MQA is Vaporware

[mansr]

31 minutes ago, Fokus said:

Surely the folded upper band data are at least scrambled into pseudo-noise and probably encrypted...

Yes, it's xor'd with a pseudorandom sequence.

[Samuel T Cogley]

22 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

I've never been able to find a digital version of this that doesn't suffer from a high level of tape hiss.

 

Perhaps this is a fringe opinion, but I've always believed the existence of tape hiss on a digital transfer was a good sign that the digital restoration didn't overdo it on the noise reduction.  In other words, tape hiss = fidelity.

 

In the 2000s, too many remasters had way too liberal amounts of NoNOISE applied, which tended to suck the life out of the music.

[PeterSt]

Ha !

[witchdoctor]

2 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Perhaps this is a fringe opinion, but I've always believed the existence of tape hiss on a digital transfer was a good sign that the digital restoration didn't overdo it on the noise reduction.  In other words, tape hiss = fidelity.

 

In the 2000s, too many remasters had way too liberal amounts of NoNOISE applied, which tended to suck the life out of the music.

Agreed, it was like the old dolby noise reduction on cassette tape players, it reduced the hiss but muffled the playback as well

[Speed Racer]

8 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

Agreed, it was like the old dolby noise reduction on cassette tape players, it reduced the hiss but muffled the playback as well

 

Wow.

 

The way Dolby B works does not muffle the playback. Dolby encoded tapes had the tape hiss frequencies recorded about 9dB louder than normal. Then, when played back with Dolby B on on the tape player, those frequencies were played 9dB quieter than normal. The net effect was lowering tape hiss by about 9dB.

 

But you knew that, right?  

[Samuel T Cogley]

In my experience, Dolby B seldom delivered on its promises.  Mass produced, pre-recorded tapes were dubbed at high speed, which typically created a treble starved cassette (there are technical reasons for this).  Add some Dolby B to the mix, and you would indeed get what people in the 70s used to call "muffled" sound.

 

On a three head cassette deck (where the gap in the record and playback heads was optimized), at home, good results could be had with Dolby B until you played that tape somewhere else.  Unless the next cassette playback device had a head alignment that was very close to your home deck, engaging Dolby B could once again "muffle" playback.

 

So unless A) you recorded the tape yourself on a high quality deck and B), you played it back on another high quality deck and C), both decks were aligned accurately, you rarely engaged the Dolby B circuit unless you wanted "muffled" playback.  Ironically, many people I knew (me too) engaged Dolby B when recording because it boosted high frequencies, making a tape that had better overall treble response (but with full knowledge that an audiophile anathema had been created ).

 

Advances like Type II (a.k.a., "CrO2") and Type IV (a.k.a., "metal") tape and Dolby C and S improved the cassette experience, but in the end, the tech mostly died when CDs rose in popularity.

[witchdoctor]

48 minutes ago, Speed Racer said:

 

Wow.

 

The way Dolby B works does not muffle the playback. Dolby encoded tapes had the tape hiss frequencies recorded about 9dB louder than normal. Then, when played back with Dolby B on on the tape player, those frequencies were played 9dB quieter than normal. The net effect was lowering tape hiss by about 9dB.

 

But you knew that, right?  

Uhhh, I think that was like in the nineties? My cassette player had a button it for "dolby", I didn't use encoded tapes, I had no idea how it worked, I just knew I didn't like the dolby button and preferred some hiss.

I still have some cassettes but no player.

 

[Speed Racer]

26 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

In my experience, Dolby B seldom delivered on its promises.  Mass produced, pre-recorded tapes were dubbed at high speed, which typically created a treble starved cassette (there are technical reasons for this).  Add some Dolby B to the mix, and you would indeed get what people in the 70s used to call "muffled" sound.

 

On a three head cassette deck (where the gap in the record and playback heads was optimized), at home, good results could be had with Dolby B until you played that tape somewhere else.  Unless the next cassette playback device had a head alignment that was very close to your home deck, engaging Dolby B could once again "muffle" playback.

 

So unless A) you recorded the tape yourself on a high quality deck and B), you played it back on another high quality deck and C), both decks were aligned accurately, you rarely engaged the Dolby B circuit unless you wanted "muffled" playback.  Ironically, many people I knew (me too) engaged Dolby B when recording because it boosted high frequencies, making a tape that had better overall treble response (but with full knowledge that an audiophile anathema had been created ).

 

Advances like Type II (a.k.a., "CrO2") and Type IV (a.k.a., "metal") tape and Dolby C and S improved the cassette experience, but in the end, the tech mostly died when CDs rose in popularity.

 

Muffled sound when played on decks that didn't have Dolby B. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as bad as you make it out to be.

[realhifi]

Thank god we moved on from cassettes eh?  Now we have streaming MQA! 

[Samuel T Cogley]

15 minutes ago, Speed Racer said:

 

Muffled sound when played on decks that didn't have Dolby B. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as bad as you make it out to be.

 

Dolby B cut treble when engaged.

[Speed Racer]

Just now, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Dolby B cut treble when engaged.

