MQA is Vaporware

[kana813]

28 minutes ago, wdw said:

funny!  it appears the MQA folks are now just ignoring you/us as they are now at third base.  The strategy is so suspect...no reviews nor direct A/B comparisons for the unwashed but extravagant treatment for the audio glitterati.  I have respect for the opinions of JA, of Stereophile, and these on MQA are overwhelmingly positive...perhaps when we have a chance to hear this stuff in a controlled environment we may share his outlook but the marketing strategies of MQA have thwarted my attempts.

 

Here a listening test suggested by Gordon Rankin:

 

"Go to Amazon and buy Rebecca Pigeon's MQA cd. Rip it play it back with something that does not support MQA like iTunes or whatever. Then play it back with Audirvana or something else that supports MQA and the result is 24/176.4 from a 16/44.1 track. Then compare that to maybe the HD Tracks downloads at 24/96, 24/88.2 (I think the closest sounding to the MQA), or Bob Katz version at 24/176.4."

Of course you'll need to borrow a MQA DAC.

 

[miguelito]

3 hours ago, Charles Hansen said:

 

Hello Miguelito,

 

I can't disagree with anyone's opinion of the sound quality of MQA - "better" is in the ear of the listener. However I would prefer to purchase a DAC with better sounding digital filters than to buy a new DAC plus pay a monthly rental fee so that only a small percentage of the music from one source (and nothing that I actually own) sounds "better".

 

MQA is many things. In my fairly limited experience, it seems that the better quality from MQA content is the result of careful sourcing of a high quality master more than anything related to the technology. Consider the Joni Mitchel releases: the MQA versions sound pretty good, better than the redbook versions for sure, just as good as the 24/192 versions. In some other cases there is no improvement. Plus you get most of the impact from the first unfold, which can be used with all DACs. A $300 Meridian Explorer2 doing full MQA decoding will not sound as good as, say, a first unfold into a $20k DAC.

 

3 hours ago, Charles Hansen said:

 

As far as $240 per year being called "fairly minimal" is again a matter of opinion. One could purchase 10 or 20 high-res downloads, or 60 used CDs, or some combination of the two for the same amount and own them forever. Five CDs a month is a lot of new music to assimilate. Even 1 or 2 high-res downloads will keep many busy. One can listen to all the new music one wants at Spotify to figure out what is worth buying.

 

Where is the $240 coming from? $20 for TIDAL for a year?

 

[wdw]

Just now, Rt66indierock said:

 

Again where is the revenue stream going to MQA Ltd? At some point you have to stop burning cash. In 2016 MQA Ltd's cash burn rate was about $360,000 a month. That can't go on forever.

 

Dunno...so odd how this is playing out...one one hand, MQA is just wonderful, the other B. Stuart is close to a sociopath.

[wdw]

3 minutes ago, kana813 said:

"Go to Amazon and buy Rebecca Pigeon's MQA cd. Rip it play it back with something that does not support MQA like iTunes or whatever. Then play it back with Audirvana or something else that supports MQA and the result is 24/176.4 from a 16/44.1 track. Then compare that to maybe the HD Tracks downloads at 24/96, 24/88.2 (I think the closest sounding to the MQA), or Bob Katz version at 24/176.4."

 

 

Of course you'll need to borrow an MQA DAC

 

Jokin' right?  

[kana813]

30 minutes ago, wdw said:

 

Jokin' right?  

No.

Are you afraid to listen?

[tobes]

25 minutes ago, wdw said:

Go to Amazon and buy Rebecca Pigeon's MQA cd

 

How much more can MQA throw away and still claim to be able to recover the sound of the original master?

I mean if the 24/44 MQA version of a 24/176 file is "Master Quality Authenticated" - how can a 16/44 MQA file be likewise?....or even better than a standard CD?

[wdw]

9 minutes ago, kana813 said:

No.

Are you afraid to listen?

 

Not at all...but you are suggesting I buy a CD from an artist i have little interest in, then an HDTracks download of the same music to compare the bonafides of a commercial product...so, you are joking!

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, wdw said:

 

Dunno...so odd how this is playing out...one one hand, MQA is just wonderful, the other B. Stuart is close to a sociopath.

 

In my case MQA doesn't work for artists, studios and there isn't enough music to matter. I've met Bob Stuart and if he wanted to he could send me the six albums from an earlier post that are available in Europe but not in the United States. He has my contact information and his people monitor this thread. 

