I've been on few occasions in the position where some high end audio store was demoing some systems/components to me, and the back-and-forth switching almost always made for an extremely impressive experience. Like "here is configuration A, give it a good listen; now, here is configuration B -- ta-da!!!"

Those stunts always made me think in the back of my head -- "there must be a trick to this..."

My latest impression: MQA. Listened to John Coltrane "Giant Steps" in MQA format. Sounded bloody awesome! I could easily follow every Coltrane's nuance on the tenor sax, things I've never heard before because of the blinding speed of his playing.

Then listened to the same track in red book format -- the music just collapsed. Everything else remaining equal -- same volume, same configuration. Simply going from MQA to CD the music just died.

How's that possible? Is there a trick to it, or is it really such a genuine improvement?