MQA is Vaporware

[tmtomh]

This is going to splinter - and therefore possibly kill - the high-res download market.

 

24/44.1 is not an adequate incentive over CD/redbook for most folks. 24/48 arguably is actually better because of the possibility of better digital filtering above the audible range. But still, it's surprising to see so many new releases at HDTracks in only 44.1 or 448kHz sample rate formats.

[tmtomh]

13 hours ago, Miska said:

Did you also notice Michael Fremer's Analog Corner where he says MQA is almost as good as vinyl and all other digital is horrible and unlistenable.

 

Obviously someone wants to force-feed MQA to audiophiles...

 

Not to derail the thread, but I cannot stand Fremer. His tactics are those of a talk radio figure, but he gets treated as if he's a legitimate audiophile with real knowledge.

[tmtomh]

13 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

Apparently, this is not the case. I downloaded a MQA file from www.2l.no, which came in a flac container. Played it on my MQA DAC and it unfolded to 24/352 (and the MQA indicator lit up). Then, using dBpoweramp, I converted the file to AIFF, ALAC, and WAV. All three of these files played on my MQA DAC and unfolded to 24/352 (with the MQA indicator lit up). Also a quick check revealed that all four files played fine on a non-MQA DAC like 16/44.1. [Used JRiver Media Center for this test.]

 

 

Is there any way to fully unfold an MQA file and convert/preserve the unfolded version to a conventional PCM-based file (e.g. WAV, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC)? If not, then I would say @Miska's concern is quite valid.

[tmtomh]

3 hours ago, mansr said:

Not officially.

 

Thanks. That's what I thought. And is neatly encapsulates why MQA is nothing but trouble IMHO.

[tmtomh]

15 hours ago, firedog said:

Actually, this tells you almost nothing about how MQA albums are remastered. It picks 3 famous albums and tells us how they decided what source to use for an MQA version. Nothing more. It's an exercise in PR disguised as some kind of "deep information" about MQA.  

Do you think when they are trying to remaster thousands of albums for release in MQA they are going to painstakingly go thru the archives and provenance of every tape and digital file given to them? If you do, you are either exceedingly naive or you haven't been paying the slightest attention about how the record industry operates. Hell, for lots of albums they don't even know where the original master is or how it was made. Even within the three listed examples they acknowledge they don't know some of the pertinent recording details, and can only make an educated guess. 

 

Yes, very good points. I do like that they are doing research to try to find the original/lowest-generation "finished" source for these albums - but as you say it is likely that this level of "provenance" searching is only being done for a relatively small number of high-profile releases, partially because of honest time and labor constraints, and partially as a PR stunt.

 

And, I hasten to add, this has very little if anything to do with MQA per se - all of these albums have multiple D-A-D (or A-D-A or A and D-D-A-D) steps in their lineage, and so MAQ encoding isn't capable of fixing anything - they're just transcoding digital high-res sources using a minimum phase anti-aliasing filter. It's BS.

[tmtomh]

17 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

The reality is that I talked to a number of people working professionally with MQA in addition to Ken who I interviewed.  The article is based on my view based on what I heard from the entire group, not just the MQA team.

 

You are making the same claims over at the Hoffman forums - though I'd note that over there you appear to be sticking to your erroneous technical claims more than you are here, I presume because you've been faced with a more technically literate set of respondents here.

 

The issue is not whether the people you spoke to said certain things. The issue is with the apparent understanding - or lack thereof - of MQA's sonic characteristics that you (not them) have. There are dozens, perhaps 100s of pages of (admittedly dense) discussion on this site that put the lie to the blithe claims for MQA's lossless nature, and add much needed complexity and qualifications to the claim that it can correct or compensate for recording filters and such.

[tmtomh]

1 hour ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

So I think you answered your own question.  If there is no revenue potential with FLAC offering then why do it?

 

A successful new format needs to earn money.  MQA getting fees from doing work is a good thing as it attracts investors who want a rate of return on their investment.  So what you have is a healthy ecosystem of players.

 

1.  MQA gets paid at each step from encoding to selling hardware licenses on compatibility.

2.  The record label gets paid from getting paid for streaming.

3.  Hardware makers get paid from selling new DACs and ADCs.

 

All this money enables the covering of the cost of bringing out more hirez files.

