MQA is Vaporware

[Thuaveta]

6 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Your repeated use of the term "shill" is completely unwarranted.  It is a shame that Computer Audiophile even allows such personal attacks.  I have made a good faith effort to report what I have found works in audio.  Having a different opinion is not cause for belittling my hard work to interview a variety of folks working in the industry and report what I find.

 

 

Lee, if anything, "shill" might be on the polite side to describe what you're doing.

 

Since you seem to fancy yourself an investigative, critical writer, know this: how much time you spent with a source is irrelevant, as is how much effort you put into that conversation. While your effort is appreciated (and, in this case, it truly is, here, have a participation trophy), please have the dignity not to come crying a river if some of your readers feel like you're giving a pair of conmen a platform. Rather, put a good faith effort into asking yourself where you went wrong, and correct it.

[Thuaveta]

39 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

One thing you clearly are is a useful idiot.  You are being manipulated by bad mastering engineers like Brian Lucey who stand to lose money from the MQA approach.  By attacking honest journalists, you are creating large amounts of bad information that obscure the good news of more hirez music.  As a result many readers of the CA community will be uninformed about MQA and may miss the advantage of large catalogs of music.

 

Perhaps even worse, your constant attacks on those with a different opinion is scaring away good people from even wanting to participate on the board thereby lowering the quality of good discussion and exploration.

 

When a community has a widespread reputation for having biased discussion and personal attacks, very few people with experience want to participate. And that is what has happened here.

 

Quote

You have 5 posts.  Have you even followed the discussion and understand the basics of the topic?

 

Please don't appeal to authority, it's below both of us. And please don't call what you're doing journalism, it's an insult to the profession.

 

As for being a useful idiot, and if you want to insist on appeal to authority, I'll proudly be Bruno Putzeys and John Siau's useful idiot. I also tend to think that there's more competence, integrity, and knowledge of the matter at hand in either Anton Schlesinger's or Christoph Engemann's pinky nails than in your entire body, but that's just an opinion based on my reading of your many posts.

 

I think your problem isn't that the CA community is uninformed about MQA. It's that the CA community is very well informed about MQA, in a way that you happen to disagree with. Since you fancy yourself a journalist now, I'd wager the word you were looking for was "misinformed", something I'd therefore be led to believe you're trying to "correct". Now I can only wonder why.

 

[Thuaveta]

51 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

You have 5 posts and joined just a couple of weeks ago.  Have you even followed the whole discussion and understand the basics of the topic?

 

You need to put a good faith effort into asking yourself why you don't have more experience and why others have a different opinion.

 

Oh, and since you believe in learning by experience (I do too, it's something we completely agree on), it might be instructive to the CA community to compare "bad recording engineer" Brian Lucey's experience to yours, don't you think ?

 

So, with no further ado, and for everyone's convenience, here's Brian Lucey on AllMusic, and here's Lee Scoggins on AllMusic. Both, of course, have more experience than yours truly, and of course, experience isn't just quantitative, but it does take time to build, as Mr Scoggins so rightly pointed out.

 

For others, if you give value to Mr Scoggins' opinion and advice, and since experience is an important part of whose opinion you should listen to in a debate according to him, I think we can agree that, based on his recommendation and criteria, you should trust Brian Lucey's opinion rather than his.

[Thuaveta]

53 minutes ago, Norton said:

 

That may be the case, but yesterday I was streaming the Barenboim Elgar symphonies, glitch free wirelessly over my sub-par network,  via Tidal/MQA at 96 kHz ( the same resolution  as the non MQA downloads)  to my non MQA DAC.    These are recordings I am very familiar with and they sounded impressive.  

 

Theoretically your argument may be correct, but I'm not aware, in practice, of  many other services (Qobuz possibly?) that stream reliably at 96 kHz. In 2018, streaming  RBCD still seems a big deal (and a cost option) for most.

 

I'm sure MQA would argue they actually support streaming up to 384kHz, but I am aware that subsequent unfolds are consider by many to be simply proprietary upsampling and I don't have a MQA DAC by which to judge comparative SQ.

 

 

 

What you might be witnessing might not be the genius of MQA, but rather the hard work of many network engineers. You also happen to, maybe inadvertently, be making the exact same point that a number of others have been making, which is that bandwidth is abundant enough that MQA-as-compression is a solution looking for a problem, and not a solution to a problem.