 

Of course it did. That was on purpose as those same treble frequencies were boosted on the Dolby B encoded tapes....

[Samuel T Cogley]

2 minutes ago, Speed Racer said:

 

Of course it did. That was on purpose as those same treble frequencies were boosted on the Dolby B encoded tapes....

 

I unabashedly loved cassettes back in the day.  And I didn't even have the vaunted Nakamichi Dragon.  But in the 70s, Dolby B was kind of a joke.  I used to make kick ass tapes, but only one friend, with an Alpine car deck, appreciated the quality of my tapes.  In the days of "power boosters" and Jensen 6x9 "coaxial" speakers, the Dolby button typically made the treble vanish.

[Speed Racer]

1 minute ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

I unabashedly loved cassettes back in the day.  And I didn't even have the vaunted Nakamichi Dragon.  But in the 70s, Dolby B was kind of a joke.  I used to make kick ass tapes, but only one friend, with an Alpine car deck, appreciated the quality of my tapes.  In the days of "power boosters" and Jensen 6x9 "coaxial" speakers, the Dolby button typically made the treble vanish.

 

Of course it did. It lowered the output in a certain treble range by 9dB. I found tape hiss noise reduction useless in a car anyway since ambient noise was just as big a problem.

[lucretius]

3 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Perhaps this is a fringe opinion, but I've always believed the existence of tape hiss on a digital transfer was a good sign that the digital restoration didn't overdo it on the noise reduction.  In other words, tape hiss = fidelity.

 

In the 2000s, too many remasters had way too liberal amounts of NoNOISE applied, which tended to suck the life out of the music.

 

That's one way to look at it.  It seems I had less tape hiss from cassettes -- but then I used whatever Dolby I had on my deck.

[fung0]

(This thread lately seems to be suffering from a rash of posters who insist on being deliberately obtuse and repetitive, as if that were clever somehow. I remind the many intelligent posters that replying to such trollish posts - in any way whatsoever - is always counterproductive. Of course, it's your blood pressure, and your time to waste...)

 

Samuel T Cogley, you're quite right: I'd finally managed to blot it out of my mind, but now it comes back to me what a hideous failure Dolby was. You'd start off with a new deck and high hopes, and you'd kid yourself for a while. But when you went back and listened to your carefully-recorded tapes, the results were painfully disappointing. Either Dolby wasn't selective enough with its frequency range, or there was simply too much musical information in the hiss range. (I tended to favor the latter theory, but it really didn't matter: Dolby sucked, either way.)

 

The more avid the audiophile, the quicker the Dolby was disabled. At one point, I was slammed to the mat for offering Dolby-encoded tapes in a live-concert trade. The recipient was horrified, and quickly set me straight: the tape-trading community had discovered early on that Dolby was literally worse than useless.

 

A related, and equally painful memory... That trading community, hundreds of thousands strong, was eagerly awaiting DAT as a replacement for cassette. But after fighting so hard for our VCR rights, Sony torpedoed digital audio tape by building in DRM. That experience is one big reason I now flee at top speed whenever DRM shows its ugly head - particularly when attached to a whole new media format.

[witchdoctor]

2 hours ago, realhifi said:

Thank god we moved on from cassettes eh?  Now we have streaming MQA! 

+1  

[lucretius]

2 hours ago, fung0 said:

The more avid the audiophile, the quicker the Dolby was disabled.

 

Ahh, the old debate "Dolby ? or not Dolby ? That is the noise reduction". I understand that many analog master tapes were done with Dolby or some other noise reduction.

[PeterSt]

4 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

I unabashedly loved cassettes back in the day.  And I didn't even have the vaunted Nakamichi Dragon.

 

I still have two of these :

 

 

(and 600 or so cassettes)

Nakamichi 700 Tri-tracer.

I think it was rated Pro gear back in the days (and this guy had the first when he was 11 or 12)

 

I recorded with Dolbly-B and played back without it. I also increased the tension of the spring/cushion that pressed the tape to the head, of each cassete.

 

[PeterSt]

3 hours ago, fung0 said:

That trading community, hundreds of thousands strong, was eagerly awaiting DAT as a replacement for cassette. But after fighting so hard for our VCR rights, Sony torpedoed digital audio tape by building in DRM.

 

... And I also have 500 DAT tapes ... still waiting to be ripped (will never happen I guess).

That "DRM" (which was not called like that) was an electronic feature which could be tampered with. At least by decks could hence I took care to buy the right ones for the job.

 

I recall DAT that as my first endeavors of not understanding digital, because digital was digital and still DAT sounded worse than CD. But this was loooong ago.

[Charles Hansen]

2 hours ago, fung0 said:

This thread lately seems to be suffering from a rash of posters who insist on being deliberately obtuse and repetitive, as if that were clever somehow.

 

Yes, that is because the MQA-organized group has directed its trolls to distract from all threads about MQA - much like happens in political races where there are "astro-turf" (fake grassroots) campaigns designed to deceive the public.

