MQA is Vaporware

[The Computer Audiophile]

@ECL I encourage you to name a single thing that MQA improves and have an open back and forth discussion about that single thing at a time. It’s much easier to focus. Us poop throwing monkeys can’t concentrate very well. 

[MikeyFresh]

1 hour ago, ECL said:

someone who evades all the scientific discussion and just parrots misinformation

You've just described yourself quite well haven't you? Where have you addressed any of the very well made points in the various posts above at all? You haven't, at all.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

there is no way I can fight the flood of spurious misinformation above.

Thats because there is no spurious misinformation above to fight, if there were you'd have made specific reference to it and provided some sort of substantive reply.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

Third, I am not pro-MQA.

Then why are you here making claims of spurious misinformation and the like?

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

but certainly educated enough to peer review that all the critiques so far against MQA have failed to pass even the basics of scientific methodology, and are total amateur hour not even worthy of MS level let alone Ph.D. or post-graduate level.

Pure BS, and too easy for you to make this claim with absolutely nothing to back any of it up. If the critiques were so flawed then why has there never been anything remotely approaching a credible response or rebuttal to them? Wouldn't it have been wise and appropriate for Bob Stuart or the trade press to have presented a real response to the various well prepared critiques backed by real repeatable measurements by now? Did you note how Bob Stuart took 6 weeks to muster up the one pathetic/useless response to the GoldenSound video that he even made?

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

To anyone over IQ 108, this should be clear enough to differentiate me from some paid bot who comes in just to troll and market MQA.

Wow so I'm guessing in your case we're dealing with some serious higher intelligence then? Do you want a medal, or a chest to pin it on?

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

one can call me an hero of honesty and understatement to call it ALMOST LOSSY

Actually you had called it almost lossless, and MQA called it lossless, then changed that to better than lossless, when in fact it's lossy.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

"LOSING NOTHING IN EXCHANGE FOR GAINING EXTRA FIDELITY."

Simply false, and thats been demonstrated more than once, as well as backed up by controlled listening tests such as the McGill study.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

Sixth, the claim that we are at a place where bandwidth doesn't matter couldn't be further from the truth.

Depends on the person and how/where they listen. I don't really listen much on a mobile data connection where it might matter, but I do listen a lot at home on my LAN, and there it does not matter to me nor likely anyone with a decent broadband connection.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

people who weigh a list of PROS vs CONS

We've done that here, and you'd know that by now had you actually read any appreciable portion of this admittedly long thread.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

wildly exaggerative mismarketing and not delivering truthfully on its claims.

Is entirely unnecessary when a product or technology can stand on its own and clearly provide value and efficacy, right?

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

making sure a bunch of nazis don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Ridiculous assertion, so now the real problem here is nazi related?

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

WHERE ARE ALL THE OPEN-SOURCERS trying to make an OPEN STANDARD to do what MQA is trying to do?

You'll have a hard time finding very many people working hard on solutions to problems that don't actually exist.

 

1 hour ago, ECL said:

Will the mismarketing and exposure of false claims permanently damage

Bob Stuart's reputation and that of the trade press too? Yes thats already happened, and one day his money losing venture currently about £40 million under water and counting will vanish when the investors decide to stop throwing good money after bad.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, ECL said:

But I don't care about that as much as making sure a bunch of nazis don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Ouch. I missed this. You lose. You took it there, after being presented objective data from @Jud and @Archimago that shows MQA doesn’t do what it claims. 
 

 

[WAM]

WC Fields still rules... (“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”)

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

@ECL What is this extra fidelity of which you speak? 

[ECL]

I don't care if he used owls and rats to gain more info that is POSSIBLY useful. I do care about the A-D-A A/B tests in studio, with humans, show something.

 

For those who are civil and not monkeys throwing ad hominem predicates, I apologise if you thought I was referring to you. I am not.

 

"You applaud Bob for stating what everyone on earth knows and has stated for years? Strange."  No, the contradiction to your quote is all over this thread, at least half of the people's arguments are made as if they are completely ignorant of those statements, and make arguments and counter-claims as if they do hold those statements to be false.

 

"You seem to have fallen hook line and sinker for all the technical BS from BS. MQA says it improves items that it actually hurts. It has been shown objectively many times."  Show me ONE. Everything I've seen so far presumes the middle D stage in the A-D-A SR paradigm to be the golden standard while ignoring the lossyness in the "-" hyphen-joint stages. And even worse, ignores the already documented issues in those phases, and makes no measurements about restoration of damage caused by those effects. Which is, I believe, what every claim about MQA is built on. So you can't test MQA without testing those.

