Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), the audio codec from industry veterans Bob Stuart and Peter Craven, rests on two pillars: improved time-domain behavior, which is said to improve sound quality and what MQA Ltd. calls "audio origami," which yields reduced file size (for downloads) and data rate (for streaming). Last month I took a first peek at those time-domain issues, examining the impulse response of MQA's "upsampling renderer," the output side of this analog-to-analog system (footnote 1). This month I…
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Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.—Marcus Aurelius
Manufacturer's Comment
Editor: Jim Austin's assessment of the lossy/lossless question is astute. After developing lossless compression (footnote 1), we realized that losslessness in the digital transmission path was not addressing some critical issues. Jim raises the question "lossless compared to what," and this is a key point. Data can be transferred bit-for-bit to a D/A converter, but there is no such thing as a lossless converter to or from analog; and, in reality, internal signals in practical converters are rarely bit-repeatable. So, MQA is stepping beyond the lossless pipe to…
An economy of information transmitted . . . what was encoded was only what was needed, nothing more. (footnote 1)
As I wrote in the January issue's "As We See It," Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), the encoding/decoding system developed by J. Robert (Bob) Stuart and Peter Craven, has been widely criticized, despite reports in this magazine and others that MQA-encoded files tend to sound better than the PCM originals from which they were derived. Also in last month's issue, Jim Austin investigated the time-domain performance of the MQA reconstruction filter and I examined some of the…
MBL's mighty N31 CD player-DAC is featured on the new issue's cover and gets an in-depth review from John Atkinson inside, but February is also our annual "Records 2 Die 4" feature: Our team of writers put their heads together and came up with 61 albums that they will take with them when they go. February also features more on the controversial MQA coding scheme, from John Atkinson on p.3 and Jim Austin on p.125.
In equipment reports we review amplifiers from Jadis, Pass Labs, and PS Audio; LP players from MoFi and Rega; AVM's Ovation MP 8.2 CD player-DAC, and TAD's amazing little Micro…
In May of 2016, Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) was sold to EVA Automation in a deal that included Classé Audio and the US distribution of Rotel Electronics. Since then, production and distribution of B&W and Rotel products has continued but not so for Classé. Initially, the new management announced that production and distribution of current products would continue but that all newly announced products, prototypes of which had been shown at the previous CEDIA, would be put on hold. However, in July of 2016, Classé operations in Montreal were shut down and all employees, including…
. . . and nobody came? If you look at the numbers for the high-end audio sector alone, it certainly looks like something went south. However the rest of CES is thriving: gadgets, AI and even self-driving cars have supplanted much of what used to dominate these shows (one of the Innovations Award winners this year is Kohler's "intelligent bathroom.")
So it looks like the downturn is just us. A few short years ago, high-performance audio had a thriving presence here. We occupied three floors of regular rooms at the Venetian hotel, with plenty of exhibitors occupying large swaths of the top…
Just so happens the first room I entered this year featured the Wolf Cinema projector in a full-on home theater demo. Curiously, like a fish out of water, Wolf sets up their video equipment at the Venetian high-end audio stomping grounds year after year with an impressive big screen presentation. It must work for them! But as I looked around in the dark, I found Dynaudio's Brian Kjaer also present. This is Dynaudio's only CES showing this year, as the audio provider for the Wolf Cinema room.
Dynaudio's surround system featured the Contour 20 bookshelf in the rear and the Contour 30…
Found taped to a locked door among the regular exhibitors. Presumably they paid for the room anyways?
Heinz Lichtenegger, Pro-Ject president starts by exclaiming "it's a revolution at the price point!" Built around the ESS Sabre ESS9038 dual DAC chip, the $399 S2 also has full MQA processing, up to DSD 512 and 24/192 PCM, 7 selectable digital filters, jitter claimed as low as 100 femtoseconds, and headphone jack. "It's the lowest jitter you can measure," says Lichtenegger.
The S2 was designed by John Westlake who has created products for Cambridge Audio, Peachtree Audio, Audiolab and others. The interior indeed sports a gorgeous and detailed layout, packing everything into a rather tight…
Since they are based in Vienna, Austria, Pro-Ject decided to commemorate the Vienna Philharmonic's 175th birthday by creating a bespoke limited edition (175 units made of course) turntable, priced around $8,000-9,000.
"Everything you see on this turntable is made out of material used to make the instruments in the orchestra," notes Pro-Ject president Heinz Lichtenegger. The tonearm lift connected to the headshell is an actual "key" from a clarinet, the control buttons are real flute parts and the turntable plinth is made of the same brass used for trumpets. And of course the wooden case…