 

Let's break it down.

 

@Miska posted a filesize comparison between MQA and FLAC right here.

 

TL;DR: FLAC, at identical resolution, is, give or take, 30% smaller. A 44.1/24 MQA file, which if I'm not mistaken unfolds to 96Khz, is only about 6% smaller than 176.4/18 FLAC. Since you've determined that your playback chain can deal with either, which would you rather have: MQA, or 176.4/18 ?

 

You can argue that Miska's post is based on a single file, and I agree with you that it'd be nice to have a wider pool to compare to, if only because the bitrate of FLAC compression fluctuates based on a number of factors, including content, so let's have a quick look at what it generally takes to stream FLAC, with a simple, comparative criteria to see if your "sub-par" network (I'm sure it isn't ) is fast enough to reliably do that.

 

Uncompressed CD-DA (or redbook) is 1,411.2 kbps.

96/24 FLAC is around a 1500 kbps (let's say 2000 Kbps to be comfortable).

192/24 FLAC is around twice that, let's make it 4000 Kbps.

 

You know what else is around those numbers ? That HD button on YouTube. According to Google, 720p (not 1080p, not 4k, but lowly 720p) is between 1,500 and 4,000 Kbps. Does that ballpark remind you of anything ?

 

In practical terms, if you have bandwidth enough to stream 720p YouTube videos, and assuming your streaming service has a good CDN (which they should, that's part of what you're paying them for, after all), you could just as easily stream HiRes FLAC rather than MQA. Put in wider terms, the pool of consumers that could comfortably stream FLAC is smaller than those who can comfortably stream Netflix in HD. And to keep with your anecdote, if you can reliably stream MQA, you could reliably stream uncompressed redbook. Doesn't that make you want to go out and hug one of those hardworking networking engineers at the manufacturer for you networking gear, at Tidal, and at your ISP, that made it possible ?

[Thuaveta]

5 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

200:1 payoffs are rare in consulting but not unusual on analytics projects at Fortune 50 companies.

 

Needless to say, the client hired us to build more models.

 

Wow, very impressive !

 

So let's ask about the intersection between your hobbies and professional life where your input and insight can be precious.

 

What would be your back-of-the-napkin estimate of an absolute best-case-for-them scenario of how much MQA Ltd is going to be making, as a business, now that we know they're moving into the mainstream ?

 

Speaking of MQA-as-a-business, what's the ownership structure (beyond the very vague "spun off from Meridian"), and who's bankrolling the likely not inconsequent expenses to get the format off the ground ? I mean, there's public filings, we know that Stuart and Rupert-from-Richemont's son are involved, and that launch parties and PR peeps are expensive, but not much else.

 

We also know that you spent 5 hours with Stuart. Now, with all due respect to your achievements in your hobbies, if the exchanges here are any indication, we can all agree that you're no technologist, and we can probably agree that your insights on the recording process are likely of little value to someone like Stuart, who has access to all the luminaries in the field. But yet, he spends five hours chatting with you, for  a blog piece. That seems like rather bad cost / benefit analysis on his PR people's side, because it's a significant investment of his time for, all due respect, not much payoff. It isn't like anything in your piece couldn't have been gathered in a small fraction of that time by a well-prepared writer. So either he's very bored, you're extraordinarily slow, or your investigation into MQA was only the topic of a relatively small part of that conversation.

 

On the other hand, for a guy like Stuart, I'd wager 5 hours of talking shop with a very experienced and proficient McKinsey's analyst with proven success on leveraging of data pipelines is another proposition entirely. Since you've repeatedly told us you were there as an independent journalist, and not in a professional capacity, you can't have allowed anything to have been NDA'd, now can you...

 

So, tell us - we've been told, again and again, that there's no money in high-end audio, that it's really a pauper's game from a manufacturer's perspective, that the clientele is ageing, that sales are down, etc, etc, etc.

 

What is it that both Arnault / LVMH and Rupert / Richemont see there ?

[Thuaveta]

3 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Thanks for the kind words, Thua.

 

Some minor corrections...

 

1.  I spent five hours talking with Ken Forsythe, a long-time associate of Bob’s who was involved in Meridian who he brought over when he set up the separate company.  Ken lives near me and our mutual friend Alan who owns hifibuys graciously gave us a room with a dCS DAC to do A/B comparisons on a Vandy/ARC system.