 

 

"Fifth, to claim that ALMOST LOSSLESS is the same as LOSSY is a disingenuous argument" Probably it was TL;DR, so I'll use an analogy...

I deliver to you a bag of food. Cheeseburger, fries, napkins, and also in that bag are some invisible rocks. We put it through two Star Trek teleporters, which are named A and B.

 

A gives you almost perfect replication of the food but has issues that "everyone on earth knows and has stated for years", and the invisible rocks are also almost perfect.

B gives you a cheeseburger that's different from A and claims to be better, by addressing issues that "everyone on earth knows and has stated for years". A lot of people say hey, yeah, it does taste better. Others don't, but there's no currently known impartial testing on it because the facts are in secrecy and the testers claiming it's worse are only comparing to cheeseburger A as the gold standard rather than the OG cheeseburger. Compared to A, any way that B gets better will by definition be considered lossy, if assuming this logical fallacy. But why not compare to OG cheeeseburger instead? Something is rotten in Denmark, my fellows! And oh yeah, the makers of teleporter B admit that the invisible rocks won't be quite as good as the OG invisible rocks and admit they're lossy. And also their marketing department made some misrepresentations which they were caught on. Lots of hooting chimps who understand less than 5% about teleportation science get all excited about that and start parroting the enemies of B and take on tribal characteristics similar to witch-mania in the middle ages.   

 

 

 

 

 

[ECL]

I assumed by now that if copying A into different competing products B and C is at issue, then anyone with a modicum of honesty would immediately flag statements of the type "C is not as good as B because it differs" as idiocy. I have an open challenge to EVERYONE in this forum quoting all the "established science in this forum" to give a SINGLE EXAMPLE of said references which do not make this heinous sophomoric mistake. Henceforth, until such example is given, the null hypothesis is in effect, that it has not been established at all, that MQA measures worse than FLAC/PCM in comparison to the originally performed sonic characteristics.

 

Whew, glad we could get that one out of the way.

[The Computer Audiophile]

There’s no need for long analogies about burgers and fries. Sticking to audio will work much better. 
 

If I understand you correctly, you want to compare MQA to PCM, but from the original source before it has been turned into either? 
 

I’m confused because this makes no sense and is likely not what you’re trying to say. 

[DuckToller]

1 hour ago, ECL said:

First, a troll is not by definition, "someone who disagrees with you." 

(...)

Oufff,

Looks like you've been hit hard by the partisan response army. 😎

In my terms, either because I'm no English native or because I can't cut 108, you must have invested a minimum of 3 h of your precious time to educate us trolls about our intellectual shortcomings and your balanced scientific approach (and the heroics of BS). 🥸

The way you are trying to set anyone apart from your almost genius approach of skipping objective and scientific analysis combined with white glove selection of MQA tecnalities may give insight what's important enough for your personal investment on this thinly veiled rhetorical approach.

May the sun meet us at 108!

😇

[ECL]

Quote

There’s no need for long analogies about burgers and fries. Sticking to audio will work much better. 

If I understand you correctly, you want to compare MQA to PCM, but from the original source before it has been turned into either? 

I’m confused because this makes no sense and is likely not what you’re trying to say. 

 

Thanks for the good question. Let me label some variables.

OG - The original soundwaves of the actual performance

DD - The storage of the OG in lossless digital format, after a LOSSY conversion to DD through digital recording

CW - A placeholder for the current paradigm of lossless digital media (PCM/FLAC, etc.)

NW - A placeholder for "new wave" digital paradigm, different from CW and making strongly questioned claims about being closer to OG than CW.

 

Now then, whether true or not, the entire pyramid of goals and claims that MQA is predicated upon, are such:

1. The A-D-A sound reproduction paradigm we have now, has flaws which science has established ("that everyone on earth has known about for years").

2. The CW format is full of useless or semi-useless "garbage data". For example, in Hi-Res, a majority of the file-size is useless bits that microphones can't even register during recording.

3. If we sacrifice taking on a tiny bit of lossyness in fidelity to the "garbage data" in DD, we can gain data-space used for improving fidelity in audible characteristics which everyone on earth knows are suffering lossyness relative to the OG, then a NW format superior to OW in fidelity to the CW is possible.

4. MQA claims to have successfully created a NW (Note: I am not claiming for or against that claim.)

 

Now then, iif anything is superior to something else, it has to be different in some way. If not different, then it's the same, and same things are equal, not superior or inferior.