[rickca]

17 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

his people monitor this thread

The MQA thought police reputation management folks?

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I never thought I'd see DSD on Ayre DACs after reading his rants about it, but $omething changed his mind :~)

 

Hi Chris,

 

No need for snide insults. As one of the developers of DSD at Philips (Bruno Putzeys) said, "DSD is a phenomenally clumsy recording format". There are virtually zero "true" DSD discs in the world, as to even perform a volume adjustment requires that the digital audio signal be converted to PCM, and then remodulated back into DSD. Every time that modulation to DSD is performed, additional noise is added to the signal. I believe that it only requires 6 conversions before the noise is greater than the signal, even in the audio band.

 

The only good thing that came from DSD was confirmation that digital filters caused sonic problems - something Bob Stuart claims to have discovered recently. Here is a link from an article from 4 or 5 years ago discussing the entire debacle PCM vs DSD:

 

http://www.ayre.com/insights_dsdvspcm.htm

 

Included are links to high-resolution recordings made in both PCM and DSD that allow listeners to judge for themselves if one format is "inherently superior" to the other. The only reason that some people prefer the sound of DSD is due to the digital filtering employed (or lack thereof). Rather than invent a completely new format that required completely new hardware everywhere - in the recording studios, mixing studios, mastering studios, and home, car, and portable players, wouldn't it just make more sense to make some PCM filters that didn't sound bad? That is something that both Bob Stuart and I agree on, although Bob wants to collect a royalty at every step of the playback chain for the "privilege" of using his "super secret, special sauce" filters.

 

The reason Ayre added DSD playback capability was that I was one of a group of high-end digital audio engineers that created the DoP standard (DSD over PCM), as there is still to this day no other standard way to transmit DSD signals from one device to another (at least in the consumer market - there is a standard in the pro market but only a few dozen DSD mixing consoles - The Sonoma - were ever made). Internally the Sonoma used a PCM format at the DSD sample rate of 2.822MHz, operating at a bit depth of 8 - no longer DSD,  but instead PCM and therefore requiring a noise-adding conversion back to DSD - one pass through is pretty much the limit for this - you have just once chance to get it exactly right, or else you have to start from scratch. Which is why it is "phenomenally clumsy" as a recording format.

 

The reason Ayre added DSD playback capability to its USB DACs is simply because we could. Prior to that time, there was no way to do so. If somebody has a collection of 100 SACDs, and figured out how to rip them to a hard drive, or purchased DSD download files, it would be silly not to be able to play them, especially when we could do so at no extra cost whatsoever. No new hardware, no new licensing, no new royalty, no new contractual obligations, no nothing. Just some new firmware and a group to create a standard which has been widely adopted.

 

Even then it only made sense if there was any real demand for it. Regarding demand, please remember that  CONTENT IS KING. Having 100 titles on any bizarre, unique format does not justify anybody spending time or money on it. I could invent a new format tomorrow - vinyl records running at 100 rpm for the ultimate in fidelity. They would have to be 24" in diameter to offer decent playing time. Does that then mean that every single turntable and  tonearm manufacturer in the world should instantly start making 100 rpm turntables with 24" platters and 18" tonearms?

 

No.

 

They would be crazy to do so unless there were many tens of thousands of customers who wanted it. And the customers would only want it if there were at least 10,000 titles available and they were affordably priced. Even then they would probably not want to deal with a 2' disc just to hear the ultimate in sound quality. The market has already shown that there are only an extremely limited number of audiophiles that will pay extra for 45 rpm 12" vinyl discs that don't even require any new hardware!

 

MQA is developing a new "format" that is about as relevant and desirable as my proposed 100 rpm vinyl format.

 

Cheers,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, miguelito said:

 

MQA is many things. In my fairly limited experience, it seems that the better quality from MQA content is the result of careful sourcing of a high quality master more than anything related to the technology. Consider the Joni Mitchel releases: the MQA versions sound pretty good, better than the redbook versions for sure, just as good as the 24/192 versions. In some other cases there is no improvement. Plus you get most of the impact from the first unfold, which can be used with all DACs. A $300 Meridian Explorer2 doing full MQA decoding will not sound as good as, say, a first unfold into a $20k DAC.

 

Hi Miguelito,

So why not just stream a 96/16 FLAC version? It would sound better than the MQA, be absolutely free, and require both less storage space and less streaming bandwidth. No need for licenses, royalties, NDAs, contracts, gobbledy-gook marketing talk.

