MQA is Vaporware

[garrardguy60]

22 hours ago, shtf said:

Maybe one day a former Stereophile reviewer with some integrity and listening skills, if such a one exists, will write a variation on Stereophile magazine.  

 

There'd definitely be some money for that author.  Oops.  I hope that idea doesn't jeopardize anybody's "reputation" and retirement plan.

 

 

 

We already have that person [though he's not ex-Stereophile]. It is Archimago and his blog.

[garrardguy60]

33 minutes ago, shtf said:

 

Why, Jim Austin of course.  Why else would Atkinson choose Jimmy to take the helm at Stereophile?  Unless you're insinuating that it's not really all about the music at Stereophile.  Are you? 

 

I would think that it was Paul Miller who picked Jim, or at the very least had the final say. [I say this with all due respect to John Atkinson; my comments are not meant to be in any way critical of him. It's more the case that it's been my observation that bosses/owners make these kinds of decision, rather than [even high-level] employees.]

 

MORE IMPORTANT, in my mind, is the fact that Stereophile recently reviewed an affordable product. And when I say ''affordable,'' I mean to you and me, not as in Stereophile's definition [e.g., ''though this amplifier fails to support MQA -- the greatest development in audiophilia since oxygen-free cooper -- we give it props for being an affordable option at a very reasonable $2,500 [base model; chassis enclosure and output transistors not included].

 

Anyway, back to my point. I was pleasantly shocked a few weeks back when Stereophile reviewed the Klipsch RP-600M bookshelf speakers [$549]. Here, I am hoping that this is also Mr. Miller's influence and that he intends to make Stereophile and its sister sites a little more relevant to audiophiles with normal, human-scale incomes. 

 

I am very hopeful in that regard. As for Mr. Austin, since he has a doctorate in physics, it is clearly not his intellectual capabilities holding him back from understanding the realities of MQA.

 

[garrardguy60]

4 hours ago, bluesman said:

...But I have a bit of trouble with the Carpenters and ABBA as reference source material  .  I'd suggest checking out Wes Montgomery's California Dreamin' album on A&M to hear what they could do with a heartbreakingly dull set of performances. It's a Van Gelder / Creed Taylor production with one of the greatest studio bands in history - Herbie Hancock, Wayne Andre, Bucky Pizzarelli, Richard Davis, Grady Tate, Ray Barretto etc.

 

I am with you on ABBA and the Carpenters [though the latter isn't at the same level of abject suckitude, since Karen Carpenter had talent], but I have to step in and defend Wes Montgomery's California Dreamin'  [which was on Verve, not A&M]. I'll agree with you that, as easy listening/smooth jazz, we're not talking about breaking any ground here. But I'd argue that the [unique, wonderful] tone he got out of his guitar makes anything by Wes Montgomery worthwhile. Doubly so since he died so young. Interestingly, that album, which charted in 1966, has just been reissued on vinyl by Impulse Records, though it seems to be available only in Europe.  OK, sorry for off-topic.

[garrardguy60]

5 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

Precisely

 

As i said, my friends conversation with about several reviews he has done (my friend owns gear JVS reviewed) and some of his other comments left a very specific impression.  I will leave it at that. 

 

i will also add when they compared notes about listening impressions of certain rooms, you would have thought they at different shows. 

 

What 'reviews'?  By my count, Jason has posted 31 stories'on Stereophile between June 7 and today. The vast majority [all? ] are only a few paragraphs long, with their most notable characteristic being the bold-faced names of multiple manufacturers/products concatenated in the respective headline, which I guess is aimed at the advertising community.

 

Regardless, Jason knows nothing of Ohm's or Kirchhoff's laws, thinks cables impart [indeed can 'improve'] sound at baseband, and is, he has said, immune from expectation and confirmation bias. Why we put any stock in what people without any technical education have to say about electronics is beyond me. Jason is legit to review records, given his music background, but as for the other stuff, well. . .  At least Fremer [another non-engineer] is entertaining.

