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MQA is Vaporware


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5 minutes ago, Allan F said:

With the exception that there are rare occasions when you can ask a question that, regardless of the answer works for you, a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" type of question. :)

 

Oh yeah I would never have made a good lawyer 😉

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  • 1 year later...
59 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

If people really valued independent publications, there would be more independent publications. I'd drop all advertising on my site in a heartbeat if more people paid to subscribe. My life would be so much easier, but for many reasons, one of them may well be that my offerings aren't compelling enough to get people to pay, people prefer the ad supported models. 

 

Conflicts exist in every facet of life, but we need to do our best to avoid them and to identify when lines have been crossed. In my case, I do my best to build trust with this community. One of the ways I do this is by allowing unfettered criticism of my work on any page of this site. If I even attempted to pull one over on people, I'd hear about it instantly and it would be all over these pages in bold capital letters. 

 

Bringing it back to mQa ...

 

mQa aside for a moment still, maybe you could Sticky something compelling like this on top of the Activity Stream or somewhere else like that. In my eyes anyway it is no more offensive than ads. In fact, I find it more purposeful.

Saying this, I have to scratch my head about subscribing - and I will.

My honest feeling is that I'd like to see the cultural elevation effect of your message (which I certainly anticipate!) and then subscribe. You can't have your cake and eat it I know.

I still think it's worth Sticky - no matter what I decide to do.

You have a great case here in outline.

The mQa thread on ASR is closed. I wish everyone there would come here and debate in the spirit of your remarks. If I saw that happening I would subscribe without hesitation. If I weren't on such a tight financial rein I'd just do it anyway.

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19 minutes ago, Iving said:

 

mQa aside for a moment still, maybe you could Sticky something compelling like this on top of the Activity Stream or somewhere else like that. In my eyes anyway it is no more offensive than ads. In fact, I find it more purposeful.

Saying this, I have to scratch my head about subscribing - and I will.

My honest feeling is that I'd like to see its effects (which I believe in anticipation!) and then subscribe. You can't have your cake and eat it I know.

I still think it's worth Sticky - no matter what I decide to do.

You have a great case here in outline.

The mQa thread on ASR is closed. I wish everyone there would come here and debate in the spirit of your remarks. If I saw that happening I would subscribe without hesitation. If I weren't on such a tight financial rein I'd just do it anyway.

 

OK I put my money where my mouth is and subscribed to AS Premium.

Your message is great.

Thank you

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9 hours ago, garrardguy60 said:

What if the record companies adopt MQA as the sole distribution format? That's what I'm worried about. Raising MQA's technical shortcomings, which won the consumer messaging battle, won't help us here. The record companies don't/won't care

 

Bang on!

 

It's not an audiophile issue. Lucey, who is otherwise very clued up, thinks audiophiles are people beguiled by little blue lights. Those audiophiles, indeed, are part of the MQA success story - should it become one (and what signs of capitulation do we see). Spurious justification for mass reselling music to new generations is what's at stake. This has always been at the heart of things. Surely we see barely anything of "boardroom negotiations". We may come to re-conceptualise "don't look behind the curtain".

 

Copyright holders are the real targets. ARQ et al are the wrong targets. Especially when the dignity of discussion is lost.

 

I don't have the answers. Except to hedge my bets as I do. I love records. I buy CDs. I have many. I stay offline.

 

I would just add - protection of the moral rights of composers, artists and performers is about as upstream as you can get ... perhaps that's where the argument should begin.

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24 minutes ago, ARQuint said:

 

A CD player designed to play MQA CDs that costs $17k. The world has lost its way.

 

24 minutes ago, ARQuint said:

As luck would have it, TAS put Paul Seydor's review of the Luxman player up on the website yesterday so that all those who wouldn't touch a physical copy of the magazine if double-gloved can see for themselves that our coverage of MQA is not exclusively over-the-top cheerleading (link below.) Paul devotes more than 2400 words of his comprehensive review to detailing his experience with MQA-CD (which involved direct contact with Bob Stuart, Morten Lindberg, and Peter McGrath) and I don't think that anyone can read it as a ringing endorsement of the technology.

