Mike48 I couldn’t agree more!!! In fact this is one of the reasons why so far I haven’t been drawn to Roon; I use VST plugins in JRiver for a little bass eq; I try to be very minimal about it and keep all adjustments below 150hz but in my room it is important. Not willing to give that ability.
BTW I misspelled John Siau’s name in my original post - my apologies to everyone and especially him!
http://www.whathifi.com/advice/hdr-tv-what-it-how-can-you-get-it
Here is an intriguing article. As you can read, the video manufacturers and video content creators know how to embrace multiple or “competing” tech innovations in their products. It is good for advancing quality, enjoyment and keeps the economy running.
Why can’t audio embrace a similar approach? Why is it “wrong” to embrace MQA and support it…as well as regular legacy HD audio formats?
I like improved video quality, and I’m happy the industry is working collaboratively to make it available to me as a consumer! I care more about improved AUDIO.
I’m running behind reading Stereophile, and blame Copper. Anyway I finally finished the August issue on Sunday night and started to read September. Monday in the mail Stereophile October arrived, so behind again.
In the August issue is a short interview Jim Austin did with the MQA guy in charge of securing content. It read like a political interview, I can’t comment on this and that. The thing that got my attention was that while making the usual claims of improved sound quality. He said that if record companies release their now often digitized masters at the transfer rate of 24/192, they were giving away the keys to the kingdom. That with MQA, if something better comes along they could then once more release their catalogs in that format. Implying that if released in its archived format like 24/192 or I would think some may use DSD, they would not have held back anything that could be bettered.
He made it clear that MQA was not a DRM scheme, but it sounds like you couldn’t make a copy of the file without losing the total MQA benefits.
He also claims that it goes through a “deblurring” process that will make undecoded files sound better on all players. And if someone tries to get around it my using an adc off the analog output of a MQA player it will get blurred again. I have been ripping vinyl at 24/96 and I sure don’t hear anything I would consider blurring.
After reading this guy’s interview, I am more convinced that it isn’t the holy grail. With storage cheap and download speeds very fast, I want the high bit rate transfer from the original masters if/when available.
It seems like one of their selling points to the labels is that MQA gives you something new to sell and still have potential options available to sell the catalog again, in the future.
So, how many times are they going to sell us the same music? We started with vinyl and tape, then CDs, followed by SACDs or DVD-As. Now downloads at hopefully better than CD quality, and here comes MQA.
Jeffstarr, I tend to agree… I remain open to the possibility of sonic benefits but in terms of streaming and bandwidth conservation, it’s starting to look to me like a solution in search of a problem. I just upgraded to 100Mb/s download speed for an additional $5/month; really not a problem to take 1 or 2 or 5 of that for streaming if I want to.
Do not forget about the services that pay to upload. ( stream to you your music )
Any reduction of upload bandwidth will save them operating expense.