 

When I was young, I used to enjoy Audio magazine [in the pocket of industry but still trying to do good tech articles] and Hi Fidelity [hackish but fun] and most of all Popular Electronics [Hirsch-Houck Labs, wonderful but with a business model that would be unsustainable today; what, they'd get $99 a pop per freelance review]. Today, and I mean this in all honesty, the best audio outlets in terms of delivering value are this site and Archimago's site [followed by Patrick Turner's, but Turner's is for archival tube gawking value not journalism].

[garrardguy60]

4 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

It is intended to assist in search efforts for those who want to find such reports in the future.

Duh. Thanks, Kal. As a web guy, I should've picked up on the keywording. I still have a quibble with the fact that most of the posts are content-free. I would analogize that readers who are referred to his posts by Google will have the search equivalent of a meh date -- when they get there, there's no there there. 

[garrardguy60]

7 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Can't speak for @Doug Schneiderof course, but while I might be a bit optimistic, in the big picture of all who enjoy music and want good hardware, "high end" is such a small niche that I don't think it's too difficult to change in time now that we are all connected to the information stream.

 

At work, when I tell people that for fun I write about hi-fi audio, very few will recognize AudioQuest, Wilson, Magico, Focal, Dynaudio, Chord, Audeze, etc... Even fewer will know about stuff like Synergistic or MQA, or even care about expensive cables. All of us here are already part of the 0.01% club of audio enthusiasts and there aren't that many of us who need to be swayed to create significant changes in the zeitgeist of this hobby.

 

 

Agreed about the 0.01%. The thing is, I fear that this hobby is slowly dying. We on this forum are pretty much exclusively a bunch of not young men who aren't getting any younger [that's the nicest way I could think to phrase it]. 

 

The new folks coming into the 'hobby' aren't coming into 2-channel. They're over on the avs forum discussing the best ways to add ceiling speakers to their 7.4.2 home theater systems so they can experience Dolby Atmos.

 

I can't say I blame them. I got into audio as a teenager after I began reading Popular Electronics, High Fidelity and Audio magazine. All that stuff is long gone. I can guess that someone might get more takers, among friends and dates, to get them to come over and watch a movie on a nice home theater setup than they would inviting them to listen to vinyl.

 

The other observation I'd make is that audiophiles have a disproportionate number of obsessives-compulsives among us. How else to explain the frankly insane focus on stuff like 'grounding boxes' [a good birthday gift for Dracula], cables, power cord [often rendered in the Freudian misspelling 'chords'], etc. Indeed, I recently saw a post on some av forum where a guy was laughed off the thread because he put forth some deblurring nonsense that we have been socialized to discuss civilly herein. [Also, younger, non-rich guys with families can't justify buying preamps that cost more than the engagement ring they bought their wife, whereas a UHD TV w sound to match can be had for a few k and it's something the whole family can use for video, audio and gaming.]

 

In closing, I don't think I'm being hyperbolic by saying that, if we only had the legacy pubs/sites, this hobby would be dying even faster. We owe a debt of gratitude to folks like Chris, who has provided us with this vital, lively place to engage ['A place for dad,' perhaps; in a twist on those Joan Lunden commercials], and just as much to Archimago, who has in a very real sense single-handedly forced non-BS objectivism back into its central and important position in the audiophile world. He is our pseudonymous Julian Hirsch of the 2010s. 

 

  .

 

[garrardguy60]

10 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Not sure how many people receive Bob Lefsetz email letter, but check out this text from tonight’s email. He received this from an engineer in the industry. You could replace every instance of Spatial Audio with the letters mQa. 

https://lefsetz.com/wordpress/2021/06/11/spatial-audio/

 

"I just want to try and alert you to the potential seismic scam happening with this Atmos roll out.  Atmos catalog remixing is being done by the truckload in a handful of Nashville, LA, and NYC rooms right now and has been for a couple of years, and almost none of it is being overseen or approved by the artist or original producer or mixer.  And these versions- according to Apple- will be the new standard versions, superseding the original versions, now designated by Apple to the dustbin of history.