 

I cannot establish that 16/44 PCM is superior to MP3, by measuring how faithful it is to MP3, and marking up any differences in PCM as "distortion caused by the PCM format." Are you smart enough to tell me why? Of course you are. Because that would be begging the question that MP3 is perfect and it's impossible to be superior to it because any difference will automatically be counted as "worse than MP3." Well, the elephant in the room is this: 100% of the dozen or so "scientific measurements" I read in this forum and others, are all doing a charlatan trick of exactly that.

 

If someone does a "scientific measurement" between NW and CW to see which is better, and says "NW measured different than CW so therefore measures inferior to CW", we have what SHOULD be an obvious problem even to a layperson: this gives NW no way to be superior to CW, and at very best it could only be equal to it, perhaps only better at data compression but under these premises, impossible to transcend the CW.

 

So to finally answer the question, if you record OG into competing formats NW and CW, any test that says one measures worse than the other because it's different, is absolute QUACKERY and JUNK SCIENCE. You need to do something like RMS deviation scores on both, relative to the OG, and the one with higher deviance WILL be definitely objectively worse in such case; though you could still argue about subjectives since one might have higher sum deviance in things which matter less, while less deviance in areas that matter more to sound quality.

 

Hope the helps 

 

 

[botrytis]

44 minutes ago, ECL said:

 

Thanks for the good question. Let me label some variables.

OG - The original soundwaves of the actual performance

DD - The storage of the OG in lossless digital format, after a LOSSY conversion to DD through digital recording

CW - A placeholder for the current paradigm of lossless digital media (PCM/FLAC, etc.)

NW - A placeholder for "new wave" digital paradigm, different from CW and making strongly questioned claims about being closer to OG than CW.

 

Now then, whether true or not, the entire pyramid of goals and claims that MQA is predicated upon, are such:

1. The A-D-A sound reproduction paradigm we have now, has flaws which science has established ("that everyone on earth has known about for years").

2. The CW format is full of useless or semi-useless "garbage data". For example, in Hi-Res, a majority of the file-size is useless bits that microphones can't even register during recording.

3. If we sacrifice taking on a tiny bit of lossyness in fidelity to the "garbage data" in DD, we can gain data-space used for improving fidelity in audible characteristics which everyone on earth knows are suffering lossyness relative to the OG, then a NW format superior to OW in fidelity to the CW is possible.

4. MQA claims to have successfully created a NW (Note: I am not claiming for or against that claim.)

 

Now then, iif anything is superior to something else, it has to be different in some way. If not different, then it's the same, and same things are equal, not superior or inferior.

 

I cannot establish that 16/44 PCM is superior to MP3, by measuring how faithful it is to MP3, and marking up any differences in PCM as "distortion caused by the PCM format." Are you smart enough to tell me why? Of course you are. Because that would be begging the question that MP3 is perfect and it's impossible to be superior to it because any difference will automatically be counted as "worse than MP3." Well, the elephant in the room is this: 100% of the dozen or so "scientific measurements" I read in this forum and others, are all doing a charlatan trick of exactly that.

 

If someone does a "scientific measurement" between NW and CW to see which is better, and says "NW measured different than CW so therefore measures inferior to CW", we have what SHOULD be an obvious problem even to a layperson: this gives NW no way to be superior to CW, and at very best it could only be equal to it, perhaps only better at data compression but under these premises, impossible to transcend the CW.

 

So to finally answer the question, if you record OG into competing formats NW and CW, any test that says one measures worse than the other because it's different, is absolute QUACKERY and JUNK SCIENCE. You need to do something like RMS deviation scores on both, relative to the OG, and the one with higher deviance WILL be definitely objectively worse in such case; though you could still argue about subjectives since one might have higher sum deviance in things which matter less, while less deviance in areas that matter more to sound quality.

 

Hope the helps 

 

 

It makes it understandable that you have no clue what you are talking about.

[Archimago]

Guys, I think this could be what ChatGPT trolling looks like in the days ahead.

 

Or at the very least this is not normal human thinking. As you can see, there's actually no information in these posts from ECL. Just pseudo-philosophical mental masturbation, presumably trying to dazzle us?!

 

Anyhow, I'll bite and address one sentence from the last post that seems odd, but let's consider it at face value:

"Now then, iif anything is superior to something else, it has to be different in some way. If not different, then it's the same, and same things are equal, not superior or inferior."

 

 

MQA and others claim that MQA-CD is true to the master. When I decode the MQA-CD file above, it even says 352.8kHz on my DAC like the master file. So here's a simple question for ECL:

Nobody here is saying MQA-CD is equal to the master. Clearly the graph above shows that full MQA decoding is different. Is the decoded MQA-CD output above then superior, or inferior to the master recording?

