lossless sound quality
The principle of these audio compression methods is to keep as much as possible the parts that are easy to hear for the human ear.
In the main constant bit rate (CBR) mode, audible data in the audio is removed and it is easier for the human ear to hear. The more information that is retained for the part, the less information that is retained for the less audible part. As sound complexity increases, the degree of sound quality degradation becomes more apparent. For example, when listening to pure human music voice performances and performances combined with background music, pure The degree of degradation of the compressed music of the human voice is less obvious than that of the original file.
As for the lossless sound quality provided by today’s streaming platform, there are many formats, but strictly speaking, these formats, including flac and ALAC, belong to lossless compression (non-destructive data compression) rather than quality. lossless sound in a narrow sense, but due to its performance it is almost the same as WAVE, but the file is small, the decoding speed is fast, and it can be used in streaming services, so it is also a representative format of lossless sound quality that has entered the era without CD support, and it is also the current music streaming service.
Also, MQA like Tidal is a more controversial format, because although MQA is lossless audio compression in a broad sense, it focuses on driving high-quality music files that are above CD quality at a size similar to those of CD quality flac files. , but it can also be restored to the original high-quality audio format, but the controversial point is whether the higher compression ratio can maintain the same real auditory sense as the original high-quality audio has always been controversial. At the same time, MQA requires a specific device to perform hardware decoding. Yes, many devices can only decode MQA through software.
▲Currently called Hi-Res Audio generally refers to sound quality higher than that of a CD, but to be certified, the device must support the processing capability of the 24-bit 96kHz format.
However, since MP3 and AAC are previously planned destructive music compression formats, their purpose is to compress CD-level sound quality into smaller files, so most encoding specifications are presented in one presentation. CD-level 16-bit 44.1 kHz or 16-bit 48 kHz; but MQA is a format with a small file size that locks in high sound quality requirements. Basically, the MQA format will be music equivalent to 24-bit PCM or higher.