I have heard some Atmos mixes which were indeed an improvement.  However, most are not.  And I would like to steer you toward this demo from Apple to get a sense of their mindset

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/introducing-spatial-audio/pl.af1ad34ef38543dd8bcdfc11356bd00e

In the rush to make content for Apple, labels are jamming this crap out with little QC and -again- almost no input from artists.  This format has real potential but if they continue to try and tell us that shit like this 'new' version of 'What’s Going On' is better than then original, then it will be seen as a counterfeit and a fraud, and will go the way of the Home Pod.   I know how you feel about catalog being remixed and this has potential to be a worst case scenario."

 

Take this FWIW: From talking to my young adult kids in their 20s, what Apple has done by announcing Atmos (and, to a lesser extent, lossless) is to creating genuine excitement that I have not seen in audio since the dawn of the stereo era in the mid/late 1960s. They ALL want to listen to this stuff, they are very excited and are talking about getting better headphones and also KRK active monitors (low cost and apparently very popular w the young folks).

 

This is just like when all of us old guys here (not you, Chris, no insult intended, you're not a boomer) got heavy into stereo as a hobby in the 1970s. ALSO, these young people are using the Apple news as an opportunity to check out legacy bands. So in addition to the usual Kanye and Taylor Swift (those are the only current artists I can identify. I guess there's Frank Ocean and Drake and then Gaga, but I like her so she can't be that hip) they are getting exposed to Beatles, Bowie and other classic rock giants.

 

I think this is the greatest chance to bring new people into the hobby in 50 years. I was telling my kid about getting better sound by buying a DAC + headphone amp, but he's not there yet, still acclimated to how to best listen to Apple Atmos (which I distinguish from Atmos Atmos, but which I mean in a proper HT set up. I actually thought what when Apple announced Atmos, they meant regular HT 7.2.4, but I guess this Apple Music spatial Atmos is more DSP manipulation so that your 2-ear headphones gives you a faux immersive experience.

 

Hey, we gotta remember that Apple isn't lying to anyone. They're not pulling an MQA where, well, I don't want to use the words BS, BS, Amir, Stereophile, or any of that nonsense. Apple is not claiming virginal purity. They're putting out something that people can enjoy. Many of them are younger people who normally would have nothing to do with old man stereo equipment and certainly not with blingy OCD "everything matters" crap.

 

I think what Apple is doing is GREAT and we should welcome it. We should be happy that Chris will soon have new, younger folk coming here seeking better sound because they've been turned on to it by Apple. (And I should ad that I am NOT an Apple fanboy. I actually think they are heavy handed, over priced, self righteous, all those bad walled garden things. But, either through intent or by accident, they are doing something really good here.)

[garrardguy60]

The scary thing is that the past year has proven/confirmed a few things:

 

1) the audiophile market is vanishingly small (certainly when you constrain the discussion to "how many people will pay extra for superior streaming. 

(I'm not talking about the $25,000 "affordable" audio equipment/bling market. That's also vanishingly small but is a different kettle of fish, or maybe different kettle of old men, with the salient question being who dies off first, the equipment makers or the buyers.)

 

1b) As an extension to the above, with Apple lossless, there is in effect no separate market for superior audio streaming anymore since it's being folded, price-wise, into the regular streaming marketplace. (This holds even when you add in hi res, which I would argue is a subset of the original "people who want high quality audio" subset. It's actually a tertiary, vanishingly small subset if you define it as true [actually recorded in) hi res as opposed to the dominant upsampled "fake" hi res.])

 

AND HERE'S THE SCARY PART:

3) Because people don't care about streaming audio quality (or, more precisely put, they're ok with what they're getting), if MQA can fly under the consumer radar and/or CHANGE IT'S FORWARD-FACING MARKETING PITCH, it IS possible for it to position itself to the music industry as a single-point, end-to-end distribution/control/DRM (whatever term you prefer; not trying to get into the DRM argument here). 