 

Perhaps @ECL can illuminate our understanding using whatever science he wishes.

 

- If MQA decoding is superior in some way, it would be nice to know why he/she thinks this is so.

- If MQA decoding in inferior, then we're all agreed that MQA(-CD) is lacking, right?

 

A concise, 3 paragraphs at most should suffice as an answer. Preferably with at least a single illustration of the scientific rationale. Thanks.

[Jud]

3 hours ago, ECL said:

First, a troll is not by definition, "someone who disagrees with you."  I'd say a troll is someone who evades all the scientific discussion and just parrots misinformation as "It's already 100% established", then launches into ad hominem attacks or conspiracy theories. So here the real trolls are the ones who accused me of it.

 

Second, there is no way I can fight the flood of spurious misinformation above. Much of it has clearly not even researched the basic goals and principles of what MQA is and is trying to do. And is completely ignorant on the science of the flaws in digital recording that MQA rightly acknowledges and CLAIMS to be improving.

 

Third, I am not pro-MQA. I am pro-evolving past the heinous flaws in current digital recording/playback methodology and highly interested that MQA at least rightly lists off what those are. I am not inner circle to MQA nor the expensive equipment needed, to tell if those claims are correct, but certainly educated enough to peer review that all the critiques so far against MQA have failed to pass even the basics of scientific methodology, and are total amateur hour not even worthy of MS level let alone Ph.D. or post-graduate level.

 

I have given ample volumes of critique against MQA, especially in what I called mismarketing and proprietary secrecy which would hold back global cooperation and intelligentsia from collaborative consortia of bringing the legitimately superior goals of MQA further. To anyone over IQ 108, this should be clear enough to differentiate me from some paid bot who comes in just to troll and market MQA.

 

Fourth, the claim that MQA at a 16/44 or 48 is up to 50% more data is a blatant misinformational propaganda lie, far worse than any misrepresentation made by MQA itself. It's at roughly 1:1 or only micro higher, and significantly compressed for Hi-Res, which is what all audiophiles are more concerned about since Hi-Res brings significant magnification to the frequency bandwidth for the cutoff filtering, which CREATES LESS FALSE DIGITAL ARTIFACTS in the AUDIBLE frequencies.

 

Fifth, to claim that ALMOST LOSSLESS is the same as LOSSY is a disingenuous argument when the topic is about slight lossyness in INAUDIBLE frequencies in a format whose A-to-D was ALREADY extremely lossy in these frequencies due to microphone limitations. If we are lossy in inaudible areas that microphones can't even record, and we trade off SLIGHT lossyness in this "garbage data" for actual GAINS in the reconstruction of audible frequencies, then besides that being KUDOS FOR ABSOLUTE GENIUS, we can make some judgements about the kind of person who understates this as "ALMOST LOSSLESS." That person could've hyped it a lot more than merely saying ALMOST LOSSY. That person is using understatement and OVERVALUING the points against them in an extreme act of honesty and civility to propagate higher quality discussion. That person is a hero of honesty, civility, and understatement when calling it ALMOST LOSSLESS when they could have deservedly and easily given it a more deserving title like "LOSING NOTHING OF VALUE IN EXCHANGE FOR GAINING EXTRA FIDELITY." If anything, we need to re-educate people with a greater vocabulary than just LOSSY vs LOSSLESS. Let's make some new concepts such as GAINY. GAINY represents any format which RECOVERS losses made over an exisiting A-to-D-to-A paradigm, giving greater fidelity to the original A. FLAC has 0 GAINYNESS and as such, recovers NONE of the lossy damage which has been scientifically shown to occur in the current A-to-D-to-A sound reproduction paradigm. 

 

Now then, it is claimed that MQA is a GAINY format which recovers some of those losses and is therefore, when the rubber meets the road, actually LESS lossy than PCM/FLAC/etc. Obviously, an MQA enemy could propagandize this GAINYNESS by actually measuring it as LOSSY, by comparing it to the middle-stage D rather than original-stage A. But only if disingenuous and dishonest and deliberately ignoring the main thesis of MQA as invalid before even starting the troll attacks against it.

 

Sixth, the claim that we are at a place where bandwidth doesn't matter couldn't be further from the truth. YES, TRUE, we are at a place where you can actually pay LESS to get lossless Hi-Res from Amazon, than compressed ALMOST-LOSSY from Tidal. And I never claimed otherwise. I'm the honest one here who acknowledges pros and cons.

