John Coltrane Quartet Ballads Impulse UHQ MQA CD UCCU 40111

John Coltrane Quartet Ballads

audiophile Impulse Universal Ultimate High Quality CD UCCU-40111

made in Japan

new, factory sealed

UHQCD stands for Ultimate High Quality Compact Disc and is a joint development of the Japanese CD replication company Memory-Tech and the Audio Quality CD Company from Hong Kong. Unlike conventional CDs, UHQCDs are not pressed from polycarbonate, but cast from a photopolymer and cured with UV light. Another layer of high-purity polycarbonate is applied to the softer photopolymer for scratch protection. The combination results in significantly reduced reflection of laser light inside the CD and an unmatched precise edge transition between pits and lands of the CD. UHQCDs are 100% compatible with standard CD players. Musically, the result is a sound image strongly reminiscent of analog master tapes.

The discs offered by Universal Japan are additionally MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) encoded. If you output the digital signal from the digital output of your CD player or the previously ripped data stream from your music server to a corresponding MQA-DA converter, you can generate a 24-bit signal with up to 352 Khz sampling frequency from the CD data.

While Universal Music Japan's first UHQCD series relied on the DSD data of previous SHM-SACD releases, with increasing popularity, albums that had not previously been released as SHM-SACD are now appearing. Typically, the Universal Archive master tapes are re-converted to DSD for this purpose and then post-processed with the appropriate MQA encoder. Thus, the UHQCDs are ideal for music lovers who want to get as close as possible to the sound of the recording, but do not own an SACD player.