 

From the info that's leaked out lately on this thread, about MQA's apparently renewed influencer push as well as the Sony stuff, I believe that's what's happening. MQA is now solely focused on marketing to the record companies. (I think it's clear that the expensive, restrictive and NDA-laden push to sign up manufacturers has failed.) I think KeenObserver has raised the same concern: 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

 

[garrardguy60]

18 hours ago, Archimago said:

The issue IMO is not whether he waxes poetically about mQa now, but rather the fact that he was one of the ones at the helm of the audiophile magazines who bought into the scheme and actively tried to sell the product to audiophiles.

 

<snip>

 

Instead of being the wise elder-statesman of audiophilia who based much of his career on technical writing and testing, as he approached retirement, John Atkinson lacked the insight or courage (depending on what he knew or didn't know) to act the part. 

 

<snip>

I do hope the audiophile press recognizes the results of what they've done to the hobby. 

 

<snip>

 

IMO, Atkinson must realize that the events of these last few years will play into his legacy as he retires into the sunset. 

 

 

As someone who worked in the trade press for many years, and lived through its precipitous decline during the rise of the Internet -- the salient economic epigram on this is that there was a shift from "Print [advertising] dollars to digital pennies" --  my take on Atkinson is that he could have a legacy or a job, but not both. (This of course applies to Harley too and indeed anyone who writes for a living.)

 

I apologize that this will come across as an argument from authority, which I hate, but it's where I'm coming from so here goes: You have no idea how difficult it is to survive running a content site. Reader revenues are nil, and to get advertisers to pay you have to show clicks. Now, there is a further wrinkle that's emerged over the last decade. Sites like Stereophile (and its sisters) simply cannot generate enough clicks to make money on click-based and remnant advertiser (the pay rates and interest in both having dropped significantly over the last few years). Still, one has to maintain enough clicks for respectability. And it's harder all the time to clear the minimum bar here.

 

[When I said "you have no idea" I was referring to the general/global "you." "You" as in "Archimago" actually do have an idea about what drives audio reader traffic. (I have been a fan and faithful reader of your site since 2015, so as they say on sports talk radio, I'm a first-time, longtime.) So you've probably seen the swings depending on story; that you have a minimum baseline but that your upside is driven both by the, er, "agitativeness" of the current piece of content and referrer traffic. You've probably also seen that, once you think you've figured it (traffic driving) out, everything changes. (This, btw, is the hallmark of an experienced site editor. It recalls the famous screenwriter William Goldman's line, "Nobody knows anything. . .") ]

 

Anyway, I'm getting discursive and verbose, but I've pretty much been in Atkinson's situation. Either you get with the program (both the implied program and what your boss says out loud) and stir the pot, or you will be replaced. TL:DR ads qua ads (i.e., based on raw traffic) don't even pay the bills anymore. You have to blow smoke up vendors' butts with tailored content (even though there are never any specific quid pro quos. Everything's understood. You have to make your site ever more friendly -- in tone, presentation and opinions expressed-- to those few who are willing to give you ad dollars, which from their end they only do if they think they will get sales "leads." (There's also image advertising, but we're not talking IBM in the audiophile world; that $2k cable vendor is spending in hopes of customer acquisition.)

 

HERE, I would actually say that in one sense (not us the reader sense, but the audio press industry sense) John Atkinson is in a comparatively STRONGER position than he was before he was "retired." That's because, his replacement, who I will refer to as the editor in chief of plodding prose ("As I [Who Wants to Be a Serious Essayist] See It"), prickly comment responses, and passive-aggressive "civility" mongering (a friendly but pointed shoutout to fellow AS forum member Dr. Quint). It's my sense that as long as JA2 is EIC, JA1 will have a job in the wings. While as Arch says he has lost credibility over MQA, he still has his measurements credibility, which is the only differentiator Stereophile has. (This is similar to how AnalogPlanet has Mikey's personality as its site persona. Without Mikey, no AnalogPlanet).