 

2.  A full McKinsey analysis would require lots of data I don’t have access to including music consumer data, fee and license data, MQA overhead, estimates of market penetration, size of hardware and pro recording markets, etc.  With that you could do a discounted a sales forecast, then get to NOPLAT cash flows then use a weighted average cost of capital to back into an estimated value.  Then, if you knew investor buy-ins, you could determine an estimated rate of return.  You might also look at strategic benefits to your Meridian investment and potential related products that you could launch.

 

3.  My interest in this is really based more on a love of hirez since I make hirez recordings when I am not doing analytics.

 

4.  I am not intimately familiar with MQA’s ownership structure but was not aware that Arnault had invested.  He has invested in Devialet.  What is your source for this?

 

5.  I have only met Bob twice recently and both brief conversations.  A while back our local audio club visited Meridian’s Atlanta facility and demonstrated his DSP speakers and talked about DVD-Audio but this was years ago when that format was still new.

 

6.  I have not signed an NDA but have been told things that are off the record.

 

Thanks for the clarifications Lee !

 

It's obvious that a McKinsey analysis would require loads more data. I was just curious if you had a seat-of-the pants guesstimate, based on your discussions.

 

Re Arnault, my apologies if my wording was ambiguous (and for not properly separating Groupe Arnault and LVMH).

Arnault himself does not have a hand in MQA, neither does LVMH that I know of. I was thinking of high-end audio as a whole, and his stake in Devialet, and wondering what it is both he and the Ruperts see there, and if there's anything beyond IP.

Meridian, assuming there isn't too much creative, Richemont accounting at play, doesn't seem to be a really profitable company, hence my curiosity. I can see "car market", if only because I'm sure both the owners of Richemont and LVMH would like to have a cut of a car sale that costs them a watch sale, but, since MQA rather clearly appears to be an attempt at, let's say, a strategic move, I'm curious what someone with your knowledge of the market and business expertise makes of the larger picture.

[Thuaveta]

49 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

My sources tell me Meridian is actually tremendously profitable firm and has made a boatload on licensing deals.

 

Please kindly note my use of "creative, Richemont accounting".

 

As far as 2015 is concerned, and public filings, your sources would appear to be correct, and it would appear that Meridian did indeed make a boatload by selling MQA to Reinet Investments SARL, a Luxembourg-registered subsidiary of Richemont.

 

Them losing money also doesn't mean they're losing money for everyone, of course... it's not like they aren't repaying their loans, or interest on their loans, now is it...

[Thuaveta]

Just now, rickca said:

I agree, that train left the station a long time ago.  You don't think MQA needs to generate consumer demand?

 

You really think they're going to leave it up to consumers to demand anything ? Because I hear both the RIAA and JAS are supportive of the technology.

[Thuaveta]

25 minutes ago, rickca said:

On an ironic note, here's a quote from the CEO of Roon 

Roon brings back the feel of owning music.

 

MQA is a gift to audio. Anybody who whines about (MQA) is ridiculous.

[Thuaveta]

4 minutes ago, Fair Hedon said:

The engineers wing of the Recording Academy recommendations for Hi-Rez AUdio.  40 odd pages, not a single mention of MQA. From Nov, 2107.

 

https://www.grammypro.com/sites/default/files/recommendations_for_hires_music_production_10_10_17.pdf

 

 

I was quoting Rob Stuart's Dec. 2015 MQA public filings (it's on page 4). Some may of course say "supportive" is a bit, somewhat, noncommital...

[Thuaveta]

12 minutes ago, Fair Hedon said:

The engineers wing of the Recording Academy recommendations for Hi-Rez AUdio.  40 odd pages, not a single mention of MQA. From Nov, 2107.

 

https://www.grammypro.com/sites/default/files/recommendations_for_hires_music_production_10_10_17.pdf

 

 

Pages 4:

 

Quote

Sales of Hi-Resolution Audio downloads from companies such as HD Tracks and Pro Studio Masters have become a healthy business with many subscription streaming services focusing on the delivery of higher quality audio, whether CD-quality or true Hi-Resolution using MQA. And now, most record companies require the delivery of hi-res masters because they recognize new opportunities to monetize better-sounding music.

