Why would Meridian be involved, MQA is a separate company ?
Here is what the Schiit folks has to say about MQA (and few other things)
Related FB post on Auralic's page:It is unfortunately that MQA has decided to pull back the integration on ARIES/ARIES LE during CES as they have decided to make it an ‘end to end’ technology which means it will always requests a MQA certificated DAC to work.
ARIES ARIES LE, will be able to playback or stream music contains MQA format but will not listed MQA certificated device, to benefit from MQA, you will need a MQA certificated DAC and this is the only way.
We are sorry about the decision made by MQA.
I though it was always an ‘end to end’ technology and won’t allow conversion of MQA format to others, like PCM or DSD on the source end (e.g. Aries or some playback application running on a pc/mac). Wouldn’t the whole purpose of MQA be defeated otherwise ?
jtrimm said Yes of course, or I wouldn't have posted it.This has not stopped others before. Sadly. rampant speculation is the stuff of audio forums. Beginning with "If" made me wonder as to the truth of what followed. Thanks for explaining and giving us the background.
Dev said Here is what the Schiit folks has to say about MQA (and few other things)Talking Schiit about DSD, MQA @ CanJam SoCal 2016 | DAR__KO on Vimeo
I had a brief look at this.
What strikes me is that Schiit seems to take a rather defensive ‘wait and see’ attitude to the whole shebang.
You can either be part of the future or you can shape it, but I agree that it is too early to tell because MQA is currently not tangible.
Also, I always read reponses with my ‘strategic-intent’ googles on 
I don’t agree with everything they said, but the comment that “MQA is HDCD version 2” seemed very appropriate and apropos.
Also tho Schitt and the DS may have ended up with different reconstruction filters we both believe that there’s a lot more good music to be found in our current libraries by using specifically designed filters that doesn’t take short cuts or approximations and hence as far as sound quality that MQA is working on a problem that may not exist. And further, that in so far as MQA specifies a particular reconstruction filter, they may actually be forcing a step backwards in sound quality compared to the “overkill” filters that Schitt and the DS use.
Ted Smith said . . . in so far as MQA specifies a particular reconstruction filter, they may actually be forcing a step backwards in sound quality compared to the "overkill" filters that Schitt and the DS use.An intriguing observation. Can you elaborate further? What are the characteristics of the filter MQA mandates?
That’s why I used the qualifying phrase “in so far as”. I don’t know how prescriptive they would be. They do have to do some specific processing / filtering to unpack information that they’ve moved around in the spectrum. On the other hand they talk about their differing filters based on the characteristics of the music which is something that EMM Labs DACs (and others) that I respect also do. Still I have reservations about seamlessly blending the outputs of multiple filters or crossfading when you transition from one filter to another and have stayed with the filter design that seems the most pure and “obviously correct” to me.
rogerdn said Why would Meridian be involved, MQA is a separate company ?Not really. Bob Stuart still owns Meridian (at least I think so).
Wow this is very sad news that they won’t allow mqa to DSD, etc. So this means that the DS can never support mqa? I suspect the fpgA in the DS doesn’t have enough power to support an additional Decoding method. If the format takes off I wonder if ps would consider an upgrade board to support it? Or does the whole end to end thing negate that? If so I think it’s short sited and there are examples of companies keeping such a tight leash on tech that it fails. No longer as excited about mqa.
I’m not sure I’d jump to the conclusion that they intend to keep dacs such as the DS from doing MQA - they just want to verify that we aren’t crippling MQA by, say, converting it to low res PCM and THEN to DSD. I think that the comment about DSD was more that they won’t attempt to keep DSD as some form of DSD and call it MQA. I.e. we probably shouldn’t expect that sites that offer MQA streaming will offer DSD streaming via MQA.