 

Seventh, a "partisan" in my book is someone whose pro- and con- list is 100% pros or 100% cons and is incapable of having an erudite productive dialogue. If we were to believe intelligence experts like Edward deBono, we'd classify the people who deliberately try to force data/information to 100% support a view as IDIOTS, people who weigh a list of PROS vs CONS as SMART, and people who use a list of PROS and CONS to generate a third category called INTERESTING, and use the three categories to generate intellectual PROGRESS, as geniuses. I started out with P and C to a group of only C, and hinted at how we can discuss I, and all I got was more C.

 

At the end of the day, the elephant in the room is this, and NO ONE here is talking about it so hasn't even passed level 1 out of 10 in due diligence:

As Bob Stuart CORRECTLY says, all the recording engineers in studio COMPLAIN that the A-to-D-to-A PERFORM-RECORD-PLAYBACK tests right in the studio show that what goes in IS NOT WHAT COMES OUT. Compared right next to analogue in the same studio, the analogue is still performing better in SOME metrics over digital. Unlike poop-throwing chimps, I applaud him in giving a calm, clear, thorough, and civil explanation of the hypotheses for why this is the case, based on our current scientific understanding of all the known phenomena from multi-disciplinary fields coming together. I applaud anyone seeking to TACKLE these issues rather than stick their head in the sand and proclaim current digital formats as be-all-end-all. Heroes raise the bar, fundamentalist dogmatists fight advancement. What we know so far is that in studio A-to-D-to-A A/B testing, significant improvements WERE made in these issues.

 

My concerns are that there is no openness to what's going on, and how much of the advancements made there are really and truly getting to END USERS from a dual-corporate-monopoly that has currently exhibited no remorse in wildly exaggerative mismarketing and not delivering truthfully on its claims. But I don't care about that as much as making sure a bunch of nazis don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. WHERE ARE ALL THE OPEN-SOURCERS trying to make an OPEN STANDARD to do what MQA is trying to do? Nowhere, just chimps throwing poop and sticking their head in the sand and claiming PCM/FLAC is the be-all-end-all highest summit humanity will ever reach in recording and playback. DISGUSTING.   

 

What people familiar with these topics should be legitimately concerned about is:

1. HOW WELL does it MQA achieve its stated goals? Surely it can do better.

2. IF it can do better, WHO IS EVOLVING THAT improvement?

3. WILL PROPRIETARY SECRECY handicap the rest of the industry from taking these concepts to further levels of perfection?

4. Will the mismarketing and exposure of false claims permanently damage the LEGITIMATE goals MQA has correctly listed, as what is holding digital media back from higher levels of fidelity?

 

My prediction is that none of the trolls here will address any of that, and will default back to their PCM/FLAC is the be-all-end-all which needs none of the improvements that Bob Stuart listed, in spite of the fact that those are now scientifically established flaws in the current world of digital formats.

 

Cheers and Peace.

 

Conspiracy theories, caps lock, and calling people who disagree with you "Nazis." You've hit the trifecta, buddy.
 

You owe me two things:
 

After you used your screed to call *other* folks unscientific, my irony meter broke. You owe me a new one.
 

I lost a significant portion of my family to the Holocaust. After that remark about Nazis, you owe me (and everyone else here) an apology.

[Currawong]

 

5 hours ago, ECL said:

Second, there is no way I can fight the flood of spurious misinformation above. Much of it has clearly not even researched the basic goals and principles of what MQA is and is trying to do. And is completely ignorant on the science of the flaws in digital recording that MQA rightly acknowledges and CLAIMS to be improving.

 

There are plenty of people here who have spent years researching it. Many of us know engineers with decades of experience in digital conversion who have analysed MQA in detail. The things MQA are actually doing, don't improve anything, but, in actual application, make things worse.  For example, minimum phase type filters, which MQA uses, ruin the timing information necessary for the brain to reconstruct the the placement of instruments on a soundstage. You can literally pass audio through a minimum phase filter and compare the before and after, and see the phase shift.  The issues with ADCs cannot be fixed post conversion by screwing up the audio even more.

 

5 hours ago, ECL said:

Third, I am not pro-MQA. I am pro-evolving past the heinous flaws in current digital recording/playback methodology and highly interested that MQA at least rightly lists off what those are. I am not inner circle to MQA nor the expensive equipment needed, to tell if those claims are correct, but certainly educated enough to peer review that all the critiques so far against MQA have failed to pass even the basics of scientific methodology, and are total amateur hour not even worthy of MS level let alone Ph.D. or post-graduate level.

