Meridian MQA

[Pim]

Has anyone seen this?

http://www.musicischanging.com

It's Meridian's way of shrinking the package without loosing the SQ.
My guess is that it either becomes the new standard or internet connections are going to be so much faster and storage so much cheaper that nobody will bother with it.

[rik]

Looks very similar in concept to HDCD, though obviously the implementation and packaging will be quite different.

Rik

[IanG-UK]

To me looks very much like a marketing response to the new Devialet stuff - almost as though produced by the same ad agency (checks calendar to see if 1st April)

(And interesting that Meridian thinks that streaming gives even worse sound quality than compact cassette.)

[Eddye]

Yet another standard, and there are already so many to choose from.

[thumb5]

(And interesting that Meridian thinks that streaming gives even worse sound quality than compact cassette.)

Hmm. Have they not heard of Qobuz, Tidal, etc? This seems disingenuous at best.

[f1eng]

(And interesting that Meridian thinks that streaming gives even worse sound quality than compact cassette.)

Hmm. Have they not heard of Qobuz, Tidal, etc? This seems disingenuous at best.

Personally I thought their quality/convenience graph was more a marketing device than having any basis in reality.

The whole thing has left Meridian much, much lower in my opinion than it was. I have always considered them to be a technically savvy engineering company, but I suppose marketing to an increasingly tiny and somewhat particular list of clients is more important for commercial survival.

[GuillaumeB]

There's a bit more detail here, not much admittedly:

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles...idian-mqa/

Also here are details of the patent:

http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/de...escription

I certainly look forward to exploring this further.

Guillaume

[thumb5]

Thanks Guillaume, it's good to have something a bit more concrete to digest.

[rwjr44]

Well given the sound quality (as opposed to the musical quality) of today's popular music, MQA would need to be a miracle device/technique to live up to the hype generated by Meridian.

[Eddye]

I just don't think this is going anywhere. To the average customer it's just all the same. MP3, FLAC, MQA, DSD, PCM, AIFF, WAV, etc. The average consumer doesn't care about the how's. They just care about cheap/free music. Therefore it's not profitable to change anything with regards to fancy encoding (heck, even the artists themselves don't care how awfull their music sounds, SQ wise), it'll just cost more to encode music with MQA, so studio's won't use it. Perhaps a very few Audiophile labels will think about it, but that won't be enough to give this any momentum. Just my 2 cents.