 

The one thing I don't easily see is how the labels get rich from DRM?  I can readily copy the MQA files I have so I not sure how that creates revenue for the record labels.

 

 

I agree with your 3-item list as a factual statement about MQA's business model: That does indeed appear to be the MQA business model.

 

And if it works, it's certainly good for MQA - it's one way a new format can get into the market. But what you've failed to demonstrate is how MQA is good for the consumers who sit at the end of this money chain, ultimately footing the bill. And there is where we run headlong into your sonic-benefit claims, which are oversimplified or in some cases flat-out false. @mansr perhaps put it most succinctly: no one asked for Meridian's "help" here: For consumers, MQA is a solution in search of a problem.

 

Relatedly, this MQA revenue chain contributes to "covering the cost of bringing out more hirez files" only if by "hirez files" you mean files with an effective resolution of 14-17 bits and 48kHz sample rates. And that's the problem: You've admitted - in fact, actively argued - that the hi-res aspect of MQA is secondary, riding along in the same files used for streaming services whose subscribers (the vast majority anyway) have no interest in hi-res. So for audiophiles interested in hi-res, MQA offers "more hi-res music" but at the cost of reducing the bit depth and sample rate of the high-res music.

 

And let's not forget that so far, MQA hi-res files cost the same as conventional PCM high-res files. So labels could continue letting HDTracks and others sell PCM files at the same prices they currently do, with no need for MQA. The high-res ecosystem doesn't need MQA.

 

1 hour ago, Shadders said:

Hi,

No, my old Marantz CD63B from 1984 would still play CD's if it was around.

Regards,

Shadders.

 

1 hour ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

True but the sound quality would be poor.  The point I am making is that DACs don't stay current.  I think we can agree on that.

 

Again, Lee, whenever you get into technological/sonic claims, you make baseless assertions that betray a level of ignorance surprising for someone with an audiophile blog.

Shadders' old Marantz unit is a classic, considered a particularly nice implementation of the old, classic Philips TD1541 ladder DAC chip. Reasonable people can differ in their preferences of course - but "the sound quality would be poor" is an assertion without basis. Your claim that "DAC tech expires quickly" is false as a factual technology claim. It's true only as a business aspiration. And it's precisely your tendency to make business-model statements that you claim are tech facts, which leads some here (though not me, I stress) to call you a shill. 

[tmtomh]

18 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

I am still exploring the technical aspects but based on what I know now, the 48khz sampling rate statements is not accurate.

 

As for Shadders' 1984 CD player technology, I am aware of some of the advantages of that ladder chip but it really doesn't compete with more modern DACs and CD players.

 

The 48kHz sampling rate is, to the best of my knowledge, the maximum lossless rate - everything else is "unfolded," which as already discussed here, is not lossless.

 

As for the old CD player/DAC issue, you can repeat variants of your assertion as many times as you want, but it doesn't make it any truer.

[tmtomh]

14 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

I say this because in my own personal experience DACs do expire quickly.  Things just keep getting better.  Look at Benchmark's DACs (I own three of them) and you will see their measurements indicate significant improvements in lower noise and other metrics as you move from the DAC1 to DAC2 to DAC3.

 

At the end of the day, DACs are software filters and algorithms and there has been much advancement on those.

 

Again, oversimplified. Some people prefer the sound of a ladder DAC to a Delta-Sigma DAC. And some people prefer different sound profiles - a Wolfson vs an ESS Sabre, just to pick one example. 

 

If your metric is going to be measurements, then - again - you're casting stones in a glass house because as mansr and archimago have shown, the MQA codec process does not measure as well as PCM and DSD processes. 

 

So you can take the side of sonic perception, or you can take the side of better measurements - but you can't selectively switch sides when it suits you in a disagreement.

[tmtomh]

17 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Not correct.  It can unfold with an MQA DAC up to 24/192.

 

14 minutes ago, Fair Hedon said:

As I pointed out, which you ignored, anything above 96 Khz is UPSAMPLED BY THE DAC.

 

Yes, Fair Hedon - there's an aspect of this that Lee seems not to grasp.