So, now we're into the ad-hominem attacks.  

5 hours ago, ECL said:

 

I have given ample volumes of critique against MQA, especially in what I called mismarketing and proprietary secrecy which would hold back global cooperation and intelligentsia from collaborative consortia of bringing the legitimately superior goals of MQA further. To anyone over IQ 108, this should be clear enough to differentiate me from some paid bot who comes in just to troll and market MQA.

"[L]egitimately superior goals of MQA". I think you missed that their goals were to earn billions processing all music through their machine, collecting royalties from studios, manufacturers, streaming companies, and the whole industry, basically. They got caught out lying about their technology, however. 

5 hours ago, ECL said:

 

Fourth, the claim that MQA at a 16/44 or 48 is up to 50% more data is a blatant misinformational propaganda lie, far worse than any misrepresentation made by MQA itself. It's at roughly 1:1 or only micro higher, and significantly compressed for Hi-Res, which is what all audiophiles are more concerned about since Hi-Res brings significant magnification to the frequency bandwidth for the cutoff filtering, which CREATES LESS FALSE DIGITAL ARTIFACTS in the AUDIBLE frequencies.

There's more than enough processing power available, even in off-the-shelf DA converter chips, to avoid this. MQA, however, are claiming their music has high-res content, which is aliased content, the result of their digital filters. Then, don't forget that the MQA data is often stored within the audible frequency range. If you have an MQA CD, you basically have 13-bit audio.
Another example of MQA claiming one benefit, while making something else worse.

 

5 hours ago, ECL said:

Fifth, to claim that ALMOST LOSSLESS is the same as LOSSY is a disingenuous argument when the topic is about slight lossyness in INAUDIBLE frequencies in a format whose A-to-D was ALREADY extremely lossy in these frequencies due to microphone limitations. If we are lossy in inaudible areas that microphones can't even record, and we trade off SLIGHT lossyness in this "garbage data" for actual GAINS in the reconstruction of audible frequencies, then besides that being KUDOS FOR ABSOLUTE GENIUS, we can make some judgements about the kind of person who understates this as "ALMOST LOSSLESS." That person could've hyped it a lot more than merely saying ALMOST LOSSY. That person is using understatement and OVERVALUING the points against them in an extreme act of honesty and civility to propagate higher quality discussion. That person is a hero of honesty, civility, and understatement when calling it ALMOST LOSSLESS when they could have deservedly and easily given it a more deserving title like "LOSING NOTHING OF VALUE IN EXCHANGE FOR GAINING EXTRA FIDELITY." If anything, we need to re-educate people with a greater vocabulary than just LOSSY vs LOSSLESS. Let's make some new concepts such as GAINY. GAINY represents any format which RECOVERS losses made over an exisiting A-to-D-to-A paradigm, giving greater fidelity to the original A. FLAC has 0 GAINYNESS and as such, recovers NONE of the lossy damage which has been scientifically shown to occur in the current A-to-D-to-A sound reproduction paradigm. 

1+1=3 if I say it is. Thank you for providing a good example of a bunch of logical fallacies. 
MQA, nor anything else, can recover the losses caused by conventional AD conversion. If it were possible, after almost a decade of MQA, there's good reason we don't see it all through the recording industry.

5 hours ago, ECL said:

 

Now then, it is claimed that MQA is a GAINY format which recovers some of those losses and is therefore, when the rubber meets the road, actually LESS lossy than PCM/FLAC/etc. Obviously, an MQA enemy could propagandize this GAINYNESS by actually measuring it as LOSSY, by comparing it to the middle-stage D rather than original-stage A. But only if disingenuous and dishonest and deliberately ignoring the main thesis of MQA as invalid before even starting the troll attacks against it.

 

Sixth, the claim that we are at a place where bandwidth doesn't matter couldn't be further from the truth. YES, TRUE, we are at a place where you can actually pay LESS to get lossless Hi-Res from Amazon, than compressed ALMOST-LOSSY from Tidal. And I never claimed otherwise. I'm the honest one here who acknowledges pros and cons.

 

Seventh, a "partisan" in my book is someone whose pro- and con- list is 100% pros or 100% cons and is incapable of having an erudite productive dialogue. If we were to believe intelligence experts like Edward deBono, we'd classify the people who deliberately try to force data/information to 100% support a view as IDIOTS, people who weigh a list of PROS vs CONS as SMART, and people who use a list of PROS and CONS to generate a third category called INTERESTING, and use the three categories to generate intellectual PROGRESS, as geniuses. I started out with P and C to a group of only C, and hinted at how we can discuss I, and all I got was more C.

