Music Ward > Album Reviews
MQA Sonic Comparisions
tmazz:
--- Quote from: rollo on October 02, 2017, 06:48:47 AM ---Tom the Eastern Electric DAC has MQA decoding ?
charles
--- End quote ---
No it does not. The MQA decoding is being done in software by the Bluesound Node, which in turn passes the digital signal to the DAC in the 96/24 format.
I spoke with Bill at Morningstar to see if there was a possibility of any updates to the EE DACs that would provide MQA functionality, unfortunately he said that they had no plans to do so.
tmazz:
--- Quote from: HAL on October 02, 2017, 07:00:56 AM ---Tom,
Is TIDAL doing the MQA decoding now? Thought I read they had it working.
One thing from going to the MQA talks by Bob Stuart is the DAC reconstruction filter as part of the chain should be a minimum phase apodising style, or at least minimum phase.
I checked the ESS9018 DAC datasheet and there are two filter modes. One is Sharp Rolloff and the other is Slow Rolloff. There is no definition of the type of filter like Linear Phase or Minimum Phase styles.
You might see if the Slow Rolloff is used in the Eastern Electric MiniMax DAC. Probably more likely to not be a linear phase filter.
Just a thought.
--- End quote ---
The Tidal desktop app will do MQA decoding, but I an streaming to my stereo via a Bluesound Node which is streaming from Tidal directly and doing the decoding itself.
I would think that the the minimum phase filter recommendation applies to DACs that are equipped with MQA Hardware decoding. I wonder if it makes a difference in DACs used downstream from a device that does MQA software decoding, since the output of those devices is a standard 24/96 bitstream, which is not really MQA specific.
As for the EE DAC, as far as I know the filter type is not user selectable, so while it might be interesting to know, the filter is what it is and I would not be able to change it without buying a whole new DAC.
HAL:
Tom,
Cool. Thought I had read they have the software MQA decoder working for TIDAL.
With my dspMusikLCD crossover, the DAC's have selectable filters.
Those make a very big difference here. My preference is for anything but the linear phase filters. This follows Bob's talk about the MQA filters.
Nice comparison!
Nick B:
Tom.
Very thorough and nicely done. For the reasons you stated, i never tried to do listening sessions regarding MQA. Do you feel that Bob Stuart has provided enough information regarding how MQA works? I’ve read a couple of articles that were quite critical because of that.
Nick
_Scotty_:
Here is a link to James Tanner's comments and conclusions from the Bryston circle' Post #93
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=151245.80
My concerns about MQA are in regards to its best case recovered resolution of 17.2 bits – a loss of 6.8 bits from the 24 bit original and the potential for DRM problems.
Of course DSP and crossovers are nixed by MQA from the get-go.
Scotty
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