[tmtomh]

11 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Hi Tony,

 

I am sensitive to the customer having limited money for new DACs as well. We have all been there.  But I think you are looking at this a bit wrong.  I'll explain.

 

In a free market system that music exists in (albeit with some oligopolistic dimensions), the Customer is truly King.  If MQA creates this ecosystem and the Customer doesn't buy the streaming subscription (either hirez or no hirez) then the format will collapse and record labels will fade it out.  We have seen this happen to SACD where Sony turned off the music titles tap after a while and in DVD-Audio where most labels stopped creating new discs.

 

The Customer really has control now. So I think you need to look through that lens than the lens of big corporate players creating evil schemes. 

 

Lee, I'm trying really hard to believe that you're not trolling - I'm not talking about conventional trolling, but rather promotional trolling, keeping yourself at the center of the conversation by playing whack-a-mole with the various claims and arguments being made here, selectively picking and choosing what you want to respond to.

 

But I will put that aside to see if you are willing to be accountable for what you yourself have stated here. In this latest comment you write that the "customer is king," and that MQA will die if customers don't buy streaming subscriptions.

 

But you've repeatedly stated in prior comments that:

1. Audiophiles are not the main customer for streaming services;
2. MQA is a convenient way to deliver high-res music to a broader audience not primarily interested in that; and
3. MQA is just "along for the ride" (your words) and streaming is the main product.

Your own arguments clearly show that the customer is not king when it comes to MQA, because streaming subscribers are not paying for MQA - they're paying for streaming subscriptions in which parts of the streaming library happen to be MQA-encoded.

 

Customers will "choose" (or not choose) MQA only if all the labels and streaming services make MQA-encoded streams a separate, higher priced or add-on subscription produce. But if MQA becomes integrated into the base subscription price (or a lossless subscription tier), then the customer has no choice.

 

This is the classic problem of vertical integration and oligopolistic practices, and it's the #1 myth about free markets: Consumers routinely are presented with clusters of choices that can't (or won't) be unlinked, meaning that consumers have no choice. Your own posts have shown that MQA's real customers are the record labels. And there is not a one-to-one pass through of costs and profits from the labels to the consumer.

 

So if you want to be taken at all seriously, you need to either recant your earlier claims about the MQA market and how streaming services work, or else you need to recant your more recent claim that the customer is king when it comes to MQA. I am not optimistic that you will do either, but I am happy for my pessimism to be proven unfounded.

[tmtomh]

31 minutes ago, semente said:

 

I think the word is "shilling"

 

Yes, you are right! But for my part, I am trying to give Lee the benefit of the doubt. People get entrenched in their positions even when they're not shilling. And people also get an outsized feeling of ownership of a discussion when they have a new article or blog post about it (as Lee recently has published). So he could indeed be shilling for MQA; or shilling for visibility and page hits on his web site/blog; or just really stubborn about clinging to his points; or just not a terribly attentive reader of others' (and for that matter his own) arguments. I'm sort of curious to see which it is. 

[tmtomh]

6 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

No, I am drawing an analogy to illustrate how restrictive a view of DRM this is.

 

Lee, if I purchase an MQA file of a song that will decode and unfold to 24/192 resolution, can I store and freely copy the full 24/192 data across all my music-storage and playback devices?

[tmtomh]

10 hours ago, FredericV said:

No you can't. There is no "full" 24/192 data. MQA does not contain 24/192 resolution. 24/192 is degraded to something like 17/96 after the first unfold, and then upsampled back to 24/192, fooling the user into believing this is actual 24/192 resolution when he looks at the display on his dac, which is quack.

MQA does not allow the output to be captured easily at this upsampled resolution.
But why would you want to capture fake upsampled highres which what the MQA renderer is all about? It is a waste of diskspace.

DRM = digital restrictions management.

 

Thanks Frederic. Appreciate the detailed info (particularly the 17/96 info). Just to be clear, I know you can't - I was posing the question to Lee to see how he would reply; a reply that I still would like to see.

[tmtomh]

32 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Firedog,

 

I've ignored some of the technical points simply because I am still researching the subject and don't wish to comment until I gain a deeper understanding and look at all sides.  Remember, I have only published the article that deals with the business model and even on that I am doing more work.  The math is not a problem as that is what I am good at.  I build predictive models for a living and use AI algorithms.  If I had poor math skills I would not be able to do my job.  But I'm equally as good at evaluating business models and applying my critical listening skills.  And I have a background in making hirez recordings (PCM and DSD) so I know a few things about how all this works and what we can hear and what are some key considerations to good sound.

