Bob talks
Bob Stuart, creator of MQA, talks in detail about this revolutionary British technology that sets a new standard in capturing, delivering and reproducing digital audio.
Insight – Topic series
Welcome to Insight, a series of posts about the entire process of recording, mastering, distribution and playback of live and recorded music in the highest possible sound quality. MQA represents a Paradigm Shift and the scope is wide, so we aim to cover these topics at a few levels – introductory overviews, perspectives and occasionally a deep dive into …
Read moreMQA-CD #3: Overview
MQA‐CD is mostly a regional phenomenon. It started in Japan and is recently spreading to China. The total catalogue of MQA‐CD (in May 2021) is around 600 albums at prices comparable to regular CDs. These are mostly from the major labels that issue Japanese releases but also from several Japanese independent labels. A search of cdJapan (who ship …
Read moreProvenance and Containers
MQA Encoding When audio is encoded into MQA, several things happen, the most important of which are: ‘Deblurring’ of the source to remove audible artefacts introduced by analogue-digital converters, mixing and mastering. Identifying the musical information and encapsulating it for the highest quality sound. ‘Origami’ – folding content into a PCM stream for distribution. Embedding …
Read moreWhat is 16-bit MQA?
MQA Catalogue We often use high sample-rate examples, such as 192kHz, to explain how MQA ‘Origami’ packs the recording into a more efficient form. But the end-to-end system benefits of MQA are just as important when the sample rate is low. This matters a great deal because the music catalogue includes many masters that were originally …
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