Losslessness Questions
a) Is MQA really lossless?
b) MQA isn't lossless?
c) MQA prevents us changing the signal before playback (eg, room correction or upsampling).
Answers:
a & b) This question often seems to assume that lossless is always best but in fact all "lossless" does is to take some bits and to reproduce those same bits at another time or place. It that's all you wanted to do, FLAC would be fine and there would be no need for MQA. The team behind MQA understand not only lossless compression but also lossless processing and data burying. [3][11][13][21] (footnote 7)
There is a fundamental difficulty if we focus solely on strict lossless delivery. It is understood that a digital distribution system (including MQA) can be lossless in distribution and therefore requires lossless delivery. The problem is that the result is not delivered today; current DACs do not have lossless behavior in the digital domain and all behave differently. Also the replay chain has several (sometimes unintended) places where losslessness breaks down. This is covered in our papers. [1][2].
So MQA is set up to deliver a 'closer-to-lossless' digital path up to the DAC modulator with the goal of approaching analogue-to-analogue 'lossless' within appropriate thermal limits, including protecting the signals above 'acoustic absolute zero' (see [2][6]).
c) You can't have it both ways. If we apply the lossless criterion to encoding we must guarantee it in delivery.
MQA does not have the capability to defeat information theory.
More important is to capture and protect (in a lossless manner) all the information in the file that relates to the music content. This means capturing safely at least everything in the triangle on the Origami diagrams; this is then conveyed and protected without loss. This triangle is important for defending the content but also to achieve the low-blur hierarchical sampling chain. (See later where we describe the triangle in more detail).
Furthermore, the system path from analogue to analogue is more precise because of the other parts of the technology. Lossless deals with data in the digital domain. The biggest problem, in our experience, is getting it from analogue and back to analogue with the least audible damage. Unless you understand this perspective, MQA looks strange.
The problem that MQA is addressing is how to transport an analogue signal to another time or place. It is the analogue signal from the mixing desk that the producer heard and that is the signal that you want to reproduce at your loudspeaker.
Many recording and mastering engineers have testified that MQA improves very considerably on the conventional methods, recreating the sound they actually hear or remember from the original session or, in the case of archive material, the sound from an analogue tape recorder.
Footnote 7: Members of the MQA team were the first to implement a real-time lossless compression system and demonstrated it to the RIAA a decade before FLAC existed.
Footnote 7: Members of the MQA team were the first to implement a real-time lossless compression system and demonstrated it to the RIAA a decade before FLAC existed.
