I just tried to read this article on MQA, and I have to admit, I have no idea what they are talking about.
Can anyone decipher the discussion between Austin and Bob Stuart?
Thanks
I hadn't heard of "B-splines" in audio encoding until this year. Some of the photo resizers/interpolators I've used use b-splines, but that's photo not audio, and besides, they weren't the best resizers anyway - just the cheapest.
Since Stuart's algorithms are mostly secret, and many audiophiles are frightened at the prospect of all major studios encoding only with MQA in the future (more for copyright control than sound quality they say), it's nigh impossible to validate what MQA is doing, unless you buy into the anti-MQA arguments that say it's all bad.
The paragraphs in the article that talk about the "improvements" in MQA, to remove the excess noise that was added to the 2L recordings (and perhaps others), tell an interesting story. I don't know if the B-splines were particularly instrumental in the improved coding with lower noise, or whether Bob just pulled that out of the black box to impress the Stereophile readers.
Bottom line - the MQA discussion in general has been so poisoned by the anti-MQA'ers that I have no hope that we'll ever see really good tests of its results (compared to non-MQA copies from the same masters), but maybe a miracle will occur and Stuart will host a test event open to fans and critics alike, with the ability for users to encode some tracks with MQA and directly compare those to the originals. That shouldn't be a problem, since the software is compiled and none of the testers would be able to discern its secrets, unless certain negative secrets (don't know that there are any of course) reveal themselves during the user-coding and testing processes.
