MQA Experiments Continue 27Oct17

While I dropped Tidal after my 3 months HiFi User trial expired (rather than pay the $20 monthly service fee), and therefore lost easy access to MQA encoded streams, I have continued to experiment some. Today I did a comparison of Grouplove Big Mess tracks played in FLAC and played in MQA. I chose Grouplove not only 'cause they are very good but I could also buy the album MQA Studio encoded (there are not many available really).

I used two setups for the comparison experiment. The first "environment" employed the MacBook Pro with a Meridian Explorer 2 USB DAC attached and running VOX to play the tracks. Here are the screen shots and status LEDs on the E2. When playing "just" FLAC encoding, VOX indicates FLAC 984kbps stream with 16bit depth and the E2 shines a white LED; when playing MQA Studio encoding, VOX indicates FLAC 1660kbps stream with 24 bit depth and the E2 shines a blue LED (indicating MQA Studio decoding/unfolding at work in the DAC).

To configure VOX to correctly send the MQA stream to the DAC I ensured the Mac was outputting 44.1kHz/24bit in the Midi Utility and that VOX was set to sync sample rate to player as shown in these screen shots - before these settings I couldn't get the MQA blue LED to shine.

On my awesome DP-X1 DAP all I needed to do was copy the MQA encoded tracks onto the player and when they played the MQA-capable DAC in the player did the work automatically - no configuring needed. Note the decoding indicators on the tracks being played.

You're saying, "All well and good with the technical mumbo-jumbo but how did it sound?" I listened to both environments with my Sony MDR-EX1000 (single dynamic driver) earbuds. This experiment is subjective of course as it's only "measurement system" is my own non-calibrated hearing. Caveats stated, the MQA tracks seemed a bit more dynamic and full, especially through the mid-range, and less harsh in the high end than the pure FLAC versions. Though, the differences are very subtile IMO, at least on the material I used to do the comparison. Both encodings are very good - HiFi quality depends much more on the original recording production techniques than the interim handling.