 

Anyway, so I'm not proud to say this but as a realistic, 60-year-old American, if I were in Atkinson's shoes, (and apropos of nothing I am an EE), I can't say I would have done things differently. It's a nice gig if all you have to do to absolve yourself when a piece of equipment is bad to is tack a few sentences onto the end of the measurements write-up that have the opacity of a Federal Reserve pronouncement but yet can still be correctly decoded by EE-knowledgeable "Kremlinologists. 

[garrardguy60]

10 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Looooooooong story, but I had to implement it because people were purposely coming here to bash AS and link to ASR. I put science in quotes because I believe it’s deserved. 

Is that still the case (people trying to post links to ASR)? I ask because it seems to me that since Amir revealed himself (the MQA fracas at ASR a few months back), a lot of us (the people who left when you created the objective forum) have come back. (I admit I'm universalizing from my own behavior here; you will know whether I'm on the right track or just imagining since you have the analytics.)

 

Anyway, so the upshot is that you can't have a forum/community if only one person is allowed to have an opinion (or, if his opinion is the only "correct" opinion), which is what they have over there. I still have my gripes with AS, but I think I now understand the boundaries (e.g., don't upset the feng shui orange audio fuse people who are still hankering to give their money away to a guy in scotland) and I will try hard to stay within the lines! (I hope I'm not damning AS with faint praise here; this is meant to be a positive comment about Chris and AS.)

 

[garrardguy60]

(EDIT: I see Pierre and I posted the same/similar thing at same time. Great minds think alike!)

 

NOW THERE ARE TWO DOTS! 

 

Our favorite legacy publication has a review of the Cambridge Audio EVO 150 streamer. On the second page of the article, the reviewer goes to town listening to multiple MQA versions of the same album. This of course begs the question: How can there be multiple MQA versions of an album when supposedly the intent of MQA is to stipulate to the listener that he/she is listening to the ONE AND ONLY TRUE AND APPROVED file.  This seems like an underreported crack in the MQA p̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶l̶i̶e̶s̶ story.

 

FURTHER, apparently there are now two lights, something of which I was previously unaware. Green dot means engineer approved, blue dot means artist approved.

 

I don't want to give this nonsense more air, nor do I want to inadvertently violate any policies Chris might have, so I won't quote from or link to the article, But if you go to the home page of that audiophile mag which starts with stereo and ends with phile, and scroll down to the EVO 150 review, please see if you are not as confused as I am. (Indeed, one disruptive commenter is asking why it is that upsampled files seem to always be called out as such, except when they are MQA, and he wonders why that is.)

 

Me, I wonder what's up with the multiple MQA versions and also the two dots. I HAVE AN IDEA. Let's refer to MQA from now on as "MQA 2 dots." That will, as the Brits say, take the piss out of RS and co.

 

 

 

 

[garrardguy60]

On 12/1/2021 at 10:40 AM, yahooboy said:

A question, You say an octave above redbook. Redbook goes to 20 kHz, an octave above that is at 40 kHz. But if one looks at the measurements where the dreaded "MQA gap" is present it seems that Actual frequency response only goes to approx. 24 kHz.

Or have I gotten this wrong? 

 

Strictly speaking, redbook CD goes up to 22.05 kHz, as per Nyquist. By definition, the Nyquist frequency is 22.05 kHz, because that is half the sample rate is 44.1 kHz.

[garrardguy60]

On 3/29/2022 at 10:13 AM, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

I can't imagine what Scoggins could have said to you over the phone to make you believe he'd changed somehow.  With all due respect (and I mean that), he totally played you.

 

But what's more unbelievable to me is he now posts as the Chief Executive Officer at Nextscreen, LLC and somehow he still doesn't feel any need to dial back the disingenuousness.

 

This makes me really question the integrity of the publications under his control.

 

 

It's really sad that Lee is allowed back. If Lee can come back, can the objectivists come back too?

[garrardguy60]

22 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

Getting this back on track, three recent patents assigned to MQA Ltd.