 

And 34:

 

Quote

New technologies like Master Quality Authenticated (MQA), which enables hi-res audio streaming, make a difference in the marketplace. MQA is a particularly important enhancement for the consumer who wants the best audio quality but who also enjoys the musical experience of sites such as Apple Music and Spotify. Delivered via Tidal.com, MQA has gained acceptance from many of the most highly respected members of the professional audio community.

 

[Thuaveta]

Just now, Fair Hedon said:

NO mention of MQA with regard to any technical standards or workflow procedures.

 

I happen to know for a FACT that the MQA mention was insisted upon by Bob Ludwig, who is hoping to profit with MQA and was paid to make promotional videos.

 

Oh, ok. Sorry for missing your point.

[Thuaveta]

2 minutes ago, Shadders said:

Hi Lee,

OK - so what would be the relevance of my not experiencing that cables make a difference, to the discussion on MQA ?

Thanks and regards,

Shadders.

 

Not experiencing the differences that cables make could indicate you might not be easily suggestible to PR and marketing claims 

[Thuaveta]

12 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

You haven’t seen the MQA certified cables yet?

 

:~)

 

The ones Shunyata are about to announce ?

 

[Thuaveta]

For those who'd like a slightly lateral take on whether bandwidth savings matter to the experience of even mobile users going forward, there's an interesting piece on Qualcomm (the guys who make the radio chips in cellphones) right here. It's a bit starry-eyed, but contrast this to the utility claims MQA is making :

 

Quote

Sometime in the next two or three years, if all goes to plan, Qualcomm will play a leading role in building the world a new wireless network. LTE and 4G will be replaced by 5G, a new system that uses the super-high-frequency millimeter-wave spectrum to send way more data, way more quickly. "It's faster than what's in your home, faster than what's at work," says Sherif Hanna, Qualcomm's director of product marketing. You'll be able to download movies in a few seconds, or stream high-res VR content. Internet speeds will effectively stop being an issue.

 

[Thuaveta]

27 minutes ago, Alan B said:

 

It will be a .25 cent DAC, but will cost the consumer $25....Bob has to get his cut

 

In all fairness to .25 cent DACs, iPhones, for example, seem to not measure that badly, and, at 17 bits, are essentially everything you'll ever really get out of MQA...

 

Come to think about it, it'd make for a great marketing campaign... "MQA: Out of the box, it's worse than CD, but if you give us money, we'll make it sound as good as an iPhone from 3 years ago !".

[Thuaveta]

3 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Think about this for a minute.

 

The original 24/192 file is being folded into a 24/48 file, then unfolded, then played back while streaming with no loss of fidelity to experienced ears compared to the original file.

 

That seems to indicate the claimed “17 bits” contains all of the music.

 

The triangular encoding must be robust.

Please allow me to rephrase your argument in a way you'll be able to comprehend:

 

"The 16/44 file is being compressed into a much smaller file at around 320kbps, then uncompressed while streaming with no loss of fidelity to experienced ears. That seems to indicate the claimed "lossy mp3 compression" contains all of the music."

 

I'm not saying that 320kbps isn't lossy, I'm saying it's indistinguishable from the lossless original.

[Thuaveta]

22 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

 

With all due respect, as the editor of a publication, perhaps you should re-examine the meaning of the expression "investigative journalism", because sitting down with your chums to compare audio formats might seem like a stretch to some.

[Thuaveta]

3 hours ago, botrytis said:

They are getting paid to hawk it. It is as plain as the nose on your face. I mean Stereophile did testing and their graphs show what people have been saying in this thread (it is not exact as the original, etc) and then they say, "See they are the same", when anyone with any background in looking at data can see they are not.

 

 

57 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

With all due respect, why were pieces like this not published 2 years ago or more? I can't think of

a single reason why not except for relentless outside pressure.

 

Always remember not to ascribe to malice what can properly be explained by incompetence.


 

We all know that high-end audio is a small world. Stereophile (and despite what I just wrote, and my snapping at @John_Atkinson earlier, what follows isn't an indictment of 'em) as a publication, and as writers, are, quite simply, probably a bit too chummy with the industry they're covering.


