MQA is Vaporware

[MikeyFresh]

26 minutes ago, Spike Kasperak said:

Unless I missed, it seems MyTek has dumped MQA. Does not seem to be Trojan Horsed on to this product:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/mytek-digital-brooklyn-bridge-ii-roon-core-preamplifier

 

No apologies to customers, no mention of how MQA is no longer available. How humiliating. I would never spend a Euro with this company.

 

Interesting in that there appears to be some conscious distancing there, however once digging down a bit on the Mytek product listing, it does appear:

SPECS

Brooklyn Bridge 2 is all in-one Roon Core Streamer + excellent DSD/MQA DAC+ Analog (w/Phono) and Digital Preamp and a high-end headphone amplifier in a compact, modern beautiful chassis.

[KeenObserver]

If you keep feeding the troll, the troll will keep performing.

If the troll claps his flippers, and you throw him a fish, the troll will keep clapping his flippers.

 

There are those that think they can make a fortune selling freezers in Antarctica. The financial aspects appeal to them and they think if they employ an overwhelming PR blitz they can implement their scheme. The professional appliance reviewers are complicit in their scheme.

Then, their are those that have no interest in the product, they simply want to "sell" you. They derive satisfaction from having "sold" you.

It is like the psychopathy of the rapist/murderer that derives satisfaction not from the sex but from the power.

The alleged benefits of MQA are irrelevant, getting over on you is what is important.

[charlesphoto]

2 hours ago, JoeWhip said:

Boy, that Infigo review! Holy Moly Batman and for the low low price of $55k.

No kidding. The ironic thing I find about Stereophile, is that I know of no writers, in any genre or medium, that could afford (flawed at that) $55k amps, let alone the auxiliary gear used to play it. Do they get paid like $100/word to spout their nonsense? 

[Archimago]

Wow. Quite the explosion of messages overnight!

 

Okay, let's perhaps close off this chapter with our troll as I see that he has removed the original 24/192 link that he put up on this YouTube video and replaced with another:

 

 

So, let's recap and summarize what he most likely did.

 

1. He took Demi Lovato's single "Still Have Me" presumably streamed off Tidal as MQA "Master" although I see no evidence of the typical MQA filters applied in any of the samples. Likely saved the output as a 24/192 file.

 

2. For the "FLAC" sections, he either spliced in or just converted the portions into mono, thus removing all the stereo soundstage. This is evident in the original file he linked to in the YouTube video. He took the original file off after discussions here showing him the issue (here and here).

 

Here's a link if you want to check for yourself that file he removed since it was still in my Downloads directory:

https://www.mediafire.com/file/ghnlrchoy89ycxf/Still_Have_Me-27_FLAC_mix.flac/file

 

3. He played this "doctored" file and recorded it to create that video you see above. Then added "FLAC" and "MQA" labels in the video obviously to highlight the portions that have collapsed stereo imaging (mono = "FLAC") and the portions he wants us to believe demonstrates MQA's superiority (retained stereo imaging = "MQA"). He dares ask us "which one sounds better?"!

 

4. He wants us to believe that apparently we need "$20k++" speakers to hear the difference. Yet in that video, we hear more of the effects from a poorly treated large space with obviously extended reverb that would overwhelm any putative "deblurring" MQA could have improved. He uses a PA playback system (jeez, I hope Alcons Audio isn't connected to this guy), and thinks that low-bitrate YouTube lossy audio (I see Opus is being used) is capable of demonstrating the "deblurring"!

 

Obviously, price does not directly imply high fidelity playback quality (but can correlate) and the effect of MQA can be experienced with much less expensive speakers + DAC combos; or just headphones + DAC. No, YouTube lossy encoding would obviously "blur" any significant temporal improvement from MQA (not that there is any demonstrated in the first place). [He never answered the question asked about his understanding of what "deblur" means. This is because he doesn't appreciate the concept.]

 

In summary:

It's obvious that @Fx Studio is dishonest given what he did (at the very least, removing the original file link from YouTube without explanation). I suspect he knows that converting portions to mono was also a dishonest act on his (I assume male) part; otherwise he's also extremely incompetent. I mean, seriously, if you want to play a hoax, at least do it better than this!

