MQA-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 …

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MQA CD: #1 Origami and the Last Mile

Once the recording has been ‘de-blurred’, MQA uses a process we call ‘Music Origami’ that focusses on maintaining the information in the orange triangle (plus a substantial safety margin), thereby making this large, high-resolution file both manageable, and compatible with any service or playback device. This section reviews the ‘origami’ used to make a single-speed …

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MQA CD: #2 Some examples

When the transmission is restricted to 16 bits, as for example in an MQA CD, the decoder will maintain the output resolution at 24b, firstly to preserve the encoder’s enhanced quantisation, but also because there is more information in a decoded MQA CD than can be represented in a normal rectangular 44.4 kHz/16b PCM channel. The …

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