jtrimm said
Reading articles like this is getting me amped up about MQA. http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/from-the-editor-mqa-on-the-threshold/
Tidal (which I’m already a customer of and using with my DirectStream) streaming MQA is going the be the great game-changer. My question is: Is PS Audio looking into native MQA support in the DirectStream DAC? I know there are streaming devices like the Auralic Aries that plan to convert MQA to PCM bitstream so you can use any DAC, but my question is, do you lose something in sound quality going that route vs. the DAC itself decoding MQA natively. IE. DirectStream gets MQA data stream and converts directly to DSD…
-Jeff
I am sure they do. Harley's amped up and all the demos they've lavished upon him speak well for why he's so excited. And Robert's a good listener, with ears I trust. To date, he hasn't taken a DAC with sound he well knows home, and listened to MQA through it with a toggle switch for on/off. Or if he has, I haven't read about the results.
No one has that I know of, except us. And we’re not impressed.
MQA is a lossy process - the music does not come out bit perfect, the process does not support DSD. My suspicion is that the wonderful improvements heard are more at the encoding end - if they have access to the masters, as they did with Peter McGrath. Their way of improving upon to digital transfer may be extraordinary.
Unfortunately, the notion they will be able to remaster the world’s catalog of music in this superior mastering technique seems a rather flawed one.
And so far, tracks we’ve heard without benefit of remastering - with and without the MQA process - aren’t something I am interested in continuing to listen to in Music Room One.
I hope they can prove to us otherwise - it’s tough being an outlier.