 

Like much of the "information" from MQA itself, this video appears to be fraudulent disinformation.

[garrardguy60]

Why are we indulging Lee Scoggins' little brother, who is annoying but not quite yet as annoying as Lee?

[Archimago]

1 hour ago, charlesphoto said:

No kidding. The ironic thing I find about Stereophile, is that I know of no writers, in any genre or medium, that could afford (flawed at that) $55k amps, let alone the auxiliary gear used to play it. Do they get paid like $100/word to spout their nonsense? 

 

That JVS is quite somethin'. I think the rationale goes a bit like this:

 

[Archimago]

9 minutes ago, garrardguy60 said:

Why are we indulging Lee Scoggins' little brother, who is annoying but not quite yet as annoying as Lee?

Cuz it's Friday September 1st, 2023 right before a long weekend. And given the way things are going with MQA, need to extract as much conflict as we can out of this extremely long-running thread before it all gets boring. 😉

[KeenObserver]

Watching trolls play can be amusing.

It's like gawking at a bad accident. You're drawn to it.

Or watching monkeys committing lewd acts at the zoo.

[maxijazz]

On 8/30/2023 at 12:34 PM, Fx Studio said:

there NDA's keep the cards close to their chest

That is single sufficient reason to boycott that shit.

 

 

[Currawong]

7 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

I have debunked the so called "debunkers" - by showing that MQA is the better format if played on PA ribbons. 

Where is your evidence - Golden Sound with his totally flawed so called test that certainly wasn't any kind of a test? - because that's the only thing I've seen so far.

 

It's funny that you say "do your own research" because there are dozens of posts in this thread, posted over years, done by multiple people, based upon research. 

Here are a select few, plus some links. I'm posting this before breakfast, so apologies for it being a bit messy and maybe not in perfect order. GoldenSound's videos about MQA was based on much this actual research and information. 

 

MQA smears in the time domain, as it uses leaky minimum phase filters. You know what a minimum phase filter is, don't you? If you don't understand, see how the minimum phase filter in the middle shifts the music in the time domain (the original signal is red. 

 

From an industry expert: 

 

Quote

“As for MQA compression, it has a tendency to time-shift transients to the nearest sample instead of rendering these transients with the proper timing. The effect is audible, and I do not like it. From a streaming bandwidth standpoint, MQA offers no advantages. There are lossless schemes that can achieve the same bit rate."

MQA's claims of multiple unfolds are false. There is only one unfold, then the filters with a poor time-domain response are used to up-sample the music. Here's an image of the output from a DXD master from 2L's test bench, showing the original, MQA, and unfolded MQA. Note that above 48 kHz, all you get is distortion -- actually high-frequency aliasing caused by the poor digital filter. The content above 92 kHz can be ignored, as 2L's ADC just produced high-frequency sigma/delta noise above that. Funnily enough, that shows that encoding the music as DXD on that particular ADC in the first place is pointless, but that's another matter.

 

About the above image:

On 3/9/2019 at 4:35 PM, FredericV said:

(1) look at the severe frequency errors starting at around 35 ~ 40k - and remember MQA can't encode any analog signals above 48 Khz, or in case of DXD, above 44.1 Khz, as it can the encode the equivalent 17/88.2, so it starts to make mistakes already below 44.1 Khz

 

And see also: 

 

Even MQA's own materials effectively show that it would require 32-bit files to do more than the first unfold: 
 

From: 

 

Here's another view of how MQA's leaky filters clearly distort the audio, in this case a -60db signal. This was verified soon after by John Atkinson a couple of pages later in the thread: 

 

 

 

MQA vs FLAC comparison: 

Quote

From the filter roll-off we can see that there's quite a bit less than 24-bit worth of information, amounting slightly less than 18-bit. Meaning about 108 dB SNR. Quite a lot of low level information visible.