 

I would hope we can trust that such reviews - “balanced” wrt MQA -  are truly independent rather than just behind the “on-the-side-that’s-winning” curve. Not a conspiracy standpoint. We all roil in the wake of a shifting culture. True independents are rare breeds! The world doesn't like them anymore.

 

24 minutes ago, ARQuint said:

What's significant, I think, is that the assessment focuses almost entirely on sound quality, a metric that many of the most doctrinaire anti-MQAers don't want to consider because it's largely subjective.

 

lol probably true

 

24 minutes ago, ARQuint said:

If MQA can't be sold to audiophiles of the "sounds better" sort when technical objections have been as powerfully presented as they have been here and elsewhere, the road to anything like universal adoption becomes that much more difficult for it's creators.

 

Almost feels like we are all on the same page ;-)

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1 hour ago, DuckToller said:

We don't act on levelled playing fields anymore.

 

OK - Agreed. Everything is crazy and getting crazier. It's a dirty world and it's getting dirtier. And "we" - exercising our democratic rights no less - pretend it's getting cleaner. We say one thing (about equality and human dignity and all kinds of ideals) between elections - and vote selfishly come the day. The corruption gets compounded - but we can't let it look and feel that way. The trajectory is not good - mainly since 1979 ... East and West.

Thing is ...

1. In the end the people get what the people want. This is true even where there is no ballot box. [Even JB just said last night that Afghans (cf. Taliban) have to fight for themselves.]

2. There are many issues at large without reins. Multinationals paying local taxes. Global warming. From the vital to the trivial. MQA is one.

3. We are what we talk about. We can talk about the inevitability of doom. Or we can talk about co-operation towards good ends.

4. Seismic shifts are possible. So is under-the-bonnet/hood evolution. We can be surprised at the rapidity of change when stability seemed assured.

5. Social media can facilitate campaigns such as freedom to busk (play music in the street). Political shifts can occur. Threads like this one matter.

6. Ownership weight can be created upstream - vested in composers, artists and performers. I am not the only person on the planet saying that this ought to and could be achieved.

7. Just to the extent that this happens is the capacity for agents downstream to manipulate the retail market diminished.

8. Many pursuits in life are a long haul. Some pertain to our most worthy aspirations.

9. Keeping sight of superordinate principles is invaluable. Shooting at phantoms in the trees or ourselves in the foot is wasteful and painful.

10. I don't know whether you've ever noticed, but sometimes good things happen unexpectedly when we have good motives and channel them in good ways. Good motives are a sufficient condition for good outcomes.

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12 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

And please CLEARLY differentiate remixes of original session masters for the purposes of an "audiophile" release.  In my opinion, those recordings should have the word "remixed" put directly in the title, not a footnote as HDTracks often does.

 

For sure some will disagree with this decidedly intolerant take.

 

Completely on beam - completely reasonable - and not intolerant at all.

 

I'd go further. To fail to declare a modification to [perversion of] the original recording/master (and its nature) should be a criminal offence. Who needs to be misled like that. In the UK we have statutes that prohibit misdescription. (Their purpose mainly to contest the guileful kind, of course).

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Isn't there an adage something like - happiness is being satisfied with what you've got not what you haven't got.

 

If you can tick that box, can afford more, and know that you're fortunate to be in that position ...

 

First world happiness - here we are talking about happiness on the MQA thread  ... chuckle

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18 minutes ago, garrardguy60 said:

Is that still the case (people trying to post links to ASR)?

 

Can happen just for conversation's sake ... reference to a parallel fyi or exchange there. Probably fair to say any recent links to ASR are uncontroversial (in the "old" sense anyway).

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3 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Hey Stephen,

Yeah I think it's good for the hobby (heck, everyone!) to go through some soul searching once awhile. It was certainly time and I would not be surprised if future generations of audiophiles might see the polarization arising from mQa as one of the catalysts that created the "crisis of faith" about what audiophilia represents.