 

I think you and others are looking at MQA primarily through an engineering lens whereas I am trying to apply some problem solving skills developed from my consulting work to examine what the future of the business model is, ie. how likely is MQA to be successful.  So I do spend time on looking at who the MQA ecosystem involves in terms of companies and people.

 

We may have different opinions on MQA but I am going about it in a thoughtful manner.

 

@Lee Scoggins, I feel you are being highly disingenuous here. You write that you've ignored the technical points because you are "still researching" and "don't wish to comment until I gain a deeper understanding and look at all sides." But that's not actually true, because your "Why MQA is good business" arguments have been based on an underlying assertion - often implicit, but sometimes explicit - about the technical benefits of MQA.

 

As @firedog, I, and numerous others have pointed out repeatedly, you're not actually ignoring the technical issues and questions about MQA. Rather, you're ignoring only the technical objections, and you repeat the claimed technical benefits claimed in MQA's PR materials.

 

The reason this is a problem is that your parroting of MQA's "the tech is just fine, nothing to see here folks" line allows you to equate what's good for MQA's business model with what's good for music consumers concerned about high quality sound. Your comments have made this equation over and over and over, and it's been pointed out to you over and over and over - and still you repeat the same conflation.

 

I find that behavior, and your apparent refusal to even acknowledge it let alone modify it, troubling. I'm all for free speech, but if you truly "don't wish to comment" until you've researched the technical issues, then how about not commenting in this thread until you've.... researched the technical issues?

[tmtomh]

2 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

This is a mischaracterization.  The good business arguments I have made are based on stakeholder buy-in leading to more music availability.

 

 

With respect, your response is disingenuous, @Lee Scoggins. There is no lack of music availability right now, and you know that: lossy streaming is everywhere, and redbook lossless is plentiful too. Your argument is about the availability specifically of more high-res music. And there we run straight into the question of whether or not MQA delivers a high-res product that is satisfactory to the segment of the market that cares about high-res. 

 

This is the point you have steadfastly refused to engage - and as you have just demonstrated in the above-quoted comment, this point is absolutely central to the "business argument" you are making.

 

So by your own logic, you should refrain from commenting further until you have researched the technical issues raised in this thread.

[tmtomh]

1 hour ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

This shows an antiquated view of corporations.  Their must be some value for the consumer or it won’t sell.  The new world has the consumer having a lot of power.  For this to work well, there has to be good selection and good sound quality at a decent price.

 

@Lee Scoggins, consumer culture as we know it today began a century ago, and modern forms of advertising, market segmentation, and so on were in full flight after WWII. You're showing your ignorance of the historical literature.

 

In addition, no one in this thread is positing that corporate interests are totally divorced from consumer preferences - and you know it. Folks have repeatedly and carefully explained the particular ways in which this situation is not presenting consumers with a choice to embrace or reject MQA - and you know that too. "Good selection and good sound quality at a decent price" is not the issue. We already have that, and no one has argued that MQA will harm the available selection of streaming music or that MQA is not "decent sound quality." And you know that too.

The question is whether MQA delivers better sound quality than hi-res PCM and DSD, because MQA is likely to negatively impact the available selection of those formats. That is - for the umpteenth time - the issue virtually everyone here is concerned with, and the issue you refuse to engage. 

 

You are deflecting and dodging accountability for your own words.

[tmtomh]

Wow, this is dreadful - it means the end of bit-perfect output. And if the MQA upsampler upsamples everything to the same resolution (in other words upsampling 44.1 and 48 both to 96 rather than 88.2 and 96, respectively), then it's also effectively the end of on-the-fly resolution-switching, which is kind of the most core aspect of high-res computer/streaming audio.

 

In fact, the entire 3rd-party music player market, at least for the Mac, is based on the macOS's built-in limitation in this regard: Every app's core claim to better sound quality lies in the fact that it can bypass the AudioMIDI/core audio single-resolution output setting.