 

Or if you are buying it, why not get the original 192/24 transfer from the analog tape instead of a lossy version that is only 96/17 at best, plus requires special equipment to "decode" it?

 

1 hour ago, miguelito said:

Where is the $240 coming from? $20 for TIDAL for a year?

 

Is there some other source for MQA?

 

Thanks,

Charles Hansen

[esldude]

49 minutes ago, tobes said:

 

How much more can MQA throw away and still claim to be able to recover the sound of the original master?

I mean if the 24/44 MQA version of a 24/176 file is "Master Quality Authenticated" - how can a 16/44 MQA file be likewise?....or even better than a standard CD?

Future MQA upgrades will allow Scami-Origami-Multi-Euphonic-Multi-Dimensional-Folding.  This will allow a 4kbps stream to unfold without audible loss into a 768 khz/32 bit PCM or 44.8 mhz DSD playback condition.

 

MQA  SOME-MDF

[rickca]

26 minutes ago, Charles Hansen said:

Even then it only made sense if there was any real demand for it. Regarding demand, please remember that  CONTENT IS KING.

What about the many CA members who enjoy using HQPlayer or A+ to convert redbook to DSD512?  Isn't that legitimate demand?  I've been hearing this message of 'nobody wants it' from Ayre for a long time.

 

 

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, wdw said:

Dunno...so odd how this is playing out...one one hand, MQA is just wonderful, the other B. Stuart is close to a sociopath.

 

Hi WDW,

 

I think this one was covered earlier in the thread:  https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/30381-mqa-is-vaporware/?page=125&tab=comments#comment-691826

 

Cheers,

Charles Hansen

[The Computer Audiophile]

That's a very long winded, circuitous, self congratulating way to justify why you enabled a format you derided for many years. 

 

You run a business, not a charity. Same with me. I understand why some decisions are made, and I don't judge. I just hope, for your sake, you haven't made Ayre's possible future support of MQA so complicated that it will harm your business. 

[wdw]

2 minutes ago, Charles Hansen said:

 

Hi WDW,

 

I think this one was covered earlier in the thread:  https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/30381-mqa-is-vaporware/?page=125&tab=comments#comment-691826

 

Cheers,

Charles Hansen

 

Hello Charles,

Always look forward to your comments and observations (love your gear) but your willingness to slang Stuart, as an individual, is interesting but also questionable.  

Is he truly such a duplicitous rascal?  

best

 

. 

[Charles Hansen]

21 minutes ago, rickca said:

What about the many CA members who enjoy using HQPlayer or A+ to convert redbook to DSD512?  Isn't that legitimate demand? 

 

HI Ricka,

 

These days it is trivially easy to "convert" 44/16 PCM to  DSD anything. It's all done with digital filtering. The 7th-order noise shaper used in the original DSD format had a unique sonic signature that many liked and that many disliked. It made the high-frequencies of all DSD recordings sound very similar - "polite", "delicate", or however you want to describe that coloration.

 

People who liked classical tended to like it. People who liked hard rock tended to dislike it.

 

The thing to remember is that there are multiple digital filters in the chain between the recording microphone and the playback loudspeaker. When playing back a digital file, the first filter in the chain has the greatest sonic impact. If people want to play with different colorations  by selecting from various digital filter options, there is nobody to stop them (unless they are trying to play an MQA file, in which case MQA will mandate the playback filter).

 

I certainly wouldn't recommend it myself. I spent a lot of time listening to various digital filters, just by changing the coefficients in the hardware. When you use an external digital filter (such as found in HQPlayer), you may or may not find something that you prefer, but in my experience, the simple act of sending a digital audio signal to a computer is an iffy proposition at best. Why do uncompressed files (eg, WAV and AIFF) sound any different from losslessly compressed files (eg, FLAC and ALAC)?

 

I have a master recording made of the best grand piano in all of Berlin played by a master pianist in the Emil Berliner Studios (a subsidiary of Deutsche Gramophon). The signal path was Sennheiser condenser microphones to microphone preamp to Ayre QA-9 A/D converter. It sounded wonderful. When I went to edit the file into individual tracks using Adobe Audition, doing nothing besides removing talk and noises between pieces, the sound quality diminished noticeably. To even get it close to the original master file (everything was still bit-perfect, remember), I had to send it to a mastering engineer who used a special software package known to sound better than the ubiquitous ProTools.  What I got back wasn't quite as good as the original, but it was so close that the difference wasn't worth worrying about.

