Audio Video News

High-Res Audio Defined

Mark Fleischmann  |  Oct 1, 2014

High-resolution audio is getting a big industry push, but until now the category has labored without a definition. The Digital Entertainment Group, the Consumer Electronics Association, and The Recording Academy have teamed up to offer one. They define what they call Master Quality Recording in four ways: MQ-P audio comes from a PCM source with minimum 48/20 resolution, but “typically” is 96/24 or 192/24 in today’s download services. MQ-A is from an analog source, and high-quality analog can still be deemed high-res. MQ-C grandfathers in CD-quality 44.1/16 audio. And MQ-D refers to DSD sources. Taken together, these categories define high-res audio somewhat broadly. Even so, they may give the informed consumer a better idea of what he’s buying (for those of us who still buy music).

COMMENTS
rhirschey's picture
Submitted by rhirschey on October 2, 2014 - 10:22am

Most anyone that cares about audio quality doesn't need these labels to understand what they are downloading or listening to. How many people who already care about the difference between 44.kHz and 192kHz sampling need another label/metadata telling them it is 192kHz 5.1 FLAC MQ-P? It simply adds meaningless data to the description of the file. What if, instead, it was just labeled 5.1 FLAC MQ-P? I'd still be asking what the heck the sampling rate and bit depth are. See how it adds no value whatsoever and is simply redundant with the information we'll actually want to see?

This is one of many worthless attempts of many parties to define "hi-res" audio and it is all in vain.

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