 

Bruno Putzeys, in a 2017 FB post, on how from the start MQA's arguments contradicted themselves:

Quote

Bruno Putzeys

This isn't a prelude to suddenly becoming active on FB but I felt I had to share this.

Yesterday there was an AES session on mastering for high resolution (whatever that is) whose highlight was a talk about the state of the loudness war, why we're still fighting it and what the final arrival of on-by-default loudness normalisation on streaming services means for mastering. It also contained a two-pronged campaign piece for MQA. During it, every classical misconception and canard about digital audio was trotted out in an amazingly short time. Interaural timing resolution, check. Pictures showing staircase waveforms, check. That old chestnut about the ear beating the Fourier uncertainty (the acoustical equivalent of saying that human observers are able to beat Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), right there.

At the end of the talk I got up to ask a scathing question and spectacularly fumbled my attack*. So for those who were wondering what I was on about, here goes. A filtering operation is a convolution of two waveforms. One is the impulse response of the filter (aka the "kernel"), the other is the signal.

A word that high res proponents of any stripe love is "blurring". The convolution point of view shows that as the "kernel" blurs the signal, so the signal blurs the kernel. As Stuart's spectral plots showed, an audio signal is a much smoother waveform than the kernel so in reality guess who's really blurring whom. And if there's no spectral energy left above the noise floor at the frequency where the filter has ring tails, the ring tails are below the noise floor too.

A second question, which I didn't even get to ask, was about the impulse response of MQA's decimation and upsampling chain as it is shown in the slide presentation. MQA's take on those filters famously allows for aliasing, so how does one even define "the" impulse response of that signal chain when its actual shape depends on when exactly it happens relative to the sampling clock (it's not time invariant). I mentioned this to my friend Bob Katz who countered "but what if there isn't any aliasing" (meaning what if no signal is present in the region that folds down). Well yes, that's the saving grace. The signal filters the kernel rather than vice versa and the shape of the transition band doesn't matter if it is in a region where there is no signal.

These folk are trying to have their cake and eat it. Either aliasing doesn't matter because there is no signal in the transition band and then the precise shape of the transition band doesn't matter either (ie the ring tails have no conceivable manifestation) or the absence of ring tails is critical because there is signal in that region and then the aliasing will result in audible components that fly in the face of MQA's transparency claims.

Doesn't that just sound like the arguments DSD folks used to make? The requirement for 100kHz bandwidth was made based on the assumption that content above 20k had an audible impact whereas the supersonic noise was excused on the grounds that it wasn't audible. What gives?

Meanwhile I'm happy to do speakers. You wouldn't believe how much impact speakers have on replay fidelity.

________

* Oh hang on, actually I started by asking if besides speculations about neuroscience and physics they had actual controlled listening trials to back their story up. Bob Stuart replied that all listening tests so far were working experiences with engineers in their studios but that no scientific listening tests have been done so far. That doesn't surprise any of us cynics but it is an astonishing admission from the man himself. Mhm, I can just see the headlines. "No Scientific Tests Were Done, Says MQA Founder".

 

Jud summarised this well here: 

 

How can MQA correct for music which contains samples, often at lower resolution, that came through multiple ADCs? Answer: It's not possible. The idea that the processor was "detecting" the ADC used is BS.

 

As some musical instruments have high frequency spectra out to 100 kHz, the destruction of this during MQA encoding (since MQA cannot encode anything beyond 48 kHz) shows that it absolutely CANNOT reproduce music accurately, and that's before the time shifting is even taken into account. 

 

Quote

The fourth excerpt shows that by 55 kHz, the harmonics are vanishing. Note that, as seen in Figure 1(a), the trumpet is still 12 to 15 dB above the background at this frequency; so the energy seen at 55 kHz, though non-harmonic, is still trumpet sound.