 

I would personally be very reluctant to do digital filtering in a computer program. It's already turning out that its very difficult to make even the best implementations of computer audio sound as good as physical disc. But the computer has obvious convenience advantages, so I don't expect it (or this site) to disappear any time soon. Instead, there are just more challenges to figure out what is causing the degradation, and what is the best way to solve the problem.

 

On the other hand, if you are already living with the completely unexpected tweakiness of computer audio, you may find it "fun" to create your own sounds with different digital filters, EQ, room correction, speaker correction, or whatever. The philosophy at Ayre is to do all of that for you, so that you don't have to. The last thing I want to make is a product with a hundred different settings so that the customer can "customize" it to match their preference. How much of your time do you want to spend fiddling with your equipment versus actually listening to music? That why no Ayre product has an absolute polarity switch or front-panel selection of multiple different things that can affect sound quality - such as digital filters. Older Ayre DACs had a switch on the rear, strictly for the curious and the "measurement brigade". I don't know of anyone who actually preferred listening to music with the "Measure" filter over the "Listen" (now called "Music" in the setup menu of the QX-5).

 

Sometimes we will add things to allow for matching with a wider variety of external products. For example all Ayre preamps can have the gain adjusted if someone has a very unusual system (eg horn speakers and a high-input sensitivity amp, or the converse). We don't want to add the complexity and expense of that type of thing to every customer when perhaps one in a thousand would ever need it.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

 

[firedog]

HI Charles-

Appreciate your last post.

When using a Mytek (ESS) DAC, I found that upsampling PCM to DSD sounded superior to even hires PCM playback. I chalked that up to the  DAC doing fewer iterations of upsampling and conversion before filtering for the analog output. 

 

Now my system is a native PCM one with with it's own ASRC setup of upsampling and filtering. It converts 
DSD to PCM along the way.  I find that letting it do it's  thing sounds best - so I usually send it everything in "native" format.

 

However, I do have some recordings (mostly early digital) that sound to me a little harsh. I find that converting them to DSD (DSD 128 with 7th order filter) before sending them to the DAC does exactly what you described - it "softens" or "rounds" the sound in a way that even  upsampling to hi-res PCM doesn't. For those recordings, I like the coloration involved.  So having that option in software is quite useful. 

[Charles Hansen]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

That's a very long winded, circuitous, self congratulating way to justify why you enabled a format you derided for many years.

 

I don't understand. Is there something in that article that you disagree with or think is incorrect?

 

DSD is completely silly as a recording format. That is why it has failed in the marketplace. All of the "marketing mumbo-jumbo" about DSD's alleged advantages turned out in the end to be simply one thing - less audibly offensive filters. The fact remains that over 99.9% of all "DSD" recordings were in PCM format at some point in their production. Sony is the one who tried to make everyone believe that PCM was "evil" and "bad", while DSD was "pure" and "good" - simply because with a 1-bit system, there can be no non-linearities in converters - which was a huge lie and they knew it was a lie. It was years before they were busted and admitted at an AES conference in LA that the Sonoma mixing console ran PCM at 8 bits.

 

The real reason Sony and Philips even developed DSD is that they could patent it and collect royalties. When it failed, they gave it away - they didn't make anybody have to wait for the patents to expire. For that they should be commended. But show me the last time a Sony product supported DSD. Maybe their new $3000 portable player does, I don't know.

 

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

You run a business, not a charity. Same with me. I understand why some decisions are made, and I don't judge. I just hope, for your sake, you haven't made Ayre's possible future support of MQA so complicated that it will harm your business. 

 

Let's just put it this way.. Money is not #1 in my life. How about you? I'm sure you've heard the old joke about the rich gambler in Las Vegas. They even made a movie about it.

[Charles Hansen]

2 hours ago, wdw said:

Is he truly such a duplicitous rascal?

 

Hi WDW,

 

Clearly "duplicitous rascal" is an objective opinion. I prefer to stick with verifiable facts. To my knowledge he has willfully misled people at least twice in the past, and continues to do so with his claims for MQA. (Aliasing = "upwards rendering"? If that is not misleading, I don't know what is.) Here is some of Mr. Stuart's history:

 

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/critics/messages/8/87847.html

 

You can read the posts below that one to learn of Mr. Stuart's behavior in the early '70s.

