The MQA controversy is bound to create some winners and losers in both manufacturing and for us audiophiles.
For example, LINN has a very strongly argued case against it:
MQA is Bad For Music
The Computer Audiophile has details about how MQA advances the state-of-the-art in some respects:
MQA (for civilians)
And over at HiFi+ they report that MQA might not even be lossless:
And small manufacturers agonize over what THEY should do, and must pick sides:
ZWEIMANN AUDIO on FACEBOOK
MQA has funding and is making a bold move, but… I have a feeling things are moving so fast, that just about the time that MQA might start making an impact on the regular listening public, something new will already be replacing it.
What wins these days seem to be those things that go viral, not needing a heavy hand like the old format wars of days-gone-by.
But, who knows… not me. This one I am sitting out and taking a wait-and-see wake-me-when-its-all-over approach 🙂
[Yes, we are going to Newport 2017 this Spring as well, and I’ll post where we will be when the powers that be (Neli) tell me the details :-)]
Here we are in the wonderful world where there is a show that is only 20 minutes away. 🙂
Although CAS skipped a year, it is back in force and we are signed up for one of the larger rooms on the first floor of the building where the vast majority of exhibit rooms will be.
It is now in Oakland, at the Hilton, with plenty of parking and rooms that do not have air conditioners or heaters where equipment is supposed to go [unlike most of the other shows, shows where you eventually just learn to sit on the thing while plugging cables into the back of the gear].
This is the hotel layout and where the rooms are located.
This is the room we are in. The front wall backs to the outside. So we will not disturb anybody if we play it a little LOUD [unless, however, our neighbors on the other side of the rear wall are too loud for our listeners to bear . in which case we will flip the room the other way. ]
Hmmm, maybe we should just put the system on the long wall, on the left, also an outer wall. You know, there is hardly ever any choice when we setup rooms about where the system should go. This is a such wealth of choices here [we, (well me anyway, haven’t talked to Neli about this recently), have been looking more favorably at long wall setups than we used to. Letting the sound breathe on the sides helps clarity and macrodynamics, and clarity OFÂ macrodynamics :-)]
We’ve been wanting to go to this show for years and years. Every year we would talk and talk about it. One or the other of us would always not be able to make it. This is awesome.
