Press Launch at London’s Shard 69 December 4th 2014
Bob Stuart explaining falling audio quality standards
Meridian, after years of research have launched a new digital recording archiving and transmission format which claims to be of potentially higher sound quality than presently used high resolution standards and yet is more economical of encoding, storage and transmission resources. The term lossless has been mentioned in this connection and is associated with the use of this term for MLP, Meridian Lossless Packing which has been widely licensed particularly for DVD and Blu Ray sound tracks to allow more economical audio data storage and transmission without loss of quality.
Much research by Bob Stuart and his colleagues including Peter Craven concerned reaching a better understanding of perception, what parameters are key to sound quality, and a shift from a traditional emphasis on recording the frequency components of sounds, to better mapping of the time related or transient components. Studies on perception in recent years have showed that humans are better able to resolve and appreciate transients than frequencies. Grossly simplifying the argument we understand that a single pure frequency, a sine wave carries no musical information, it is dead, static, and cannot even reveal its location, yet our recording technologies seem to have concentrated on accurate capturing groups of sine waves.
Much research by Bob Stuart and his colleagues including Peter Craven concerned reaching a better understanding of perception, what parameters are key to sound quality, and a shift from a traditional emphasis on recording the frequency components of sounds, to better mapping of the time related or transient components. Studies on perception in recent years have showed that humans are better able to resolve and appreciate transients than frequencies. Grossly simplifying the argument we understand that a single pure frequency, a sine wave carries no musical information, it is dead, static, and cannot even reveal its location, yet our recording technologies seem to have concentrated on accurate capturing groups of sine waves.
At the Shard press launch also attended by many big hat music industry people including Warner (providing an enthusiastic endorsement), Bob Stuart explained in brief that by emphasising transient accuracy, a redesigned recording space which can convey a more realistic representation of the music recording event may also be encoded more accurately and with much greater economy than present methods. Thus with his MQA format a stereo channel requires only 1MB/s, a data rate similar to CD (which only provides 44.1kHz 16bit) while in fact the new format has equivalent quality to at least 24bit 96kHz or to higher rate DSD. The promise is that it would be possible to stream HD audio sound quality in real time, on demand. MQA works with all masters with 44.1 kHz to 768kHz sampling.
 At the Shard Rafel Todes, Tony Faulkner, Paul Messenger, Jon Honeyball and Alan Sircom |  Peter Craven and Bob Stuart with the MQA team |
MQA is compatible with lossless file formats as ALAC, FLAC, or WAV but with smaller file sizes. MQA uses metadata to set the codes for the MQA decoder and D/A converters for optimal replay. The replay is designed using psychoacoustics for the most realistic sound quality in that context.
An MQA decoder can be an app, a software player or hardware, and the final step relates to the name MQA, Master Quality Authenticated, confirming that master quality is present at the replay and completing the chain from the studio recording to the listener.
The new format is packed in such a way that many current replay systems can use it at their CD existing resolution while the comparatively low overhead and extra processing required can be easily invoked to recover the successive stages of higher quality which are built into the format, e.g. by via an updated app for the player software, and/or built into hardware.
In a sense the higher stages of replay quality are built into the one recorded file and it is the replay path which has the opportunity to unpack the layers and assemble the higher quality standards as required.
Much of the technology was discussed, without then revealing the new MQA trademark or commercial work, in a recent AES paper ‘A Hierarchical Approach to Archiving and Distribution’ by Robert Stuart and Peter Craven presented at the 137th AES Convention 2014 October 9-12 Los Angeles.
Meridian has just announced a new USB DAC, the Explorer II with MQA built in, at £199, perfect for trying out the new format.
We will report at greater length with listening test results in the 2015 issue Jan–March, Volume 9 Number 1.
An MQA decoder can be an app, a software player or hardware, and the final step relates to the name MQA, Master Quality Authenticated, confirming that master quality is present at the replay and completing the chain from the studio recording to the listener.
The new format is packed in such a way that many current replay systems can use it at their CD existing resolution while the comparatively low overhead and extra processing required can be easily invoked to recover the successive stages of higher quality which are built into the format, e.g. by via an updated app for the player software, and/or built into hardware.
In a sense the higher stages of replay quality are built into the one recorded file and it is the replay path which has the opportunity to unpack the layers and assemble the higher quality standards as required.
Much of the technology was discussed, without then revealing the new MQA trademark or commercial work, in a recent AES paper ‘A Hierarchical Approach to Archiving and Distribution’ by Robert Stuart and Peter Craven presented at the 137th AES Convention 2014 October 9-12 Los Angeles.
Meridian has just announced a new USB DAC, the Explorer II with MQA built in, at £199, perfect for trying out the new format.
We will report at greater length with listening test results in the 2015 issue Jan–March, Volume 9 Number 1.
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