[tmtomh]

7 hours ago, firedog said:

Just saw this quote from Lee at his Hoffman forum thread:

 

"Where has MQA admitted that their algorithm is lossy? If you are right I need to see some evidence as the MQA team is telling me the opposite."

 

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/my-new-article-series-on-mqa.723574/page-2#post-17874636

 

and he wonders why we don't take his "investigative journalism" seriously....

 

Yep! I'm the one he's responding to there, and I replied to his query with the evidence he demanded, linking and quoting both Stereophile and Stuart himself admitting that MQA is lossy. To the best of my knowledge, @Lee Scoggins did not reply directly to that evidence or acknowledge it in any way. (Lee, if I am mistaken about that, please point us to the comment you made at the Hoffman forums where you do acknowledge that MQA is lossy.)

[tmtomh]

Oh, I don't know. The thread at the Hoffman forums has become quite a lot of fun too. 

 

(But yes of course, I agree that the collective technical knowledge here is quite valuable in these kinds of discussions.)

 

It's hard not to come to the conclusion that @Lee Scoggins has found the soil here rather arid (after all, it's a lot tougher here to call folks liars and claim their arguments "have no substance") and is shifting to the Hoffman forums in hopes of finding greener pastures.

 

Despite it all, I still am finding the threads interesting and informative - debate sharpens arguments and helps reveal gaps and contradictions.

[tmtomh]

Holy moly - can't believe they nuked the entire thread! It was enormous. That sucks.

 

I'm absolutely not one of those unquestioning Hoffman acolytes. But I will say that Hoffman did post in the MQA thread saying he has no interest in MQA. And the thread didn't get nuked despite pages and pages and pages of comments disparaging not only Lee Scoggins, but also Bob Stuart.

It could be a coincidence, the the one new thing that happened today was that Lee made disparaging remarks about a deceased audio guy (I think with Ayre? Sorry, I can't remember), and that triggered a firestorm. That probably was the straw the broke the camel's back - although deleting the whole thread seems draconian to me.

[tmtomh]

14 hours ago, Sonicularity said:

 

Isn't a disc just a medium to store a file format, like MQA, MP3, AAC, FLAC, CD-DA, or others?

 

A CD-ROM is just a storage medium. An audio CD is a storage medium too, but not designed as a computer-style storage and retrieval file system. It's designed for real-time playback (aka streaming), and to maximize the playability of the music if the disc gets scratched or otherwise damaged. It's not really an issue these days, but in the 1990s and early 2000s computer operating systems couldn't necessarily be depended upon to be able to copy tracks off an audio CD in the usual simple drop-and-drag way that you can drag and drop files from a CD-ROM, external hard drive, etc. Third-party ripping apps were for a time the only way to do it. And if I understand correctly (and I might not!), an audio CD allows a reading device to locate a track's starting point only down to the accuracy of 1/75th of a second (a single "frame" in the parlance of the audio CD spec).This lack of precision in knowing where the data starts would be completely unacceptable for computer files. But for an audio streaming medium it is fine - if you jump to a given track on on a CD with your CD player, it doesn't matter if the CD player plays a fraction of 1/75 of a second's worth of silence before hand.

 

But all that said, the thrust of your question is totally correct. @WAM has an axe to grind - WAM feels strongly that reading digital audio data from a spinning CD will sound better at your speakers will sound better (or worse, I forget which, as I don't really care) and reading the same digital audio data from a hard drive or solid-state storage medium. 

 

In my view this is hogwash - there are too many other variables, and even if CD vs hard drive can sound different, it doesn't sound better or worse in any consistent, replicable manner. But while WAM says he doesn't want to derail the thread over this, so far it appears that he's going to keep jumping in and promoting this baseless article of faith as long as anyone continues to question it.

[tmtomh]

11 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

Er, https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-tested-part-2-fold

https://www.stereophile.com/content/more-mqa

https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-some-claims-examined

 

Perhaps you missed these articles?

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

4 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

 

Exactly.  Also, They are getting "paid" indirectly via ad $$ to hawk it.  It is as plain as the nose on your face.

 

FFS, people - stop! You don't need to make unsupportable assertions about motives in order to make the argument we all are trying to make about MQA. @John_Atkinson, once again I appreciate that you've stuck around here, and I share your hope that the accusations of corrupt motives won't detract from the substance of the issues.

