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MQA, DRM, And Other Four-letter Words
Stereophile
|May 2018
MQA, DRM, And Other Four-letter Words
In an article published in the March 2018 Stereophile,1 I wrote that critics have been attacking MQA, the audio codec developed by J. Robert Stuart and Peter Craven, by accusing it of being lossy. The critics are right: MQA is, in fact, a lossy codec—that is, not all of the data in the original recording are recovered when played back via MQA—though in a clever and innocuous way. For MQA’s critics, though, that’s not the point: They use lossy mainly for its negative emotional associations: When audiophiles hear lossy, they think MP3.
This story is from the May 2018 edition of Stereophile.
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