There’s probably plenty of power left in the FPGA to MQA decoding, but I don’t think that’s the best path for a DAC that’s capable of high resolution PCM. I’d rather decode MQA to high resolution PCM (say at least 176.4k or 352.8k) then send it to the DS - the MQA folk probably disagree. The problem with MQA in the FPGA is more that everything that’s running in the FPGA is, in essence, always running whether you use the results or not. Therefor the extra power supply noise generated by doing MQA decoding will be there whether or not MQA is being used. (This can be somewhat mitigated in the FPGA, but that has other issues…)
I expect MQA to fail due to a combination of excessive control, very limited consumer interest, and the need for complete buy in by the majority of manufacturers as well as studios.
High end audio is a limited niche market. The audio industry is not going to enthusiastically embrace a singular technology which requires significant resources to implement merely so Merdian can make money. Think Sony and SACD.
By way of contrast, HD television succeeded as consumer interest is near universal and only the formats are dictated (1080p, 1080i, 720p).
As I see it, their ‘end to end’ all or nothing approach is not doing them any favors in getting MQA implemented in the real world. The all or nothing, screw you approach just does not sit well with me. I fail to see why they can’t allow the player to unpack the MQA stream into a common 24/96 or 24/192 PCM format to get better than CD quality audio to any DAC while requiring only a little more bandwidth (50% more?) than streaming redbook - I would think that that would be the point.
Oh Well, as long as effective 8 bit dither below 16 bit audio does not degrade the quality of the 16 bit audio, I guess that streaming MQA is not a bad thing. Then again, this packed MQA information would be correlated noise, related to the normal 16 bit audio that it is riding under, so it might have a negative effect.
Of course, this opinion is based on my understanding of how MQA works, and I am sure that I am misremembering some of it and may well have misunderstood at least some of what I read in the first place. I guess that I will have to go back and reread it (if I can find it).
J.P.
Elk saidThat was exactly what Schiit guys are also professing and I agree to it...High end audio is a limited niche market. The audio industry is not going to enthusiastically embrace a singular technology which requires significant resources to implement merely so Merdian can make money. Think Sony and SACD.
Maybe they’ll soften their approach if enough customers complain and enough manufacturers fail to adopt it. One option for us might be to make a dongle with USB in on one end and I2S out on the other. This would allow MQA to be sent over the DAC’s I2S bus just like their demo board allows for now. I don’t see any downside for them to do this.
But how does this comply with the stringent requirement put forward by MQA that the DAC itself needs to be certified, i.e. one DS needs to be sent to the MQA premises for test and certification? Do you foresee to send the dongle instead? Wouldn’t this be the same principle as the Aries where the MQA implementation was revoked during CES because it was a Bridge and not a final playpoint/renderer?
It may not.
I think meridian has just shot themselves in the foot. A few of us should send short. Letters to the editor of TAS stating our lack of interest in such a controlled playback scheme . They’ll hopefully publish a few and meridian will realize their recent poor choices have alienated some of thier target audience.
If you want to learn more - and get a sense of what they’re likely up to read this article: http://www.metal-fi.com/meridian-audios-mqa/
It’s well written and gives you a sense about how they intend to lock up high resolution audio - like DRM (Digital Rights Management) that, if it becomes accepted, might quash high rez downloads unless you’re using a product with an MQA decoder.
In other words, you will be able to copy and store the original encoded and encrypted file, but only DACs with built in MQA decoding that goes directly to analog will be allowed. This is precisely why they will (apparently) not allow transports to decode MQA into a bit stream - because the output could be copied.
Me thinks something smells, but we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out.
Here was my contribution at the CA Q&A for MQA:
Q48. If my understanding is correct, DAC profiling would imply that the DAC model in question has to be sent from the manufacturer to Meridian for certification. Is this really a viable route from an IP standpoint and a practical way of doing it? Seems like a cumbersome and time consuming procedure in my view.
A48. This is not a Meridian question, MQA is a separate company (see Q76). The hardware and mobile licensing involves verification (which is normal in this industry) and we also work with our partners to optimise the conversion interface. We think it is viable. Perfection takes a bit longer.