 

MQA has set up a private (by invitation only) Facebook group whose purpose is to promote MQA and includes Bob Stuart, Morten Lindberg (2L), Mike Jbara (left Warner's to join MQA as CEO), Steven Stone (TAS), Pål Bråtelund (Tidal CTO), Hans Beekhuyzen (Dutch reviewer), Frank Vermeylen (MSB Technologies), Guido Tent (Tentlabs), Jamie Howarth (Plangent Processes), Michael Bovaird (Florida retailer and runs " The Audio Shark" website), Lee Scoggins (reviewer for Part-Time Audiophile), Jan de Jeu (Dutch reviewer), Rene van Es (Dutch reviewer), Theo Wubbolts (former Dutch reviewer, now a distributor), Bjorn Mattijsen (Dutch retailer), Garmt Vanderzel (Dutch retailer), Ferry Kremers(Dutch retailer), Peter Chattelin(Dutch retailer), Charles Rievone (Philippines retailer), Hessel Veldmen (Dutch retailer), Jaap Veenstra (Dutch retailer), Jan Hart (AudioQuest NL), Rudo Meijer (Dutch retailer), Robert Nauta (Dutch retailer), Bert Oling (Dutch audio researcher), Ferry Kremers (Dutch retailer), Johan Groenestege (Dutch retailer), Bjorn Mateijsen (Dutch retailer), Ronald Hartjes (Dutch retailer), Peter Chattelin (Dutch retailer). and many more names I do not recognize.

 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/689938551214806

The entire group is administrated by Peter Veth (now banned from CA), who posts constantly and super-enthusiastically (shills) in many of the online forums (see Computer Audiophile and Digital Audio Review as two examples in English) whenever MQA is mentioned, yet denies any affiliation whatsoever with MQA - more lies from those in and around MQA.

[Don Hills]

20 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

...

I recorded with Dolbly-B and played back without it. I also increased the tension of the spring/cushion that pressed the tape to the head, of each cassete.

 

All of the dual-capstan Nakamichis had pressure pad lifters to keep the pressure pad retracted. They used differential capstan speed to maintain a consistent tape tension across the heads.

I found Dolby B and C did work well on the 3-head Nakamichis, because they had enough HF bandwidth and tape level capability. Most decks had Dolby calibration level about +3dB, the Naks had it at 0 or -3 depending on the deck.  I had 2 decks that I matched in level and response so that I could record on one deck, then move the tape to the other and have the levels and frequency response matched to less than 0.5 dB. Nakamichi helpfully included RC networks on the circuit board so that you could add/remove solder bridges to fine tune the responses.

 

But as you point out, as soon as you moved the tape to a lesser deck with poorer HF frequency response, you may as well turn the Dolby off.

[lucretius]

9 minutes ago, Charles Hansen said:

 

Yes, that is because the MQA-organized group has directed its trolls to distract from all threads about MQA - much like happens in political races where there are "astro-turf" (fake grassroots) campaigns designed to deceive the public.

 

It looks like a general interest group started by Peter Veth and not some industry group. Thou doth protest too much?

[Fokus]

1 hour ago, lucretius said:

I understand that many analog master tapes were done with Dolby or some other noise reduction.

 

(off topic)

 

According to standard studio practice  decks are regularly aligned, and each tape is first recorded with test signals so that any future replay machine can be aligned to that tape.

 

So apart from accidental misalignment or from the real artefacts that some of the NR systems introduced (pumping, noise modulation), this was not an issue for pro use.

 

 

 

It is this lack of repeated alignment that makes the use of double ended noise reduction in a consumer environment so troublesome.

 

And to get back on topic, more or less, it is the need for precise alignment that makes a modern digital-domain implementation of any noise reduction decoder so hard.

 

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, lucretius said:

 

It looks like a general interest group started by Peter Veth and not some industry group. Thou doth protest too much?

 

Please see this post to understand my position:

 

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/critics/messages/8/88367.html

[esldude]

2 hours ago, Don Hills said:

 

All of the dual-capstan Nakamichis had pressure pad lifters to keep the pressure pad retracted. They used differential capstan speed to maintain a consistent tape tension across the heads.

I found Dolby B and C did work well on the 3-head Nakamichis, because they had enough HF bandwidth and tape level capability. Most decks had Dolby calibration level about +3dB, the Naks had it at 0 or -3 depending on the deck.  I had 2 decks that I matched in level and response so that I could record on one deck, then move the tape to the other and have the levels and frequency response matched to less than 0.5 dB. Nakamichi helpfully included RC networks on the circuit board so that you could add/remove solder bridges to fine tune the responses.

 

But as you point out, as soon as you moved the tape to a lesser deck with poorer HF frequency response, you may as well turn the Dolby off.

Count me as another of those who found Nakamichi to work well with Dolby.  Did all my needledrops (not what they were called then) with Dolby C and good tapes.  Of course I played them back on Nak tape decks.  I even had Nak head units in my cars in those years.  A TD700 and TD500.  Those head units were excellent all the way around.  Not only great tape sections, the FM tuners were exemplary as well.  Still have one head unit, one home tape deck and some tapes.