"IDIOTS". If MQA had just been sold as a mastering method to studios, without the file format nonsense (which was designed to lock in hardware manufacturers) it would have been ok. As it is, I and other people have complained about the awful results with batch processed albums on TIDAL, where old jazz and classical albums are ruined.  The same thing has happened with spacial audio on Apple, but at least you can switch that off.

5 hours ago, ECL said:

 

At the end of the day, the elephant in the room is this, and NO ONE here is talking about it so hasn't even passed level 1 out of 10 in due diligence:

As Bob Stuart CORRECTLY says, all the recording engineers in studio COMPLAIN that the A-to-D-to-A PERFORM-RECORD-PLAYBACK tests right in the studio show that what goes in IS NOT WHAT COMES OUT. Compared right next to analogue in the same studio, the analogue is still performing better in SOME metrics over digital. Unlike poop-throwing chimps, I applaud him in giving a calm, clear, thorough, and civil explanation of the hypotheses for why this is the case, based on our current scientific understanding of all the known phenomena from multi-disciplinary fields coming together. I applaud anyone seeking to TACKLE these issues rather than stick their head in the sand and proclaim current digital formats as be-all-end-all. Heroes raise the bar, fundamentalist dogmatists fight advancement. What we know so far is that in studio A-to-D-to-A A/B testing, significant improvements WERE made in these issues.

"[P]oop-throwing chimps". The problem is using one argument to justify something that does not fix the actual problem, which is the MQA playbook.  You're doing a similar thing, having a go at people calling you a troll, then replying with a bunch of ad-hominem comments. 

5 hours ago, ECL said:

 

My concerns are that there is no openness to what's going on, and how much of the advancements made there are really and truly getting to END USERS from a dual-corporate-monopoly that has currently exhibited no remorse in wildly exaggerative mismarketing and not delivering truthfully on its claims. But I don't care about that as much as making sure a bunch of nazis don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. WHERE ARE ALL THE OPEN-SOURCERS trying to make an OPEN STANDARD to do what MQA is trying to do? Nowhere, just chimps throwing poop and sticking their head in the sand and claiming PCM/FLAC is the be-all-end-all highest summit humanity will ever reach in recording and playback. DISGUSTING.   

 

What people familiar with these topics should be legitimately concerned about is:

1. HOW WELL does it MQA achieve its stated goals? Surely it can do better.

2. IF it can do better, WHO IS EVOLVING THAT improvement?

3. WILL PROPRIETARY SECRECY handicap the rest of the industry from taking these concepts to further levels of perfection?

4. Will the mismarketing and exposure of false claims permanently damage the LEGITIMATE goals MQA has correctly listed, as what is holding digital media back from higher levels of fidelity?

 

My prediction is that none of the trolls here will address any of that, and will default back to their PCM/FLAC is the be-all-end-all which needs none of the improvements that Bob Stuart listed, in spite of the fact that those are now scientifically established flaws in the current world of digital formats.

 

Cheers and Peace.

 

1. Not at all.
2. Rob Watts is designing a completely new ADC, which he aims to resolve the issues with recording.

3. BS tech certainly wont help.
4. MQA doesn't have any legitimate goals beyond hijacking music recording and playback methods (as Dolby did!) to make billions.

 

 

[Jud]

1 hour ago, Currawong said:

For example, minimum phase type filters, which MQA uses, ruin the timing information necessary for the brain to reconstruct the the placement of instruments on a soundstage

Depends. Minimum phase filters are quite useful in various audio applications. For example, they can, when used properly, compensate for timing issues with room response, while linear phase filters, which preserve the original timing relationships, cannot.
 

Used in the way MQA does, without regard to the listening environment, there may be a potential problem, but I don't know if MQA's very short filters even introduce enough group delay to be audible.
 

However, the biggest problem with MQA's use of minimum phase filters is this: MQA supposedly uses them to avoid pre-ringing (actually, Gibbs effect). The thing is that MQA's filters don't cut sufficiently in the frequency region where pre-ringing is present in recordings to make any difference. So while they don't add pre-ringing of their own on the D/A side, they are completely ineffective for cleaning up any A/D problems.

[GregWormald]

Would you all stop presenting facts and research and confusing the issues with science?

ECL is making assertions here!

[FredericV]

The elephant in the room:
 

Quote

The BAD: possibly as a marketing disaster and too proprietary, which locks out advancements, discussions, and global cooperative consortia toward improved V2+ versions thereof.

