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This Post Has Been Edited by the Author
In Reply to: RE: Actually, the XIVERO paper I linked...I first found at Hi Fi +...... posted by Steve O on March 17, 2017 at 21:00:42
Actually, HiFi Plus has not whored for MQA. Searching the term "MQA" on their website turns up exactly FOUR items. Searching just the Stereophile site, exclusive of Audiostream, turns u 15 PAGES.
A quote, from the editor in a review of the Meridian Explorere2 DAC:
MERIDIAN AUDIO EXPLORER 2 PORTABLE HEADPHONE AMP/DAC
Equipment+
by Alan Sircom | May 27, 2016
Categories: Headphone amps and amp/DACs | Products: Meridian Explorer 2
The reason why this is important is fairly obvious. CD is in decline, and what will replace it in the wider public domain isn't necessarily an improvement. Audiophiles will happily spend an hour downloading a 24/192 album (or an evening doing the same in DSD) to get that ultimate listening experience, but most people won't do that now. We live in the 'granny flat' of an otherwise instant access world: you can listen to a hitherto unknown piece of music, find all the details about that music in a few seconds through Shazam, and have the whole album lined up as a stream from Spotify or Deezer, or downloaded to your iTunes or Google Play Music folder - all before the track comes to an end. That's the current expectation of how fast music needs to reach the end user, and if 'quality' takes longer, then quality simply doesn't get a look in and 'convenience' wins out. MQA is a way of end users potentially having their cake, and eating it; you can get file sizes small enough to be streamed or downloaded fast, but you also get at least CD quality, and often far better. And the Meridian Explorer 2 lives up to the name because it is the first to plant its flag in MQA territory.
The Explorer 2 is an extremely capable headphone amp and DAC in its own right even without MQA. It's been some time since I heard the original Explorer, but I'd say this is a fairly significant improvement over the original, especially in terms of driving less than efficient headphones well. It goes loud easily with little break-up, too. OK, so it's no Mojo and it won't put desktop devices to shame, but for £199 it's one of the best in its price, and outperforms the (admittedly cheaper) AudioQuest DragonFly.
But it's as a vehicle for MQA that it is most interesting. Checking out MQA isn't that easy at the moment, although 2L and the Onkyo Music site (run by 7digital) are the exceptions; but MQA-encoded music on such sites is still relatively thin on the ground. That will probably change, change fast, and change soon: my guess is by the middle of the year, MQA will be available from considerably more download and streaming services. When that happens, a listener is strongly recommended to use one of the better classes of music software for the computer you use - I used Audirvana Plus on the Mac, and Foobar 2000 is suggested for PC users. As the Explorer before it, the on-board analogue volume is controlled from the master volume on the host computer, rather than a dial on the Explorer 2.
Naturally, this limits the selection of music fairly significantly, but the selection I received was a good enough selection to assess the quality in absolute terms (I'd prefer more dark metal and grime, but classical, jazz, and folk is a good second). Ravel's 'String Quartet in F major', from the Guarneri String Quartet [Surroundedby Entertainment] is a perfect example of 'standard' MQA, a rich and harmonic flowing of musical themes, while the Kim André Arnesen's Magnificat, played in the Nidaros Cathedral [2L, MQA Studio] is temporally exact and exciting. Meanwhile, Amy Duncan's 'My Silver Net' [Undercurrents, Filly Records, MQA Studio through the aforementioned Onkyo Music store] is an interesting comparison between MQA and 24bit/44.1kHz FLAC on the same file.
"OK, so let's be honest about all this. If you have a collection of well-manicured, high-performance, high-resolution PCM and DSD files, you are probably going to hear little or no difference bringing MQA to the party. I'd still argue that there is something uniquely 'right' in the time domain of MQA files that doesn't ring as true with PCM and DSD, and in that respect MQA is more like an analogue master tape in performance. But, if you are already well-dunked in the whole hi-res thing, MQA is probably not a high priority right now..."
This tone is utterly disconnected from how TAS and Stereophile has "reported".
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