 

And here is more factual information, from the '80 through the '90s, and up to the current date:

 

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/34750-another-major-look-at-mqa-by-another-pro/?page=23&tab=comments#comment-712977

 

NB: A few days after this was published, John Robert Stuart and Eleanor Burgess Taylor Stuart both resigned their positions from Meridian's Board of Directors.

 

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/02710631/filing-history

 

It's all a matter of public record. What do you think of this type of behavior? Would you trust everything he says?

[Don Hills]

2 hours ago, Charles Hansen said:

... Why do uncompressed files (eg, WAV and AIFF) sound any different from losslessly compressed files (eg, FLAC and ALAC)?...

 

Shhh. Alex (Sandyk) is back, he might hear you.

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

HI Charles-

Appreciate your last post.

When using a Mytek (ESS) DAC, I found that upsampling PCM to DSD sounded superior to even hires PCM playback. I chalked that up to the  DAC doing fewer iterations of upsampling and conversion before filtering for the analog output. 

 

Now my system is a native PCM one with with it's own ASRC setup of upsampling and filtering. It converts 
DSD to PCM along the way.  I find that letting it do it's  thing sounds best - so I usually send it everything in "native" format.

 

However, I do have some recordings (mostly early digital) that sound to me a little harsh. I find that converting them to DSD (DSD 128 with 7th order filter) before sending them to the DAC does exactly what you described - it "softens" or "rounds" the sound in a way that even  upsampling to hi-res PCM doesn't. For those recordings, I like the coloration involved.  So having that option in software is quite useful. 

 

Hi Firedog,

 

It's all too easy to make generalizations that turn out to only be true for specific circumstances. (I speak from experience.) Your first example is actually very much like your second example, in that Mytek uses the ESS DAC chip in its "stock" form, which includes an ASRC (called a "jitter eliminator" by ESS). Without that vital piece of knowledge, your speculations about "fewer iterations of upsampling and conversion" were not accurate.

 

Without knowing more about your current DAC I cannot comment. (The only one that comes to mind that works like that are the Benchmark products.)

 

As far as "system matching", I believe it is the wrong approach, especially in the long run. Let's say that you have a pair of loudspeakers that are on the "dull" side. One easy "solution" would be to install some "bright" speaker cables. And you may be perfectly happy with such a situation. In my experience, it is only a matter of time before I hear two distinct colorations instead of the one I had before. Two wrongs don't make a right (although three lefts do...). In the long run I think you will be happier to purchase some better speakers than try to "fix" the old ones with sonic band-aids. Much of the problem is knowing where to begin. Almost every system I've heard in my life suffered from obvious colorations - once I had enough experience to identify them and their source. The result is that I've heard some systems that sound absolutely amazing, despite being essentially built on a house of cards of various colorations. The give-away is that systems like this can sound phenomenal with certain recordings or even certain genres of music. But then they fall apart with other music.

 

Think about a a vintage Quad system - all-tube preamp, all-tube power amp, and a pair of Quad ESL-57 speakers. I'm sure it would sound gorgeous when playing a string quartet or even a harp concerto. But try playing some Led Zeppelin and tell me if you still think it is awesome. The hardest thing to do is put together a system that sounds musically enjoyable with any recording (even "bad" ones) of any genre of music. And in my opinion that is the ultimate goal - to be able to put on anything at all, press "play" and get lost in the music. YMMV.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[mcgillroy]

Charlie,

 

this might be slightly off topic but the relation of sonic signatures and genre preferences + technological standards at a given moment in time could use some enlightenement.

 

I always wonder for example about men with 300b’s or about the DSD-camp.

 

There seems to be quite a close and perhaps deepening correlation between gear & genre preferences.

 

I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on that and if you think MQA factored that in.

 

thx!

 

[Jud]

22 minutes ago, mcgillroy said:

about the DSD-camp

 

As Charles says, it’s helpful to know what’s actually going on in your system.  The vast majority of DACs internally use sigma-delta modulation on the bitstream.  DSD is a specific form of sigma-delta modulated bitstream.  So it’s just another one of those instances, like upsampling, where you’re doing something outside the DAC that the DAC would otherwise do (or something very similar) on its own.

[mansr]

5 hours ago, Charles Hansen said:

I would personally be very reluctant to do digital filtering in a computer program.

How else would you do it? Using pen and paper?