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.
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 […]
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 […]
Read moreProvenance Series: #4 Coldplay
Everyday Life is the 8th studio album by British rock band Coldplay, released in MQA from the 96-kHz 24-bit Master by Atlantic/Parlophone on 22 November 2019. Q. “Was this recording upsampled”? A. Absolutely not! So far in this Provenance Series, I have highlighted three other cases where the creative work of an artist had received technical […]
Read moreInsight – 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 […]
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