![]() ![]() Next time.enter Qobuz! Reach out to our team at Natural Sound today for more on high-end audio and higher than CD resolution for your AV systems. These devices up the fidelity of sound from your computer or your phone. ![]() We also offer the Audioquest Dragonfly USB headphone DACs with MQA decoding. These products are branded as Bluesound and also under the NAD brand in various configurations. Tidal's adoption of MQA was the perfect fit for Bluesound, and their system's biggest advantage is its ability to make full use of MQA files on Tidal. So, when Lenbrook International introduced Bluesound to compete with Sonos, their "differentiator" was its ability to play higher than CD resolution music files. When Sonos launched in 2005, their engineers decided that their chips would not attempt to exceed the limits set by Red Book CD Audio. Tidal also promised to be fairer to the music creators, but that's not our topic today! Tidal recently inked a deal with Warner Music to offer MQA encoded versions of their deep catalog. It gave the new service something to differentiate itself, and the ability to command a premium price in the face of competition from "lower quality" services. MQA made its major breakthrough when they sold the idea to the owner group launching Tidal, including Jay-Z and Beyonce. For listeners without decoding hardware, the stream sounds the same or slightly better than an unencoded stream, but with proper playback hardware, the extra details are unlocked, allowing the listener to hear the "Master". Its purpose is to encode additional musical resolution in a FLAC bit stream without greatly increasing the bit rate needed to transmit it on the Internet. MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) is the brainchild of John Stuart, founder of the high-end UK brand Meridian. In order to offer higher than CD resolution each company uses its own method. Tidal and Qobuz use FLAC encoding to reduce the effective bit rate without the loss of any information. In comparison, uncompressed CD Audio streams at 1411 Kbps. Pandora Free is 64 Bps, and subscribers get 192 Kbps. The most widely used standard of "compressed music files" was established by a consortium of sound engineers in the broadcast and film industry, known as MPEG, and their "layer 3" option, MP3, with variable bit rates from low fidelity (as little as 8 Kbps) up to high of 320 Kbps. Streaming services offering music online also set their quality criteria to the market's demands. These re-mastered analog recordings and re-processed digital recordings are the "master files" owned by the record labels. Subsequent improvements in mastering equipment and techniques and signal processing made re-issues that were far better than the initial releases from 1983. The format was chosen to meet agreed upon requirements of bandwidth (20>20,000 Hz), dynamic range (98 dBA), and playing time (long enough to fit Beethoven's 9th Symphony) on a conveniently sized 5" disc, using the semiconductor and laser technology available then. The CD format was established in the years before 1983 by a working group of engineers from Sony and Philips. I appreciate what higher than CD resolution means, it's useful to note that CDs themselves are digitally truncated versions of higher resolution "master files" produced in the studio. ![]() SEE ALSO: High-End Audio: from Then to Now & into the Future ![]()
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