 

A competition between the power and influence coming from:

"Upper echelon" magazine writers and veteran editors speaking excitedly about something that they basically purely believed to be "good" based on subjective evaluation, promoted by a guy (conveniently initialed BS) who sold it based on graphs, "neuroscience", "origami", unproven promises... (All of whom likely have some profit motive related to the mQa Industry influence.)

 

Or more "grassroots" audiophile folks who come at this without faith in BS with desire to clarify remarkable claims that on the surface already appears too-good-to-be-true. Let's not forget that some companies have taken sides with the grassroots as well. (Generally no interest in profits from mQa or association with this company.)

 

I'd of course like to think that with the ability of the Internet to disseminate information quicker and broader, the "power" actually belongs to the folks at the grassroots rather than some kind of "top-down" process where we soak up the declared wisdom from "luminaries" like BS or the elder statesmen embodied in these magazine editors.

 

If ultimately the "grassroots" win out decisively, the "upper echelon" better take notice about what they say (without evidence to back up claims) and what future they see for themselves. A world without the current incarnations of Stereophile, and TAS here in North America isn't inconceivable nor would it be a bad thing. It could actually make room for a renewed form of audio journalism that's not subservient to the Industry's advertising departments; especially the "luxury products" side of the "high end" serving up insanely overvalued products. It would mean an opportunity to re-evaluate the philosophy of "high-fidelity" and embrace a more balanced form of reviewing. I think it has to be one where the reviewer is knowledgeable enough to weigh both subjective and objective characteristics with equanimity rather than an immature either/or dichotomy.

 

Interesting history about Chesky and their streaming service! I vaguely recall some talk about this but it seemed to just disappear into the ether. I didn't even know Rafe Arnott continued to write about audio after the InnerFidelity/AudioStream catastrophe! Is he still writing hardware reviews!?

 

post of the year imho

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6 minutes ago, Abtr said:

I too want mQa to disappear, for the same reasons you do. But IMO this goal is not getting any closer by stating how bad mQa sounds, which is easily verifiably false and may do more harm than good. If it was true I don't think mQa would be where it is today. Let's stay with real technical and commercial arguments against the mQa lies.

 

Very reasonable, balanced remarks. Thank you

 

Perhaps we near agreement that one rarely if ever improves something by fiddling about with it for the wrong reasons. iow you can't make a silk purse out of a pig's ear.

 

I don't mind what people say about what they hear either way. I'm more inclined to find a "garbage" report compelling than "ooh that sounds nice and the pretty blue light makes me feel all squishy" . Hypothetical of course. I've never heard anybody say that. But that's what Lucey thinks "audiophiles" are like. And I do regret that.

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1 hour ago, John Dyson said:

It seems that older recordings,  recently available/distributed, the quality is becoming generally WORSE ... focusing stuff made since the middle 1950s when HiFi really started becoming HiFi, perhaps to the very early 1990s ... mangled with signal processing ... nastier, signal processing damaging the recordings ... Just trying hard to find new, good copies ... For the best listening experience, recordings should  simplify back closer to the original mix.

 

Different CD instances of the same pre-1980 music leave me scratching my head - not just to discern the most listenable amongst them (weeding out "loud" instances easily) but also wondering which might be least messed-about-with as a digital master. Which is "closer" to the master tape. I may say to myself "the one I like" - or "the one that reminds me most of the analogue product". But who knows.

 

1 hour ago, John Dyson said:

There is so much mind power being used to create& market nonsense like MQA, ...  It would be best, of course, to simply 'master' while maintaing the most of the quality original recording. 

 

Agreed! I reject mQa's assurance of provenance as a way to tackle this problem. Fundamental reasons already expressed all over this thread. Anyway - doubt there is sufficient market demand to produce what audiophiles of our kind want wrt back catalogue material.  Similar point applies to this thread ["HDR Audio"].

 

1 hour ago, John Dyson said:

For me, it looks like it is time to look again through the used CDs in the various shops around town.  Clean recordings appear to be more and more difficult to find.

 

+1

Pre 1995

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