducing the file size. OK, I can see some merit here, but broadband speeds are getting ever higher, 3G becomes 4G and 5G approaches. My PC will download a 24bit album in the time it takes me for a quick visit the lavatory, my 'phone will stream high definition video, and these speeds are only getting faster. Is MQA a response to a problem that either doesn't exist, or at least a problem that progress in internet technology is quickly eliminating anyway?

My only experience with MQA was a demo at a hifi show, using headphones and an MQA vs MP3 comparison. I didn't learn much from this. I would one day be very interested in hearing music via the full MQA chain, that is recorded / mastered with MQA and reproduced through a fully MQA compatible DAC. At the moment I am not aware of anything that I would want to listen to that is recorded with MQA, and I suspect that the DAC's in my little Devialet's will never be truly compatible either. Maybe one day there will be lots of music that I would want to listen to mastered in MQA, maybe, but for sure there isn't at the moment. It reminds me a little of SACD, and to this day there are only a tiny handful of recordings available on SACD that interest me. Even with these SACD's, I have no idea what format they were originally mastered in, so maybe a download of 24/44.1 file or whatever would be better than an SACD anyway.

I do find MQA quite fascinating in many ways, but the more I think it through, it does appear to be totally irrelevant, to myself at least.