MQA 16-bit and Provenance in the Last Mile

In a previous post MQA CD: Origami and the Last Mile , we outlined the steps when the recording is ‘folded’ for transmission and ‘unfolded’ for playback. It also shows how the end-to-end response varies for listeners with: a) No Decoder, b) A Core Decoder, c) A Full Decoder or d) when the stream is limited …

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Featured Post

A Deeper Look

‘Deeper Look’ is a new series, where we get more technical about topics in audio, hearing and MQA. It includes tutorials, analysis, music examples and myth-busting. [1] Some of the tutorials are fundamental topics to which we refer, again and again, so we hope that is useful. There are many more posts to come, but …

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Featured Post

All that glitters is not gold(en)

Recently a video/blog surfaced that claims to show defects in MQA.  It does not. This video is based on a flawed test that delivered invalid results.  Here we show you why it is wrong. What follows is a summary response and commentary – backed up by technical analysis appendices. Responses to Specific Claims MQA did …

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Appendix 1: A ‘Tarnished Test’ Signal

The files submitted [1] contained computer-generated test signals interleaved with the music. We assume that the music segments were included to ‘trick’ the encoder into treating it as music. The screen capture below shows (upper in green) the waveform of L & R channels throughout the 88.2kHz input signal. Below that (in red/orange) is their spectral content.  The …

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