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Unlike DRM, the authentication doesn’t prevent you from copying your music files around or from playing them in a non-MQA system. Yes, MQA does use “authentication”, which is a poor choice of words, because it’s really “verification”.
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The resultant bitstream does have some missing information but MQA also encodes the difference between this final unfolding and the original analog waveform, and this difference gets used by an MQA-enabled DAC to reconstruct or “decode” all of the original information, so, in a full implementation of the MQA playback chain, the result is the same as lossless compression. So 48kHz gets unfolded to 96kHz and then again to 192kHz.
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The “unfolding” occurs in a series of steps sometimes in software and sometimes in hardware. Yes, this gets done in a lossy way but not lossy as is thought of with an MP3 because MQA never claims that the missing information is “psychoacoustically irrelevant” or that it can’t be recovered. This is basically what Bob Stuart of Meridian and MQA calls “audio origami”. So 192kHz gets folded to 96kHz and then again to 48kHz (or 176.4 to 88.2 to 44.1). MQA calls this process “folding” because it repeats the process each time it cuts the required bandwidth in half. This is why MQA-encoded files are backwards-compatible and can be played without decoding at the compressed level (such as 44.1 or 48kHz). MQA takes a more “vertical” approach by moving high-frequency musical information into the lower frequencies and masking it with dither, a kind of randomized form of information almost like white noise, that masks the embedded high frequencies to make them virtually inaudible. They generally make no attempt to analyze what is represented by the bitstream (MP3 does a little but only to determine what to discard without the intent to replace or reconstruct what’s lost) and move things around, or “down” and “up”. They work in a linear, or “horizontal”, way on the bitstream, meaning that they look at the numbers and find ways to reduce the space needed for them often using something called pattern recognition. However, if you follow a lot of the publicly available information about it, sort of read between the lines, and collate all the information, you can suss out what it does if not exactly how it does it.įirst, most forms of compression irretrievably throw away information and/or compact it in a way that can be undone. I should say that I have no business relationship with MQA, no real inside information from them, and neither mean to be an advocate for or against it. This is understandable since MQA, for good reason, has not openly published the details of their protocol and it uses a different kind of compression paradigm than normal where some words and phrases have a different meaning in the context of MQA than they do with MP3’s, FLAC files, etc. There’s a lot of information and misinformation floating around about MQA: How does it work? Is it lossy? Does it have DRM (Digital Rights Management? And so forth. Twitter Facebook Email Print LinkedIn Pinterest SMS WhatsApp