 

Quote

Each musical instrument family — strings, winds, brass and percussion — has at least one member which produces energy to 40 kHz or above. Some of the spectra reach this work's measurement limit of 102.4 kHz.
       Harmonics of French horn can extend to above 90 kHz; trumpet, to above 80; violin and oboe, to above 40; and a cymbal crash shows no sign of running out of energy at 100 kHz. Also shown in this paper are samples from sibilant speech, claves, a drum rimshot, triangle, jangling keys, and piano.
       The proportion of energy above 20 kilohertz is low for most instruments; but for one trumpet sample it is 2%; for another, 0.5%; for claves, 3.8%; for a speech sibilant, 1.7%; and for the cymbal crash, 40%. The cymbal's energy shows no sign of stopping at the measurement limit, so its percentage may be much higher.

 

Artist approval was also BS. TIDAL and the labels certainly did NOT contact thousands of artists before encoding their tracks through a batch-process system. 

 

Bob Stuart wanted to censor the information in this forum.
From someone who is a friend of Bob Staurt: "The reality is MQA is a business venture bent on maximizing a financial return and not an audio enhancement technology."
FredericV's research into band splitting and compressing ultrasonics, which show the limitations, and impossibility of MQA's claims about compression. 
Spectral analysis of Patricia Barber's Clique album in different formats.


Stealing @crenca's summary for this: 

 

Quote

A summary of the debunked (that is to say, untrue) assertions of Bob Stuart and MQA Ltd. around MQA:

1. It is not lossless.
2. It actually doesn’t have the full dynamics of CD.
3. It has leaky filters that allow aliasing and imaging.
4. The provenance, authentication, etc. is simply a con job – dead artists rising to authenticate, massive batch processing of music, etc.
5. They claim to retroactively determine what gear was used to compensate for it when they do nothing of the sort.
6. The way that the high sample rates are a con completely past 96 khz and mostly even at 96 khz.
7. That it isn’t great at saving bandwidth as in fact 20 bit Flac could be smaller and of higher fidelity.
8. It is effectively DRM, specifically the “freemium” model of software Management of end user Digital Rights.
9. Bob Stuart even makes the bold claim that it is a “green” encoding!

 

[Fx Studio]

7 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

 

3. He played this "doctored" file and recorded it to create that video you see above. Then added "FLAC" and "MQA" labels in the video obviously to highlight the portions that have collapsed stereo imaging (mono = "FLAC") and the portions he wants us to believe demonstrates MQA's superiority (retained stereo imaging = "MQA"). He dares ask us "which one sounds better?"!

 

 

 

All the talk of the day, but when I post another version of the demo no one can answer which is better.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eh5gqnkmW8tcoI0u2O_EHl04FhIM1KAi/view?usp=sharing

 

And where are YOUR demos?  

Again, no one can produce any evidence - just talk.

 

All you have is Golden Sounds totally flawed "test".

GS should have gone into an MQA equipped studio and laid down a new track and asked for it to be output in MQA and FLAC then loaded both and compared them - that would have been a proper test. Instead he had no clue and didn't input any data for the ADC which is essential for a full studio MQA, and that's only one of many flaws.

 

To finish off though, I will predict one thing - MQA WILL BE AROUND A LOT LONGER THAN YOU GUYS ARE GOING TO BE....

 

💩 💉 ....⏱.... 🚑 ＝ 💀.… ⚰️   🏆       Bye Bye

[The Computer Audiophile]

20 minutes ago, Fx Studio said:

 

All the talk of the day, but when I post another version of the demo no one can answer which is better.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eh5gqnkmW8tcoI0u2O_EHl04FhIM1KAi/view?usp=sharing

 

And where are YOUR demos?  

Again, no one can produce any evidence - just talk.

 

All you have is Golden Sounds totally flawed "test".

GS should have gone into an MQA equipped studio and laid down a new track and asked for it to be output in MQA and FLAC then loaded both and compared them - that would have been a proper test. Instead he had no clue and didn't input any data for the ADC which is essential for a full studio MQA, and that's only one of many flaws.

 

To finish off though, I will predict one thing - MQA WILL BE AROUND A LOT LONGER THAN YOU GUYS ARE GOING TO BE....

 

💩 💉 ....⏱.... 🚑 ＝ 💀.… ⚰️   🏆       Bye Bye

Sincerely, The Onion. 

