#Audirvana izotope settings full#
#Audirvana izotope settings pro#

Hence we can expect that ‘B’ might sound different to ‘A’ even if a conventional down-conversion would have sounded the same as ‘A’! The difficulty is that both ‘B’ and ‘C’ tend to have added aliases, and that ‘B’ also has a changed spectral balance from having been filtered. And the outcome might, in practice, vary from case to case. Various outcomes may arise from a controlled subjective listening comparison. Here ‘A’ would be the original 192k rate file, ‘B’ would be the 96k rate version produced via MQA folding for transmission or storage, and ‘C’ would be the unfolded 192k rate output from ‘unfolding’ ‘B’. We can imagine setting up a test where we carry out an ‘ABC’ comparison. You should probably be able to figure it out for yourself from the following anyway:Ī particular problem can arise from the use of MQA when we wish to consider its performance by doing a listening comparison. There are technical reasons for that - and why you may prefer the up-sampled Audirvana rather than actual MQA decoding - but I will only go into it if people are interested. Not everyone thinks MQA is the WOW, utterly fantastic thing the marketing blurb says it is. On those I prefer MQA to the rest - even DXD.īut its not what I would call a fair dinkum test - IMHO it was specifically selected to showcase MQA. They all sound different - well at least to me.

You can compare the same master in many different formats here: Give me the same mastering as the SACD on CD and I bet there isn't a lot of difference to be heard. I ran the CD through the DR meter just then and got the result on the right.Īll this talk of MQA / CD / DSD / SACD / Vinyl / Casette / wax cylinder, but what it comes down to is the mastering. The SACD releases have less compression applied during the mastering, the CD release have more compression and less dynamic range. They actual sound quality is of little interest to them, as most consumers don't make spending choices based on SQ.Įvery time I listened to the 'Come Away with me' album on CD, I thought it sounded compressed. An MQA CD will be backwards compatible to a non-MQA dac, so no reason not to make one, if they are pressing CDs anyway. The big record labels will do anything they think makes them money. If they think they can sell a few thousand MQA CDs of an album, they will release it. I don't see any reason 'remasters' done with MQA won't be released on CD, once an MQA version of the master has been made. Sounds like just the thing for a desktop system: Not expensive, lots of features, and by all reports sounds good.

#Audirvana izotope settings full#

They've pretty much said that there won't be a full software implementation of the MQA unfold and filtering available either.īTW, just saw the project box s2 DAC-Pre is fully MQA. Their model is about certifying DACs with MQA - which includes MQA filtering (re: conversion to analog) - and getting a royalty from the DAC manufacturer. They aren't interested in doing what you are asking for. MQA is only implementing full MQA unfolding and filtering in devices with DACs. One of the issues with MQA is that it isn't fully compatible (if you want all it's features) with a non-MQA DAC. I haven't seen what you are looking for- a player with storage - that can fully play MQA.

#Audirvana izotope settings pro#

I am looking for a desktop digital music player to use with my non MQA Mirus Pro DAC.Īre there any desktop digital music players which have full MQA facilities, on which you can store normal FLAC and MQA music files and play Tidal MQA music files, which the digital music player can fully unfold and send the fully unfolded music file to play on my DAC? There does appear to be something special about MQA, at least in my unique setup. Note this is with a DAC which doesn't do the full unfold or any DAC compensation. MQA seems to work well with studio albums. Where DSD is open, spacious, and lively, MQA seems to be more intimate, may be even slightly rolled off at the top without losing crispness. I don't think it works as well for classical as DSD. I would describe the sound as chocolatey but crisp. Without the iZotope upsample I still found MQA unlistenable, but with the upsample it sounds good. In the current setup I'm using Audirvana to do the first unfold to 88.1/96 but I've also got Audirvana doing an upsample to 176/192 (using the default iZotope settings) before sending over uPNP to the network receiver (which doesn't support MQA). There was definitely a difference, but I just couldn't listen to it. Each time I found MQA files sounded a bit fatiguing after a minute or two. I don't have an MQA DAC but tried listening to a few MQA files over the time. I'm listening to Norah Jones MQA album via Tidal through a non-MQA DAC and man it sounds good.