Will Meridian's MQA Ever Catch Fire ?

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4-earredwonder

2K Club - QQ Super Nova
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Proponents of all three formats subsidized early releases of their formats to prime the pump and get titles to market.

David DelGrosso of DTS Entertainment was the most public and direct about his work in that arena. Sony (SACD) and Dolby (DVD-A) were less public about their subsidies but everyone in the industry knew about them.
That included the efforts by each camp to release Dark Side of the Moon in Surround with their technology.

But that isn't really new. Subsidies to launch new music and video formats is a long standing practice in the industry.
For example, in the Quad days (1970's era), JVC provided funding for CD-4 releases. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that CBS did the same for labels doing SQ production work.

It's part of the cost of launching a new system.

BTW, Brian, do you think Meridian's MQA will ever catch fire. I know Warners has signed on with other companies soon to follow. What's your take on MQA?
 
That is certainly one of the hot topics in the world of audio these days.

MQA is an encoding system that uses a collection of lossy and lossless compression methods along with techniques like "pre-distortion" to shrink music files to CD and MP3 sizes for use in streaming audio applications.
From the demos I've heard, I prefer the tracks in 24/96 FLAC and DSD64 to the MQA'd versions.

If you visit some of the audio forums, like Computer Audiophile and others, you can read a lot of back and forth on what people are saying about MQA.

Warner Music once released CDs that were encoded with HDCD, another system designed to take higher resolution audio and fit it into a CD sized space.
Their endorsement and use of HDCD, including CD releases from James Taylor, Joni Mitchell and other artists, didn't lead to success for that system.
I'm not sure that their use of the MQA encoding system will be any different.

My favorite comment on MQA to date: a well known recording engineer and producer who told me "I don't want MQA mucking around with my audio."
That's pretty clear to me... :)
 
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