What is MQA and does it work with iFi DACs?

And it’s here that the cracks started to show in a way mqa meaning that would for me become a shear line right through the entire MQA format. Some teething problems were apparent though, with two tracks (Muse’s “Uprising” and Eiji Oue’s “Firebird”) exhibiting encoding errors that affected playback. This included a few well-known standards from the audiophile back catalogue, bundling classics from Steely Dan, Dave Brubeck, and Miles Davis. The combination of whipcrack transients and unfettered HF extension recalled the natural sound of DSD which typically trumps PCM in these areas.

It’s no coincidence that the XDP-100R had lousy Wi-Fi connectivity, constantly dropping connections whenever hand-held. The side-mounted volume knob bizarrely works backwards (turn clockwise to reduce volume) and the volume scale runs (potentially making it 10 better than the competing AK players?). Pioneer’s new parent Onkyo also wants to monitor and collect your music playing habits, although a radio-button option to refuse its privacy policy and telemetry is at least offered. The design is clunky but feels bomb-proof, 204 grams of brushed metal and glass, sporting laser-etched branding at back and tiny “HIGH-RESOLUTION AUDIO PLAYER” legend up front. Like the AK100, the Pioneer XDP-100R supports PCM audio all the way up to 24-bit and 384 kHz. The attraction is of course high-resolution audio, an area that Apple has steadfastly avoided since it formally entered the music business.

And to ensure we never hear the added “sshhhh,” noise-shaping techniques are available that sweep it upstream where the ear is deaf to it. In truth, genuine 24-bit resolution implies a dynamic range of 144dB which is unattainable in the studio, let alone in domestic replay. MQA Ltd refers to the total effect of filter ringing as “blurring” the music, and addressing this defect—deblurring—is a central philosophy throughout its technology.

As Bob Stuart sees it, “MQA provides the opportunity to deliver the exact sound heard from the real master without actually putting the crown jewels out there to be stolen.” A related patent Lossless buried data outlines how to hide data in music, in a reversible process that depends upon presenting a cryptographic key such as an encrypted certificate to read. When the watermark has been successfully recognised and decrypted a little green or blue LED will light on the user’s MQA decoder to signify authenticated playback. To complete the MQA encoding, a reversible lossless digital watermark is embedded all the way through the resulting file. The MQA inventors rely on the power of dithering to preserve sound quality that approaches a 16-bit channel.

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As Stuart sees it, “DRM restricts the distribution or access to an asset based on mechanisms that confirm the recipient.” Focusing on MQA, this technology puts higher-grade audio into the marketplace, and does require a licensed decoder to play it. Then there’s Verance (now Cinavia) analogue watermarking as a scorched-earth means to tag and corrupt audio quality across all formats. It’s an alphabet soup—SCMS with first DAT then CD-R, CSS for DVD, CPRM/CPPM for DVD-Audio, PSP and other locks on SACD, AACS for Blu-ray.

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Rather than hearing an ensemble fitting together to provide a result at least equal to the sum of parts, the overall pulse of the music seemed less coherent. But stepping back to hear how a group plays together as a band, I found myself increasingly confused by the result. The same notes are there, in the same order, but you know it’s not the same players.

An MQA decoder like the Explorer 2 DAC from Meridian is required to hear the format at its best. The new 24/96 file first undergoes decimation from 24-bit to typically 16-bit, with dither and noise shaping applied to preserve something similar to 20-bit resolution. The next stage is perhaps the cleverest, a folding technique that maintains playback compatibility with existing PCM hardware. And unlike the paradigm-shifting DSD format—which effectively tore up the digital rulebook—it’s still based around PCM coding. It’s a hierarchical system, scalable across a range of quality standards, with more than one technique applied to music files depending on the original recording and its format. Meanwhile lossless reduction is available with FLAC and Apple Lossless (ALAC) using prediction tables and a redundancy technique similar to zip files, and this approach typically halves the uncompressed size/bitrate while preserving original quality exactly.

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Somewhat tellingly, I did find that these amusical effects could be more or less replicated from regular PCM audio, by simply switching from linear-phase to minimum-phase interpolation filter on both Mytek and Pioneer hardware. But it is possible my subjective impressions of spoiled timing, tonal recasts, and soundstage confusion are symptoms of phase anomalies introduced by various non-linear phase filters in the MQA chain. Looking at other rave reviews, I may be the first and only listener to be unsettled by MQA encoding.

Outside of Meridian, the first third-party hardware to license the technology was the Mytek Brooklyn DAC in early April, followed by the Pioneer XDP-100R one week later. It’s been a slow burner, with Meridian’s own hardware finally gaining compatibility in February of 2016. In MQA, cryptographic security certificates are employed, ostensibly to authenticate the integrity of the music file, but also presumably to lock out reverse engineering. Media licensing terms are very rarely made public, but patented technology is often taxed at every juncture.

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Listeners must find new hardware to decode MQA, but this need only be a revised DAC or (horror) wireless speaker. That downsizing is not for audiophiles already content to fill their drives with full-fat hi-res; the company is gunning for the mass market. After several months of careful listening and comparing, I felt musicality was missing from the music I knew, at least decoded by the two MQA-certified devices available. The former’s MQA-encoded offerings have recently appeared on streaming service Tidal under the “Master” category; the latter says it will be using MQA for Internet streaming purposes only (at least for now). Yet MQA Ltd is closely involved with tuning third-party hardware, so these products must be performing to MQA’s exacting criteria. Both products share the same silicon convertor, so it’s also within reason that the effects are confined to the ESS Sabre chip and its peculiar execution of minimum-phase filter, rather than the MQA format as a whole.

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This post-echo is held as less pernicious than pre-echo however, since our hearing is familiar with such after-effects in the world around us, and is often inaudible anyway through masking. As oversampling quickly evolved in early players—as much to make up for the under-achieving 14-bit DACs of the day—new digital filters replaced analogue ones to undertake most of the necessary sifting. The issue with filters is the way they unavoidably mangle the sound as they remove the signal you don’t want, while preserving the music that you do. Various studies point to human ear/brain timing discrimination actually being closer to 10µs; some suggest even as fine as 6µs.

For the full decode of, for example, 352.8kHz music, you need to dig into the settings to disable software decoding and use an MQA-licensed DAC. At present Tidal has around 400 albums available to stream in MQA format, confusingly filed under its “Master” category rather than MQA. Of these, it was Tidal that announced in December 2015 it would be licensing MQA, and this finally came to fruition in January 2017.

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Given the paucity of commercially available MQA files, I was beholden to MQA Ltd to find music to play. At £1500 the DAC is midrange on the audiophile scale, but has a specification and intrinsic sound quality that outclasses many costlier D-A convertors of recent times. This half-width hi-fi separates unit launched late last year as successor to the company’s popular Stereo192-DSD convertor. To get a real understanding of the sound of MQA-encoded music, you need to hear it in a familiar system, limiting the new variable to just music file and decoder. It also provided the sonic equivalent of turning up the contrast and brightness on a television screen, opening an impressive window into the set, if one which could prove wearing after prolonged use.

Put another way, musicality defines one musician apart from another—the interplay between individuals, ebb and flow, the group timing, the subjective pace of the music. It’s an angle that’s rather too metaphysical for some and it evades the usual technical specs routinely measured by meter and ‘scope that pepper the sales brochures. Yet while actively seeking to judge these sub-elements of high-fidelity sound it’s all too easy to miss the big picture, to stand back and take in the music as a whole.