Had to google SWYPO and the first few results were for ‘Sex With Your Pants On’
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And this is why post-CD, no new format aside from 
MP3 has been a success… 
SACD and DVD-A had exactly the same issue. I remember reading one of the HiFi rags discovering exactly that - they thought it sounded much zingier, did a test and the high frequencies were several decibels up.
Everything is made with 24 bits, so you have enough headroom not to worry about digital clipping. So it’s recorded with 24 bits, and mixed at 24 bits. Final mastering could be done either 16 or 24, but I think it’s usually the latter. The 16 bit CD version is only at the end of the food chain.
Also it’s quite common to use 48khz, rather than 44.1, and resample. Makes it easier when dealing with the video side of things.
I have a decent SACD player and a small collection of classical SACDs. They do sound good, but TBH I think it’s because they took a lot of care with the mastering and production processes. CDs done well can also sound fantastic. An mp3 of a great recording will sound better than a 24-bit FLAC of a lousy one.
Serge brought a downsampling gadget to Scalford one year, and played the same music at various resolutions. TBH you really couldn’t tell 24/96 and above from CD quality.
MQA blind listening
Cutting to the chase: Part 2 (the results) linked above. Summary: To summarise: statistically indistinguishable from regular hi-res.
For the background on test procedure, etc. read part 1 below.
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Hehe, he’s the antichrist as far as the disciples on the Roon forums are concerned 
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Oh, I bet!
I read it up when the thread about it was posted on PFM and it’s hard to argue with the results.
As far as I can tell MQA’s main purpose is lock-in and lining Bob Stuart’s pockets. Even if it does something useful (which is clearly unproven or marginal in the very best case), that in itself is a reason to avoid it like the plague.
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Science very inconvenient for those with a belief system shock horror
‘But, but I can hear a difference and so it must be true and besides my system is more transparent than yours blah blah…’
Fucking fannies.
Yep, because of a lot of the Roon devs are ex. Meridian Sooloos, there are significant numbers of Meridian cultists over there.
They go fucking apeshit if you dare to question or criticise the Word of Bob.
This. The bandwidth and storage issues of lossless hi res are negligible, so the only reason for MQA is to get things into a locked-down format.
Quite. Bandwidth and storage have come down so much in cost these days, the problem it purports to solve simply isn’t an issue. A solution for a 5 years out of date problem. Who the fuck needs another lossy DRM-ed format.
And then they try to tell you it’s not high res which is important but temporal domain pre-ringing something something. As if pre-ringing filters haven’t been done before or have their own set of compromises.
There was a discussion on what it actually does on a while back, on Computer Audiophile, I think. Can’t find it, though. There was definitely some smoke and mirrors going on, based on the analysis.
Hmmm…
Actually, looks like it may have been deleted as criticism of MQA seems to be heavily policed, that should probably tell you all you need to know.
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IIRC the first SACD Kind of Blue (in case anyone didn’t already have it who wanted it) was a different mastering per HFNRR.
If I could be bothered to check, it might pique some nerdish interest to find out whether hybrid discs had the same master for each layer, I did spot MrsKettle listening to the CD layer of one from outside the room.
[/attempt to make a single data point sound like science]
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By serendipitous means, I stumbled upon this blind listening test which compared lossless CD rips with lossy MP3:
Notwithstanding personal opinions and criticisms of methods, it arrives at an initially surprising conclusion - that even audiophiles subjectively prefer lossy recordings to lossless…
I find this interesting because my return journey to the disease of Audiophilia nervosa commenced in the early noughties by downloading low bit-rate MP3s from the likes of Epitonic (still going and always worth a look) to play via my desktop computer and attendant plastic HK speakers.
Progressing from crappy computer speakers to a proper hifi, I bought many of my favourite MP3s in CD form in anticipation of a much enhanced listening experience . . . and often found I no longer enjoyed them!
There were exceptions, but for the more compressed stuff, lossless files on low-res kit was often simply more fun.
A moment’s consideration of course acknowledges that these music files have been quite deliberately produced, mixed, compressed and finalised for exactly this kind of replay - computers, cheap phones with cheap earbuds, cars, portable radios etc. etc.
Naturally, the above-linked blog article has instead been used to support the usual assertions that audiophools are delusional, hi-res music a scam, and all hifi pointless, but I’m preaching to the converted here anyway so that can be taken as read!
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I wanna reply with a huge laugh!
But you may have a point…
Maybe the plastic computer speakers sounded better that those dreadful PMCs? 