 

Transparent lossless audio watermarking enhancement

Patent number: 10811017

Date of Patent: October 20, 2020

Inventor: Malcolm Law

 

Digital encapsulation of audio signals

Patent number: 10867614

Date of Patent: December 15, 2020

Inventors: Peter Graham Craven, John Robert Stuart

 

Lossless bandsplitting and bandrejoining using all pass filters

Patent number: 10896683

Date of Patent: January 19, 2021

Inventors: Peter Graham Craven, Malcolm Law

 

Discrete dither

Patent number: 11095304

Date of Patent: August 17, 2021

Inventors: Peter Graham Craven, Malcolm Law

 

This is interesting and points to a potential out strategy if MQA Ltd. (the business) fails. Namely, whatever is left could become a non-practicing entity (NPE), which is the term of art for a patent troll. 

 

As John Dyson points out, some of these patents are ripe for unintentional infringement, which means there might be some money to be made suing the putative infringer. Of course, litigation could ultimately result in an iffy patent being negated, but litigation is expensive. 

 

Wikipedia points out that patent trolling has been less of an issue in Europe than in the US, because in Europe the loser pays court costs, whereas in the US each party must pay its own lawyers.

[garrardguy60]

2 hours ago, MikeyFresh said:

 

That is laughable, I intentionally chose what I thought would be an absurd amount of MQA mentions in a loudspeaker review, and lo and behold, that same number seemed both reasonable and warranted by both the writer and the editor of the trade publication.

 

Jason is whistling past the MQA graveyard yet again.

[garrardguy60]

My personal observations, as someone who has done (professionally) something very similar to what MF is doing, web-site-building-wise, are the following:

 

--One should look at Michael as a personality or influencer, as opposed to a trained engineer who will get the technical stuff correct. He is not an engineer (his Cornell bachelor's is in labor relations, IIRC) and I suspect he doesn't understand even fairly basic stuff like why low-pass filtering removes "stair steps," what an FFT means, that time domain is inverse of freq domain, etc. Such concepts are simply not grokable if you don't have the basic math background; a non-engineer must always strain for real-word analogies (the Wall St Journal used to frequently summarize the function of a uP as "a thumbnail-sized traffic cop that controls" whatever. So this is what one is dealing with.)

 

--Mr, Fremer has his hands (as well as his feet, his checkbook, and all of his time) focused on getting the traffic on TrackingAngle up from zero to a level which can justify the outlay his initial advertisers have provided. He needs this traffic to get them to continue to advertise. Trust me what I tell you that if you build it, they won't come, and that one has to work very, very hard to ratchet traffic up and then to keep it there. (Perhaps Chris will concur with this observation.) When one launches a site, getting traffic means you have to post lots of content (so that your site gets spidered by Google and you appear in search results).

 

One observes that when Mikey launched TrackingAngle, there was little new content, but that recently, he has been posting lots of stuff, much of it by other writers (who he presumably must pay). 

 

So my TL;DR is that even if Mikey understood the technical fine points, which he doesn't, he doesn't have any bandwidth to deal with this, other than his cut/paste "go eff yourself" responses. All his time and effort are sucked up keeping the hamster wheel going (if and) until his site is self-sustaining.

 

Being a "personality," as opposed to a neutral guy who inspires no strong feelings one way or another, is actually the most important arrow he has in his quiver in terms of growing his site. Think of all the views he gets from the people who are not favorably disposed to him (i.e., us). 

 

My final observation is that I am guessing he didn't realize how tough it would be this time (to start and grow a site). (He has previously started successful sites, e.g., analogplanet).  My personal view is that the internet has changed from even a few years ago. Audiences are even more fragmented, and it is ever tougher to build, keep, and grow an audience. (Again, Chris may have some insights here.) 

