MQA Analysis

[Jean-Marie]

It's all about the blur (or de-blur). So they say....

You'll never be able to listen to your smeary old highres lossless files ever again.

This all blur and de-blur is just BS for anyone who knows the theory behind PCM, PCM reconstruction and general signal processing.

The time resolution of a PCM properly reconstructed is 1/ ( 2 pi bandwidth number_of_levels).

So even a 44.1/16 red book CD is having a temporal resolution of 100ps, which is already much lower than the needed resolution alleged by the MQA paper themselves.

a 192/24 is having a 0.1 femto second resolution ......

For having an idea of what we are talking, 100ps corresponds to a change of position of 34 nano meters given the speed of sound.... so I hope that MQA comes with a contraption holding your head stile, stoping your breathing, compensating the factory deviations of your speakers etc...

So, compared to the original PCM file, MQA has no interest and is only lossy. Maybe euphonic, but it is lossy.
Its interest comes for streaming, if the lossy reconstruction of MQA from a high-rez file is better to the ear than the corresponding 44.1/16, then MQA can transport higher frequency information than 44.1/16 with the same bit-rate.

So I fully agree with Bob, unless used for streaming to reduce the bit rate, the main value of MQA that I can think of is for Meridian... not for anyone else in the chain.

Jean-Marie