 

That said, I just re-scanned the three links you provided to ensure they were the Stereophile MQA pieces I've already read (they are). While it is true that two of the pieces contain a fair amount of detail and at least one contains visual data, I would be puzzled and frankly appalled if you were to warrant that these pieces represent anything close to an objective, critical appraisal of MQA.

 

Others have noted the issues, but in the hope of getting a direct response, I'll very briefly list a couple here:

1. There's question (to say the least) about the temporal resolution of human hearing when it comes to complex signals like music. MQA's claims about the necessary level of time-domain accuracy need to be investigated and not accepted at face value.
2. There is no reason given for why file compression is needed for high-res music outside a streaming context (and why it will be needed even in a streaming context in the next, say 3-5 years as bandwidth continues to increase.
3. There is no reason given for why a 48kHz sample rate does not provide sufficient headroom for high quality filtering - and therefore there is no reason given for why 96k and above sample rates would need to be preserved at all via MQA folding/encapsulation.
4. In one of your pieces, you conclude that "short"/"leaky" filters don't necessarily sound better or worse than "long" filters. Yet none of the articles acknowledges the implication of this fact, which is that it means MQA's entire claim to sonic improvement has no basis in fact.
5. No explanation is given for how "deblurring" could possibly work given multitrack recordings using a variety of mic preamps, ADCs, intermediate DAC-ADC stages, and so on. None of the articles even attempts to deal with that.

 

I'm sure I've missed many other issues. But the overall impression - which I would argue is amply supported by direct evidence from the articles you've linked to - is that even when Stereophile acknowledges isolated bits of information that would call MQA's benefits into question, your articles don't clearly state the implications of that information, don't follow them to their logical conclusion. These cruial bits of info seem not to alter or disturb the positive MQA narrative one bit.

[tmtomh]

1 hour ago, Indydan said:

I have managed to post the first, of what will certainly be many posts on the topic at Stereophile.

 

"The day the music died.

 

Bob Stuart's MQA is the biggest con job ever thrust upon the music industry and public. An MQA format monopoly would steer all the money into Stuart's pockets, and force music lovers to accept, whatever crumbs he thinks they should get. It would be the equivalent of a banana republic dictator living the good life, while his people starve.

If MQA becomes the dominant format, Don McLean will need to sing "The day the music died" part 2."

 

 

Congratulations. You started off the Stereophile thread with a comment that prioritizes your pet zingers over a proper argument, diverts the discussion to a personal attack on Bob Stuart, and enables others to dismiss the important content hidden beneath your overblown rhetoric. Were I an MQA supporter (which I am not), comments like yours are exactly the type I would hope for from MQA supporters.

[tmtomh]

1 hour ago, Indydan said:

 

I accept your apology. But, my post was in no way meant to trivialize the suffering of the poor in certain countries. Of course I do not equate the two situations. I would think that is self evident. I think sometimes people try to hard to be offended. 

 

It was meant to illustrate that Bob Stuart created MQA for his own profit, and does not care who loses out in the process. MQA people have admitted they want to control the whole music distribution process of recording and distribution. That is dictator like to me. 

 

I also took offense to tmtomh's post. I did so because, a lot of over the top angry comments are made here, without being criticized. I make one comment which I would characterize as colorful (not offensive) and I get criticized for it. 

 

Feel free to disagree, but I stand by my words. 

 

I wasn't offended by your post at Stereophile, nor did I think it was excessively angry, nor did it incite me into an agitated or dramatic state.  

 

I just thought it was rhetorically counterproductive for garnering support for the anti-MQA view that you and I (and many others here) share, particularly as the very first comment on the very first good MQA piece Stereophile has published.

 

And I commented on it only because you cut and pasted it here and told us that you got in the first comment. I likely never would've seen your comment had you not added it to this thread.

 

I stand by my critique, but of course you don't have to pay it any mind, and it was not my desire or aim to offend you.

 

One does have to wonder about a comment in which you say you were offended and also criticize others who "try too hard to be offended." When you post something in a discussion forum, you're going to get responses. And those responses aren't going to become any more to your liking if you call others names, say they're too easily offended, and then claim grievance because they supposedly offended you.