Hi-Res CDs

Think I would need my ears upgrading, but many points for effort on this one!

An interesting look at a format we won't likely see much in the States. It also doesn't hurt that at least two of those MQA CDs were Bob Ludwig Mastersound recordings. The vinyls are superb and in great demand by collectors.

The only question I have about this "UHQ-CD" business is: Have they also improved the ECC (error checking & correction) algorithm that every single bit of digital audio data has to be passed through as it's read off the CD, in order to truly take advantage of this new super-duper-photopolymer-material woowoo? No, of course they haven't, because it's hard-coded into the firmware of every single disc player that was designed to the existing Red Book CD Audio standard, and cannot be changed. Sounds quite a lot like buying a super-fancy silver plated $3000 digital audio cable because it "improves the quality" of the 1's and 0's.... sure, a "better quality" recording medium or cable might "round off" the edges of the square-wave pulses a little less, but if every on/off pulse is being passed through ECC processing anyway.... you can see where I'm going with this. All that aside, it's good to see that physical music media aren't completely dead, and there's still some room to improve the perceived quality of sound on a plastic disc with techniques like MQA. Interesting video Matt, thank you.

I suppose the most direct comparison would be if the same disc had both MQA and non-MQA audio on it. Probably wouldn’t be flattering, though.

Thanks for the video! So this week I learned about two formats, previously unknown to me. A friend asked about converting a U-Matic video cassette. Any chance that you will do a video?

One thing to mention about the original Brothers in Arms CD is that it's mastered at a pretty low overall volume. Not that difficult to get more out of it, if they retained the original mastering. Incidentally, is it a coincidence that you chose chiefly British artists?

if they wanted to make MQA really take off they would add firmware upgrades to those folk using SACD's so they can get an install base and drum up interest. But I bguess it'll just remain a niche market for a (sadly) dying audience.

Great video as always! Thank you! MQA seems pretty strange to me though. Not because of digital downloads, but because the approach just doesn't make much sense to me. There is no way to add more information to CD audio without also affecting the audio when playing it back on a regular CD player. That "extra space" has to come from somewhere, and embedding the information will affect the audio in some way. Whether or not one could actually hear that is a different story. There's also the trade-off where the more extra information is added, the more the original audio is affected. Quite a bit of information might have to be added to make a significant difference when playing it back through an MQA decoder. So, it's a balancing act where the more you make the audio better, the more you also have to make it worse! It's an interesting approach, but it feels unnecessary now that we have DVD and BluRay.

Very interesting video on a format I had no idea existed! This is (one of the many reasons) why I love your channel so much! I'm curious if you were to rip the MQA format and resample/dither down to 16-bit 44.1kHz if you would still notice a quality difference, or if perhaps the MQA versionis just mastered to sound more impressive. Maybe I should do some Techmoan-style experimentation myself! For future A/B sound testing, may I suggest a small 4-track analog mixer? You could put all your inputs in there, and adjust the faders to switch between them. Love the cozy corner setup, too!

hopefully this is as good as SACD, but with even more titles available!

Mat - I think this USB DAC may be an even low cost option - <a href="https://www.meridian-audio.com/en/products/dacs/usb-dacs/explorer/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.meridian-audio.com/en/products/dacs/usb-dacs/explorer/</a>

Bring on the flac!

You would not believe the grief I get on the Internet daily, with all of these morons trying to say that I cannot hear the difference between a CD (or high resolution FLAC of a CD) vs. some lossy 320k mp3 crap! - Yet every time someone gives me a blind listening test, I ace it. Why all the hate online for those who happen to be able to easily hear the difference in lossless CD quality or better, and that vile lossy trash quality ( itunes/mp3/AAC/WMA) etc.

Blogger (and Techmoan fan) Archimago has published, to my view sensible and reasoned, arguments about MQA. Link for those who might be interested: <a href="http://archimago.blogspot.com/2017/10/mqa-final-final-comment-simply-put-why.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://archimago.blogspot.com/2017/10/mqa-final-final-comment-simply-put-why.html</a>

Interesting again Mat. That “special” polymer statement immediately made me think of that fad where certain audio types painted green edges to their CDs to improve reproduction. Excellent idea not to go near the comments after this one drops 😱.

Mat, do you have any Super High Quality CDs? That’s a format I have pretty much no knowledge of, in fact an example of my ignorance is that up until very recently I thought SHQ-CDs and SACDs were the same thing, just branded differently depending on the region! When I saw the notification for this video my first thought was that this was a retrospective or review of the SHQ-CD or SACD formats (or both!), so it was extremely interesting to discover that MQA-CD is a brand new format. As someone who still collects bog standard compact discs, I never expected a 2018 revision to the medium, though it’s a shame that currently the MQA players and decoders suitable for standard hi-fi setups are so outrageously priced. Perhaps, as with most tech, the prices will come down over time, but this MQA/UHQ thing does seem very niche.

Incidentally, it makes sense that your MQA decoder doesn't work with your S/PDIF output from your CD player. S/PDIF will only output the 16 bit signal that the CD player reads from the CD, and there's no space in there that would allow a manufacturer to put enough extra information for high bitrate audio and extra bit depth. The MQA audio must be on a separate layer (like they did with SACD where a CD layer was mixed with a DVD layer) and you need a player that understands the layering and, when it detects an MQA CD, sends the audio out to the optical or coax with a higher bitrate.