 

Even if they're in a generally dominant position within their market, it likely isn't as dominant as it was a few years ago. As has been said before, they have a huge vested interest in maintaining good relationships with the manufacturers, both for advertising, but more importantly, for stuff to review. There's probably millions to be made for the industry by pushing MQA, everyone interested in audio and in their right mind wants more HiRes, and I wouldn't be surprised if Stuart and some of writers who wrote about MQA, at Stereophile or elsewhere, went back, quite literally, decades.


 

These relationships are likely relationships of trust, built over, once again, decades. Trust not to break an embargo, trust not to leak a product to a competitor, trust from the writers that what's being described by the manufacturers is what it says it is. The financial relationships are likely secondary compared to what can only be called friendships.


 

This, to me, and it's something that speaks highly of many of the writers' characters, is likely a much more important factor than any advertising contract: they trust their friends to tell them the truth, and to be candid with them, and they, very understandably, don't want to hurt their friends' livelihoods. Once they started getting on the MQA bus, getting off became impossibly difficult, because it'd mean not only admission that they'd failed, professionally, and failed in a manner that greatly diminishes and undermines the authority of the publication (since it's been preaching the gospel of losslessness, and they'd very publicly declared a lossy codec to be equal if not superior) but that they'd been swindled by people they trusted both personally and professionally. Given that so much in high-end audio is about psychology ("do you hear the night-and-day difference between these power cables I'm about to bring to market ?"), this breach of trust is, for any of the writers who worked on MQA both for the magazine and elsewhere, effectively fatal to the ability to both carry out, and be trusted for any subjectively-articulated review in the future.


 

At this point, there are certainly others, but I generally see three ways out of this mess for Stereophile as a publication:


 

a) a serious, thorough, methodical dismantling of MQA, from all angles including financial, which I'm personally uncertain the Stereophile writers are capable of, in terms of investigative journalistic technique or, secondarily, financial ressources. This would be what would be expected of a publication that has the public good at heart, but is unlikely to happen for a variety of reasons.

 

b) doubling-down on MQA support, which is unlikely given the cost in terms of credibility to the readership.

 

c) a pseudo-critical position, where a few reservations are stated by some writers, disregarded by others, and the reader is left confused as to what to think about MQA in general, and, confronted with contradictory analysis from trusted authority figures, drifts into passive acceptance. Knowingly or not, this is straight out of a political propaganda playbook (see below), and it artificially recreates a divide similar to subjectivist vs objectivist lines, which is the second-best thing that can happen to MQA after widespread, unquestioning adoption. This is what we're seeing now, it's unnecessary in light of the evidence, infuriating, and below the standards credible publications should hold themselves to.

 

 

[Thuaveta]

5 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

I ask the anti MQA brigade..why did Tidal, which has 2 million CD quality albums to stream, and the labels, sign contracts with MQA if it has so many supposed negatives? I ask for serious replies.

 

Tidal, I don't know. Labels are shareholders, so that might be an incentive, I don't know the details of the financials there. And, for them, there's the open question of what capabilities MQA's DRM has.

[Thuaveta]

44 minutes ago, oneway23 said:

Those in countries served by Qobuz obviously shouldn't even concern themselves w/ MQA if they're looking for hi-res streaming options.

 

They should, and that's the bigger problem.

[Thuaveta]

24 minutes ago, oneway23 said:

Not my hill to die on.

 

Keep in mind the Kindle 1984 precedent: assuming you want to guarantee your continued freedom to stream higher-than-MQA-quality content, it unfortunately is, whether you want it or not.

[Thuaveta]

52 minutes ago, mansr said:

Good luck finding even 1 million users who care.

 

If you don't give them the choice, they don't need to care.

[Thuaveta]

1 minute ago, Jim Austin said:

Stuart stands up in front of packed rooms and stands behind his claims.

 

If I may, so did Houdini and P.T Barnum...

[Thuaveta]

1 hour ago, Jim Austin said:

 

None of this proves that MQA is a good idea, that it's valid mathematically, or that its application to music makes sense, and it certainly doesn't prove that MQA sounds better. It does however show what some of you still seem to be questioning: sampling theory didn't end with Shannon. The body of theoretical work referred to in the latest MQA article/interview is real. 

 

If I may - if the body of theoretical work that's referred to is, to put it gently, questionably applicable to the point being made, why bother your readers with it, and, assuming it is not applicable, in what way is what Bob S. doing any different then explaining swimming pool accidents in the United States through Nicolas Cage's employment history ?