[charlesphoto]

Borderline... or somebody invested too heavily and is now losing it. 

 

We all heard it. i could hear it on my decidedly low end Sonore/Naim/Audio Physic system that I hobbled together for a paltry $8k. It sounded HiFi!! and all sparkly, but became really fatiguing after awhile. I even had a free sub to Tidal and switched back to Qobuz. 

 

[deneb]

4 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

To finish off though, I will predict one thing - MQA WILL BE AROUND A LOT LONGER THAN YOU GUYS ARE GOING TO BE.

If this really means you finish this off, we are all happy 😊

It's a trade-off for sure, but nothing is perfect in life..... except maybe mqa of course, especially in the mind of the chosen ones....😂

 

[FredericV]

Your regular MQA shill:

Ignores any evidence, any research posted: CHECK
Uses GO LISTEN argument: CHECK
Repeats you have no evidence: CHECK

Wasting any more time on this troll is pointless. The shelf life of MQA has expired.

The past days the topic was a lot of comedy.

What have we learned from the latest shill;
 

Quote

We learned from this shill that Grammy-nominated producer/engineers with real studio monitors (such as our Amphion One 18's / Two 18's) cannot hear time smear, since their speakers are not good enough 😐. PA is much better 😏

You need an expensive PA system with matching light show which no audiophile will ever want, to hear the effects of MQA, thereby making MQA completely pointless ;)

We conclude that the shelf life of MQA has expired since no audiophile is going to install a PA with light show .... .
 

 

 

[Hifi Bob]

5 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

All the talk of the day, but when I post another version of the demo no one can answer which is better.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eh5gqnkmW8tcoI0u2O_EHl04FhIM1KAi/view?usp=sharing

 

 

Fx, why should it be down to someone such as yourself to create a convincing demonstration of MQA’s virtues?

Why did MQA never do this themselves...?

[firedog]

20 minutes ago, Hifi Bob said:

Fx, why should it be down to someone such as yourself to create a convincing demonstration of MQA’s virtues?

Why did MQA never do this themselves...?

Don't feed the troll. His calls for "do the research" tell you all you need to know. He is one of the modern know nothings who goes to dubious internet sites, gets false info, and then proclaims himself an expert, and rejects reliable sources. We have them in politics, science, and audio - in all areas, really. 

It's pointless to discuss anything with these types. Their "facts" will always win. 

[lamode]

20 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

I have debunked the so called "debunkers" - by showing that MQA is the better format

 

Just go away, troll!

[JoeWhip]

I am waiting for Fx to declare he is smarter than Einstein. I have no doubt he is a flat earther too. I know of one in Thailand. 

[firedog]

3 hours ago, JoeWhip said:

I am waiting for Fx to declare he is smarter than Einstein. I have no doubt he is a flat earther too. I know of one in Thailand. 

What, you don't know the earth is flat? DO THE RESEARCH and you will see the truth.

[Allan F]

15 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

To finish off though, I will predict one thing - MQA WILL BE AROUND A LOT LONGER THAN YOU GUYS ARE GOING TO BE..

 

When you have no answer to the mountains of objective evidence to the contrary, I suppose some people have to resort to shouting nonsense try to attract attention. Goodbye and good riddance!

[The Computer Audiophile]

15 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

MQA WILL BE AROUND A LOT LONGER THAN YOU GUYS

We best get our affairs in order because MQA has been given its last rites. 

[loop7]

I'm curious about one year and five years from now. 

 

Will reviewers still play stored MQA files even though those tracks me be unavailable to most listeners?

[The Computer Audiophile]

14 minutes ago, loop7 said:

I'm curious about one year and five years from now. 

 

Will reviewers still play stored MQA files even though those tracks me be unavailable to most listeners?

Those who talked about it as the greatest thing ever, will create a market for old mQa products and pirated recordings and endlessly talk about how great it was during the salad days of mQa. 

[JoeWhip]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

We best get our affairs in order because MQA has been given its last rites. 

Could it be that MQA finally brought about the Rapture? 😎