Normal users would not raise this V2+ remark, and mentioning "a global cooperative consortia".

Who would benefit from V2+ ?

[KeenObserver]

WOW!

JUST EFFING WOW!

 

First off, this pile of BS and insults, was not really directed at us "Nazis and monkeys throwing poop" (maybe the insults were). We have seen the BS before so many times we are sick of it. This was for the benefit of those that are susceptible to the BS.

Nobody goes through this much to pile crap this high that does not have a vested interest in the matter. If you go to a murder scene and someone spontaneously screams out " I didn't murder him" you probably have your murderer.

No, these posts have the stench of utter desperation on them.

 

The most utterly ridiculous part of this diatribe is asking why open source does not come up with a system like MQA. MQA is a PROPRIETARY scheme that includes the option of DRM, taxes every stage of music production and distribution, and intends to control every aspect of the music business. Open source does not do this BECAUSE IT IS OPEN SOURCE.

There are open source methods to produce any benefit to the music consumer that MQA CLAIMS. You can even use open source to CORRUPT the music like MQA does.

There are salesmen whose egos control them. The critical thing to them is that they "sell you". It borders on Psychopathy. They are the ones that say to the potential buyer " I'll have to check with my manager" then go have a coffee and tell the manager "I've got this sucker sold". These posts smell of this.

[The Computer Audiophile]

15 hours ago, ECL said:

NW - A placeholder for "new wave" digital paradigm, different from CW and making strongly questioned claims about being closer to OG than CW.

NW does not exist because there are no A to D converters in use in the real world that encode to MQA as the original file storage format. 
 

MQA files today are made by converting the real files made by the engineers, by a cloud conversion tool. Virtually nobody signs off on the MQA version of a file. It’s all cloud converted batch processing. 
 

Original PCM files are all signed off on by the engineers working on the album. Once you change this, it’s no longer as good as the original that was signed off on. It can’t be. The original was made to sound exactly like it sounds, whether accurate to anything or not, the sound is what they wanted. Any further processing after the fact is not what the artist intended. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

4 minutes ago, KeenObserver said:

Nobody goes through this much to pile crap this high that does not have a vested interest in the matter.

That’s true I’m almost every case. 
 

Anonymous comments can be good and bad. If talking about objective data that’s reproducible by anyone, anonymity is totally fine. Making stuff up and calling us Nazis by an anonymous poster isn’t fine. He is either bad AI or appears to have a vested interest.
 

His use of anonymizing VPNs doesn’t help his case. 

[KeenObserver]

5 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

That’s true I’m almost every case. 
 

Anonymous comments can be good and bad. If talking about objective data that’s reproducible by anyone, anonymity is totally fine. Making stuff up and calling us Nazis by an anonymous poster isn’t fine. He is either bad AI or appears to have a vested interest.
 

His use of anonymizing VPNs doesn’t help his case. 

 

If you say 2+2=4 anonymity may not matter.

If you say 2+2=5 or "better than the original' anonymity may be a tell.

[KeenObserver]

If this crap is starting all over again I'm going to have to pull out my muck boots.

[FredericV]

Why does ECL need to hide it's identity behind a VPN?

The usage of very specific words and talking points is probably just a coincidence, but only PV has raised the open source topic in his group, and is the one and only member using the word "partisan".

 

 

Open source can easily beat MQA's compression benefit:
 

 

[FredericV]

Now back on topic, on the open source discussion and why nobody has duplicated MQA:

1. you can probably create the folding / unfolding with open source tools:
 

To bury one file into another, there are tools already out there:
 

Command line versions of this functionality exist:

https://github.com/ClarkFieseln/AS4PGC

Just like MQA's batch encoding, one could create a batch encoder to do all of the above.


2. nobody in the OSS community would want to add all of this complexity, since dithering with sox directly to 17/96 flac as a distribution format, avoids all of the additional steps.

Also a 17/96 dithered flac file instead of a file containing some form of steganography, is directly compatible with existing flac decoders in existing streamers and players, and does not require new software.

Only if you have something to hide or license, you would add all of the above complexity.

[Samuel T Cogley]

16 hours ago, ECL said:

Third, I am not pro-MQA.

 

With all due respect, the number of keystrokes you have dropped in this thread in the last 2-3 days makes this something like a bald-faced lie.

 

You're using the standard MQA playbook: dehumanize the most outspoken critics and try to convince the rest they're not giving MQA a fair chance because they've been corrupted by The Partisans.

 

And just how obsequious can you be toward Bob Stuart and still have any dignity left?  Unless you ARE Bob Stuart?