 

 

 

 

[garrardguy60]

One of the underlying (and, quite frankly, insane) assumptions being promulgated by the MQA proponents -- and, indeed, an unspoken tenet that underpins all modern audiophile culture -- is the belief that there is some "hidden music" deep inside whatever source one is playing,

 

The hobby actively (not tacitly; actively!) promotes the idea that if one somehow gets the "right" file (bit depth, sampling rate, media it's stored on, humidity in the room, today's stock prices, what Mom is making for dinner) and plays it on the "right" (meaning most expensive) equipment, new notes, passages and details will be revealed.

 

However, this is not the case with most recordings. Why would there be stuff "hidden" in a recording and how would it get there? Did George Martin go tell George: "Stand ten feet to the left and whisper 'Yoko stole my digestive bisquit.'?"

 

Sure, If you take a Beethoven symphony and play it on better equipment, it will sound better, and there will be a revelation of new details because so much is going on; there are so many instruments playing at once, dynamics, etc. etc.

 

To conclude, my point is less about the technical side of things and more about the blatant idiocy of the idea that a producer back in the day who wanted to sell as many records as possible would go to the trouble of "hiding" things that they thought were good.

 

JFC, THIS IS ONE REASON THEY COMPRESS THE CRAP OUT OF MODERN MUSIC. So that nothing is "hidden" when you listen to it on your earbuds or phone.

 

[To loop back to my Beatles non-example, when the Beatles wanted you to hear something, they made sure you heard it. Q.v. "cranberry sauce."]

 

EDIT: The idea that we're not hearing everything made sense in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, when there were clear limitations in source material (i.e., vinyl and cassette). That is no longer valid today, with digital sources and audio reproduction technology now mature, but audiophile culture still carries forward as its raison d'etre this idea from the Julian Hirsch era.

[garrardguy60]

Jim Austin is now appealing to non-sentient intelligence to help p*mp MQA.

 

His latest "As We See It" is entitled "A Chatbot's Take on Hi-Fi Issues." He also takes the opportunity to bash everyone who's not on the MQA thin-gravy train. Here is an excerpt from the end of the column. (I haven't posted the link because I'm not sure what Chris's policies are re outside links.)

 

Here's the close of the column:

 

[JA2]: Wait, MQA uses time-smearing to compensate for time-smearing?

 

ChatGPT: Yes, that's correct! MQA technology uses a technique called "time-smearing" to compensate for the effects of time-smearing on transients in the music.

 

[JA2}: I came away impressed by ChatGPT's compositional abilities—its ability to summarize and present information coherently—but I was surprised (even stunned) by its strange errors and how it persisted in defending those errors almost as if trying to save face—not unlike certain audio reviewers. Still, it will be a while before Stereophile employs chatbots to write its reviews.

 

I do have to give Jim some points for wit, by going off the beaten path here. Unfortunately, he's still beating the same dead horse.

 

At this point, one can't escape the conclusion that ppl like Jim care less about MQA then they do about trying to "own" their (many, many) critics.

 

[garrardguy60]

On 3/2/2023 at 12:20 PM, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

I was hesitant to allow the posts to be published, because the goal is pretty clear. However, I error on the side of publishing, rather than be accused of withholding pro-MQA comments. Dumb I know.

 

Why do we care what the pro-MQA people think about whether you publish their comments or not?

 

This is precisely why the technique of ECL and the BS lobby works!

 

We are very kinda-sorta self aware, as in "Ho ho ho ECL, we see what you're doing here. You're luring us into a rhetorical trap. We see you. PAUSE. OK, now we'll jump into your trap and start debating this all over again."

 

Why do we always take the bait?

 

[garrardguy60]

On 3/3/2023 at 1:07 PM, The Computer Audiophile said:

I care because people will see their comments deleted or hidden, screenshots them, post them on pro MQA groups, and discredit the work that has been done here. People may get the idea that I’m hiding the “real” benefits of MQA, when I’m not hiding anything. 

 

Do the pro-MQA people give Audiophile Style credit for this?

 

Do the pro-MQA people moderate their tone because you're welcoming to them and happy to engage in rational debate?