"Improved Polymers"... That sounds like an attempt to re-release a book with a special "High Resolution" logo on the cover and letting that logo represent the fact that someone with a really nice handwriting printed the original manuscript on a laser printer, instead of someone with a doctor's handwriting using a dot matrix printer. It's utter BS: The sound quality of digital audio doesn't improve by using better materials to store the bits. Just like a book that's printed on a matrix printer has the same text as a book printed with a laser printer, it doesn't matter: all the information is still there! What MIGHT improve is that in the long run, CD's that are made of better materials (with fewer microscopic air bubbles or that kind of bla bla bla) might last longer because the reflective layer takes longer to start rusting and to start making it harder for a player to extract the bits from the CD. What ALSO might improve is that you might get better audio quality because they used the original master tapes for these productions. And as we all know, there have been TONS of crappy CD re-releases where they mangled the dynamics of the original music to make sound louder (Look up "Loudness Wars"). So if you didn't have the chance to get the original Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms CD in 1983 or 1984 or whatever and you only have the remastered mangled version, here's your chance to get a copy of the better version that they should have kept selling in the first place. Whether you think it's fair for record companies to keep extracting money from you for the same music, that's a matter of opinion I guess.

Nice video. From the few seconds you played the regular 44/16 version vs the the MQA, I could only tell the regular version sounded flawed while the MQA seemed ok. I'm no genius about this but I'm pretty sure the decoding on the DAC was to blame. When the Internet storm hits this video I'm guessing you will get plenty of posts asking about what is inside the converter like the DAC and amp chips. So be prepared :) About being able to fit compressed high resolution music as well as regular versions. I guess that would depend on how much music there is on the disc to begin with? It's not like music cds fill up all the 650 MB to begin with. And the compression of MQA seems very efficient compared to other compressed lossless formats like FLAC

Of course, the MQA's could also sound better as they are freshly remastered versions of dusty 70's and 80's originals, many of which may have been some of the first to be (re)released on CD at launch of the format, back when as much care wasn't taken as it is now. Great vid as always though, and sharing that sinking feeling as Pro-Ject casually announce that co-ax isn't supported!

You know its going to be a good video when Techmoan flashes a Supertramp CD.

Thank you for the video! I have quite a collection of SACDs, and I probably would’ve looked into getting one of these MQA setups to see how they compare. However, seeing this video and these comments has definitely turned me off of these discs.

The additional information on an MQA disc is not only outside of the range of human hearing, but the analog tapes from which most of these hi-res discs were mastered do not contain frequency information outside of the range of CD audio. There are several possible explanations for the differences in sound quality, including a different EQ profile for MQA and 44.1/16, but they could even be using different preamplifier circuits.

In addition to what others said, the MQA version could also sound better to you than the standard CD version for one simple reason: loudness. In your video you can clearly notice that the MQA is louder. It's a common psychoaustic phenomenom. I once read that even small loudness differences of 0.1 dB will be perceived better in a blind test.

Facinating, I probably would have never found out about this format if not for this video.

Once again, you demonstrate the ability to post vids on topics I could not possibly care less about and make me like it. MQA appears to me to be nothing more than the latest "golly gee-whiz' gimmick aimed toward pretentious idiots with far more money than sense. But then, back in the 80s, I could never tell the difference between my friends multi-thousand dollar stereo systems and my first generation walkman. The biggest thing I got out of your vid today is the rush of nostalgia over the CD titles. While Brother At Arms is on a constant rotation of my playlists, I haven't listened to Oldfield's Tubular Bells in decades. Fixing that now, or at least as soon as I can figure out which of my boxes of albums its in. Thanks Mat.

YouTube will accept lossless uploads, although you can't do that with iMovie. Even if you could, however, YouTube is going to transcode anything you upload anyway. My point is: You made the right decision! MQA is quite controversial in the audiophile world. It's proprietary, and if you don't have the decoder, they sound worse than a regular CD in a normal CD player, since some of the bits are "reserved" for the MQA stuff - this is probably why the MQA audio sounded better to you in the comparison - the quality of the plain CD version had been reduced. SACD is an improvement in this regard - the CD layer still retains all 16 bits per sample. The problem with iTunes was probably the volume control, which uses digital resampling and will corrupt the MQA bits, or the output frequency, which may have been set to 48k instead of 44.1k. This will also corrupt the MQA bits. (You can change the output frequency in the confusingly named "Audio MIDI Setup" app.) I find it hard to believe that it's going to be a success. Plain audio CDs are already capable of recording audio at a higher fidelity than the human ear can hear. All of these "next gen" formats are a waste of time.

I’m with you on the UHQ CD thing - sounds like utter nonsense. As far as the MQA goes....I really just don’t understand it at all. I mean where does the data go? It’s completely beyond my comprehension, however all that being said, it definitely sounds a lot better to me when that MQA logo is lit up. I won’t be buying any more though until someone makes it (a lot) easier to listen to them.

I'm highly skeptical of this format. I cannot understand how it would be possible to have both MQA and regular audio on the same CD without sacrificing the run-time length of the CD. Beyond that, the whole thing about the pits being square instead of round is total snake-oil marketing there, because the data is digital those pits are read as ones and zeros. Plus there is a checksum to help eliminate any possible bit-errors. So there would literally be no difference in the sound quality whether the pits were round, square, or triangle shaped. But even if everything they said is true (which I doubt) the main issue I really have is that I have serious doubts any human being would actually be able to tell the difference between this and a regular CD in a double-blind test.