Popular Post nycaudiolistener Posted June 15, 2021 Popular Post Share Posted June 15, 2021 Hello. First post. I have not read all 929 pages of comments and my comment may be duplicative and/or redundant, but I played some songs with Apple lossless and Tidal MQA on an MQA-approved DAC and headphones, in a quiet room, for a professional person who has ears unlike anyone else I have ever met in my entire life. No details about the person. This person could immediately identify the differences between lossless and MQA. They greatly preferred the lossless. Basically, the person told me that they believe MQA is using something like sidechained 32-band compressors to realign very short differences in time between different frequencies along with a time-stretching tool that shortens or extends the waveform at various frequencies to make up for the slip and slide of the timing of various frequencies. To this person’s ears, the artifact of this process is that, for example, a snare drum sounds different in different parts of a song, depending on what else is going on, what other instruments are playing, in different parts of the song. Whereas, on the lossless file, the snare drum sounds the same throughout the song. In this person’s opinion, which they were clear, could be completely wrong, and was based on listening to only two songs, from the same artist, is that MQA is modifying the lossless files in a way that is very noticeable as well as being computationally difficult and technologically impressive, from an engineering perspective. They also said they hated it and liked the lossless better. I, on the other hand, prefer the MQA, probably because I like the more “percussive” nature of the processing imposed on the music. To each their own. But, definitely, under no circumstance, is MQA “lossless”… rather, it is a heavily processed remaster of the actual master. Peace! botrytis, kumakuma, Currawong and 2 others 4 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 15, 2021 Share Posted June 15, 2021 I adjusted the volume of the Apple lossless up one "click" to compensate for that. Like I was saying, the person's ears told them that MQA was literally changing the music, by modifying the time alignment of sounds at different frequencies, and calling it "impulse response repair", in order to collect royalties. It's actually kind of amazing people have bought it hook, line, and sinker as a "repair" of "digital blurring" when, in fact, it's "repairing" musicians timing. Sigh. The songs used for comparison were Stressed Out and Jumpsuit, by the way. Currawong 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 15, 2021 Share Posted June 15, 2021 They also said the panning on the MQA seemed more centered than the lossless. Currawong 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 15, 2021 Share Posted June 15, 2021 In summary, if digital is inherently "unnatural" more digital doesn't make it more "natural." botrytis 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 15, 2021 Share Posted June 15, 2021 Yup. Sounds about right. I hear that! Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 19, 2021 Share Posted June 19, 2021 On 6/16/2021 at 7:24 PM, Currawong said: Thank you for taking the time to do this. If your professional friend is willing to share any more impressions, they would be most welcome. I've been waiting for such a person to do something like this for some time. I had guessed that a seasoned professional would be able to take a good guess at what was being done to the music. It's rather like tweaking a photo to make it pop I guess. It's very visible to me when people oversaturate the colours in photos to make them pop. Looks impressive to the untrained eye, but the experienced one can see it isn't representative of the reality. If you want to kill MQA dead, you'd reverse-engineer whatever processing they were actually doing and make something similar freely available. Hence my comments on it sounding like it has been run in through a 3D plug-in. nycaudiolistener provided a better potential analysis. Lately people have been talking about pre-upsampling music with software that uses a million tap or better sync filter. Why not something similar for people who want an "MQA effect" on any music they choose? Might require some serious programming effort though. You're welcome! If you want to play with some unrelated, but rather advanced DSP, might check out Neural Mix™ Pro - Algoriddim and, in particular, the drum, bass, guitar, and vocals separation AI. Pretty impressive stuff! I suspect MQA was built using similar "black box" AI techniques, and MQA doesn't really know what it's doing to the music, exactly, either. Other than to say it is using that compressor / exciter concept, sidechaining it, and not questioning the results too much. More likely than not, this technique was borrowed from Meridian's DSP speaker line of products and repackaging into a file format. Anyway. Check out Neural Mix Pro for some fun times with AI! Currawong 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 19, 2021 Share Posted June 19, 2021 11 hours ago, Fokus said: But that amounts to the use of a different master, perhaps even a different mix, and is not an innate part of the MQA technology. DSP is an innate part of the MQA technology. If your ears can't discern the rather obvious differences between the DSP that literally sits at the heart of the MQA remastering process (the outcome of which sits in a lossless FLAC file container) and plain old unprocessed Lossless FLAC (which also sits in a lossless FLAC file container), maybe you should rely on the opinions of people who can discern the differences. Respectfully. I mean, my god, look at Meridian's $20,000 speaker systems, that go on and on and on about the DSP used in the speakers. DSP is literally this company's core competency. The notion that MQA isn't using DSP to tinker with the timing of music is ridiculous. That's exactly what it does. Love it or hate it, that's what it does. I happen to like it. But, I am not living under any delusion that it's what they heard in the studio. It's not. It's "enhanced" sort of. If you like that sort of thing. Currawong 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 26, 2021 Share Posted June 26, 2021 On 6/16/2021 at 7:24 PM, Currawong said: Thank you for taking the time to do this. If your professional friend is willing to share any more impressions, they would be most welcome. I've been waiting for such a person to do something like this for some time. I had guessed that a seasoned professional would be able to take a good guess at what was being done to the music. It's rather like tweaking a photo to make it pop I guess. It's very visible to me when people oversaturate the colours in photos to make them pop. Looks impressive to the untrained eye, but the experienced one can see it isn't representative of the reality. If you want to kill MQA dead, you'd reverse-engineer whatever processing they were actually doing and make something similar freely available. Hence my comments on it sounding like it has been run in through a 3D plug-in. nycaudiolistener provided a better potential analysis. Lately people have been talking about pre-upsampling music with software that uses a million tap or better sync filter. Why not something similar for people who want an "MQA effect" on any music they choose? Might require some serious programming effort though. Front-of-house mixer. Live sound for artists at venues like Madison Square Garden. At age 23. Great ears. On an unrelated note, Neil Young is probably one of the few artists who has heard his own work in MQA. Most others probably don’t bother listening to their own work, in new compression formats. Have better things to do. Just my two cents.. HalSF 1 Link to comment
nycaudiolistener Posted June 26, 2021 Share Posted June 26, 2021 On 6/20/2021 at 3:42 AM, Fokus said: If you want to embark on the very praiseworthy endeavour of criticising MQA then you'd better educate yourself on what exactly it does do and what it does not do, instead of muddying the waters. These things are not exactly a secret anymore. Your allegations that the MQA codec itself wilfully tampers with macro-aesthetical properties of the music signal such as dynamics and imaging are evidently wrong. If such effects are observed then they are the result of additional remastering, performed concurrently with the creation of the MQA version. Also you might do well not judging from afar the listening abilities or technical knowledge of people you don't know, people who have been studying this in detail since, oh, 2014. I am sure the MQA cabal is very happy with noise sources like you. Appears I pinched the nerve of some crank on the internet! You made my day! Lol. Currawong 1 Link to comment
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