 

Do the pro-MQA people promise to not pull the football away again and then. . . pull the football away again?

 

Have the pro-MQA people stopped incentivizing trolls and anonymous posting by the usual suspects and their fellow travelers?

 

Have the pro-MQA people showed ANYTHING in the 1022 pages of this thread that indicate they have ANY plans to "grow up"? Well, why should they when they are getting attention, oxygen, which is what they need to survive another day.

[garrardguy60]

5 hours ago, Archimago said:

I certainly agree with the latter; the worship of target FR curves rather than seeing them as a potential options that one has a chance of finding enjoyable is as simplistic as "one measurement" THD+N/SINAD. 

 

Let's not go apespit jumping on that often cranky guy who runs that other forum. Every site has its pluses and minuses. We come here to discuss MQA and we all certainly appreciate that Chris has been a major industry voice on this important issue. (As have you, Arch.)

 

However, If we want to discuss, say, USB isolation devices, or cables -- i.e., the stuff that used to be fodder for the discontinued objectivist forum here on AS -- well, this is not the forum for that. That's a business decision Chris made; I understand it and accepted it. 

 

All I'm saying is, let's keep some perspective here. Different strokes for different folks

 

 

[garrardguy60]

33 minutes ago, botrytis said:

Now I wonder if the DAC, that were upgraded to mqa by reprogramming will be converted back now?

 

Yes, they will be converted back by folding down twice. Three times for DACs that cost >$5,000 and were reviewed by SP.

[garrardguy60]

9 hours ago, MikeyFresh said:

JVS took the high road in the Comments of his show report and now stands corrected, admitting the Clique! album in 32/352.8 DXD is not MQA encoded. Imagine that!

 

<snip>

 

This says a bit about JVS's character, he's apparently not above it all/afraid to stand corrected, and did not dig his heels in. Maybe we can loop in MF on that discussion, and get a correction posted in the comments of that flawed piece he did on Clique! for The Tracking Angle?

 

Nah... MF was already given every opportunity to admit the entire premise of that piece was based on a flawed understanding of MQA, and he failed miserably, no attempt at any correction there, quite the opposite actually.

 

I don't think it's necessarily about character. I think it's a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. MF has a little knowledge, so he thinks he knows something, ergo he is a know it all who's often wrong. (What's the expression? "Often wrong; never in doubt.")

 

In contrast, JVS knows nothing (a perusal of the "technical" comments he makes in his reviews bears this out), as in, he is a bottomless pit of zero technical knowledge. So paradoxically I think this makes him more amenable to correction. He's probably much less sure of himself. 

 

Unfortunately, any "corrections" do not appear to go into JVS's long-term database, so it's Groundhog Day all over again when he's tapped by JA2 to review another monoblock. 

 

As a final aside, I would say this lack of any foundational knowledge in electronics, which is by no means limited to JVS -- he's simply less adept at b.s'ing than some others -- is why many audiophile reviewers use (high, high, high) price as a proxy for quality.

 

 

[garrardguy60]

The thing that is extremely funny, rather ironic, and most importantly poetic justice, is the likelihood that if MQA and Bob Stuart HAD LED WITH THE DRM ANGLE AND BEEN VOCAL ABOUT IT instead of the file compression, IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN READILY ADOPTED by all the labels.

 

 Instead, the label execs probably couldn't understand WTF Stuart was talking about either.

 

(Yeah, I know I'm being speculative here and MQA probably DID talk up the DRM in private -- "It's like a rootkit, except there's no root and no kit. So the music buyer won't even know it's there! We don't even know it's there!" -- But still, this is karmic justice is there ever was such a thing.)

[garrardguy60]

On 8/8/2023 at 10:52 AM, ralphfcooke said:

Quote from 'As we see it'  September Stereophile by Jim Austin

 

Tidal is starting to do standard hi-rez PCM FLAC to complement

their MQA offerings, which, though many prefer them, may be going away.

 

Make of that what you will :)

 

Mr. Atkinson has weighed in: