Critic's Corner

Andres Koch Slams MQA as A Money Grab and a Fraud

198.7.58.101


[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  Email  Next ] [ Critic's Corner ]

This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

Andreas Koch, one of the architects of modern digital, with a resume that most can dream of, says MQA is totally and utterly uneccesary, a marketing scam, and technically a fraud.

"...the new format has to be proprietary and patentable so royalties can be collected. After all that is the entire reason to do it-selfish greed. As we have seen above, there is no other good reason, no customer benefit."

Stereophile, the ultimate MQA cheerleader has lost all credibility in that it has not reported how HighResAudio.com of Germany, Jriver, and other players in the industry have rejected it, and pointed out it's obvious issues. Shameful.

And by the way, if you have any doubts about Mr. Koch, this is what Stereophile wrote about him:

"Koch's pedigree in the field of digital audio is long and impressive: working for Studer ReVox in 1982, he designed and built the world's first fully asynchronous digital audio sample-rate converter. He then designed one of the first digital audio filter banks-512 paralleled filters were employed to reduce, in the digital domain, noise in vintage recordings.

Koch then worked for Dolby Labs, where, in 1985, he built the encoder/decoder DSP system used in Dolby's first professional digital audio product, the AC-1 encoder and decoder used for TV audio transmission. In 1986 he built the hardware for the first version of what would become Dolby Digital compressed audio (originally AC-3), the default sound format of both DVD-Video and DVD-Audio formats.

Back at Studer in 1987, Koch oversaw there the development of a 48-track, 1/2" digital tape-recording format and, later, a PC-based hard-disk digital recorder. Back in the US but still working for Studer, Koch managed an engineering team that developed and launched, in 1992, Dyaxis-the hard-disk-based digital audio editing system.

In 1997, now working for Sony, Koch managed an engineering team that developed Sonoma, the world's first eight-channel system for recording, mixing, and editing in DSD, and now used in the production and postproduction of most SACD releases. Koch designed the digital components in the A/D and D/A converters used in the Sonoma, then expanded them to a single-PC, 32-channel DSD system.

Koch became an independent contract engineer in 2003, and spent the next four years designing all of the highly regarded digital audio products, both professional and consumer, for Ed Meitner's EMM Labs. In that capacity, he invented new algorithms for sample-rate conversion, a discrete D/A converter, and new digital clock-management architecture.

On ending his relationship with EMM, Koch established Playback Designs with Blue Light Audio's Jonathan Tinn, who, aside from distributing various high-performance audio lines, was EMM's vice-president of global sales and marketing. Blue Light distributes Playback gear in the US."




Edits: 03/17/17

Follow Ups: