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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Provenance 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 …

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What 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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Featured Post

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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