Suppose somebody popped the question: “What is Meridian’s MQA?”. How would you describe it? In a nutshell, it can be described a type of ‘MP3 for audiophiles’… because it encodes large (hi-res) digital audio into smaller-sized files that are no bigger than CD-sized files. Should the encoding become ubiquitous in mastering studios, music streamed to home hi-fi systems – using today’s technology and distribution infrastructure – could be at 192kHz/24-bit resolution. DVD-Audio-quality hi-res digital audio from Tidal, Spotify, iTunes, the lot, would be a game-changer.
For perfectionist ‘purists’ demanding to know: ‘Is it fully lossless?, the answer is that it IS up to 96/24, but is NOT fully lossless when encoding/decoding data of original sound frequencies above 48kHz (ie 96k sampling).
Here are links to a two-part ‘seminar’ explaining Meridian’s MQA codec.
This Dutch hi-fi journalist does a remarkable job at
covering pretty much ALL the salient points.
