MQA is Vaporware

[jriver]

4 hours ago, RichardSF said:

Tidal have skin in the game and I think it's a definite possibility. It wouldn't be Tidal itself purchasing MQA, but Tidal's owner Block Inc. Block (Square) paid $300M for Tidal and they can easily purchase MQA.

I'd guess that Tidal will drop it within a year.  MQA has no benefit to them.  Or anyone.

[Rt66indierock]

4 hours ago, RichardSF said:

Tidal have skin in the game and I think it's a definite possibility. It wouldn't be Tidal itself purchasing MQA, but Tidal's owner Block Inc. Block (Square) paid $300M for Tidal and they can easily purchase MQA.

 

Buy Tidal Music and you can hangout with JayZ. Buy MQA to hang out with Bob Stuart?

[Archimago]

1 hour ago, Rt66indierock said:

Buy Tidal Music and you can hangout with JayZ. Buy MQA to hang out with Bob Stuart?

 

Not sure I'd want to hang out with either of them... But at least with JayZ it's likely more lively and there's a chance to run into Beyoncé. ;-)

[sphinxsix]

2 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Buy Tidal Music and you can hangout with JayZ. Buy MQA to hang out with Bob Stuart?

 

55 minutes ago, Archimago said:

But at least with JayZ it's likely more lively

 

He's also clearly a bit richer, hence a bigger chance he will pay for himself..

 

[bambadoo]

But he does not fold. 

 

BTW: Since my english is not my native language I was not aware of this "urban dictionary".

 

It must suck big time with 3 times (un)folding. 

 

[sphinxsix]

20 minutes ago, bambadoo said:

But he does not fold. 

 

He doesn't indeed, he also seems a bit blurry in comparison with Stuart.

Ok, does someone know what I should buy to hang out with Scarlett Johansson? I will pay for snacks.

 

[KeenObserver]

My God!

What is going to happen to the blue light industry?

[KeenObserver]

Well, I guess the MQA staff can get jobs folding laundry.

 

Too soon?

[FredericV]

3 hours ago, KeenObserver said:

Well, I guess the MQA staff can get jobs folding laundry.

 

Too soon?

This is how they fold, and enable the blue light ;)
 

 

[yamamoto2002]

On 4/8/2023 at 12:35 AM, Jud said:

They’re really not able to be decoded ‘properly,’ in the sense of being faithful to the original, even with the official decoder, because encoding uses lossy compression and truncation of bits (to substitute bits that tell the decoder what to do); then that’s followed by filtering as part of the decoder that leaves aliasing/images. (I don’t know what the filtering looks like on the ADC side, but if MQA adheres to the same philosophy there it should behave similarly.) So once a file is encoded with the MQA process, some information is irretrievably lost. This is why I think the great pity of MQA while it lasted was not so much the bad productions, but the good carefully produced recordings that could have been yet better.

I don't know MQA algorithm. I understand it cannot be lossless compression because 2:1 or 4:1 (I read somewhere they compressed 176.4kHz PCM onto Compact Disc) fixed rate lossless compression is technically not possible, data with maximum Shannon entropy cannot be compressed further so all the lossless compression should be variable bit rate. Still, with some of the high frequency info can be stored and recovered by embedding a hint information onto least significant bit of PCM signal. While without proper decoding, the extra hint info becomes very non-musical noise and signal quality becomes worse than plain linear PCM and it is not good (at least in psychologically, may be it can be real audible noise issue in some corner cases). Similar technology HDCD, which squeezes extra 6dB ? of dynamic range using perceptual unevenness nature of linear PCM, is relatively benign because it is not DRM protected and it can be decoded properly forever.

[Jud]

On 4/7/2023 at 10:25 AM, JoeWhip said:

I know some flat earthers who would still deny the Earth is a sphere

 

One of my very favorite Web things is that the official site of the Flat Earth Society used to say "Members from around the globe!" until someone finally realized and deleted it.

[Jud]

3 hours ago, yamamoto2002 said:

Still, with some of the high frequency info can be stored and recovered by embedding a hint information onto least significant bit of PCM signal.

 

I believe it uses the 3 least significant bits of the encoded signal (telling the DAC which of 16 or so filters to use among other things, which is a waste because they are all very similar), so that's 13 bits left for music in Redbook.

[Iving]

Well, provoked by @firedogand having denied he ever blew a gasket over people criticising BS or supported MQA himself, Amir just closed the "MQA entering into administration" thread on ASR on basis not allowed to talk about why MQA looks like it's going out of business (as in "What more do you want?"). Like elsewhere online, most ASR members react to MQA news with "Good riddance". Seems the pro-MQA crowd are more into authoritarian censorship of others than self-reflection. 

[sphinxsix]

4 hours ago, Iving said:

Amir just closed the "MQA entering into administration" thread

 

He's an audio scientist, I'm sure he's got reasons to do that - maybe MQA is scientifically more justified than lossless.. 

😉

[botrytis]

50 minutes ago, sphinxsix said:

 

He's an audio scientist, I'm sure he's got reasons to do that - maybe MQA is scientifically more justified than lossless.. 

😉

 

He is not an audio scientist, he is a glorified computer programmer. 

[sphinxsix]

2 hours ago, botrytis said:

 

He is not an audio scientist, he is a glorified computer programmer. 

That was ironic.

Is this ironic too.? (I never check audio scientists bios on Wiki)

[botrytis]

1 minute ago, sphinxsix said:

That was ironic.

Is this ironic too.? (I never check audio scientists bios on Wiki)

An audio scientist would have studied physics. 

[Archimago]

6 hours ago, Iving said:

Well, provoked by @firedogand having denied he ever blew a gasket over people criticising BS or supported MQA himself, Amir just closed the "MQA entering into administration" thread on ASR on basis not allowed to talk about why MQA looks like it's going out of business (as in "What more do you want?"). Like elsewhere online, most ASR members react to MQA news with "Good riddance". Seems the pro-MQA crowd are more into authoritarian censorship of others than self-reflection. 

I've always been surprised by Amir's somewhat protective attitude to MQA. Very strange and some have suspected it's because he does have ties to the hardware industry (Madrona Digital sells Berkeley DACs that do MQA for example). The limits to our ability to perform critical thinking or at least express it whenever we're indebted to certain associations we've made?

 

Silly to be inconsistent, on the one hand measuring and grading DACs based on THD+N/SINAD but yet not critical of an encoding scheme that does not have the capacity to even use the resolution of any of his top-tier 120dB DACs that he recommends.

 

Granted, I don't know any recording needing that kind of resolution, but I don't see the need to be handcuffed by MQA's bit-depth reduction and lossy character either so MQA must be called out for being qualitatively regressive.

 

It is interesting isn't it seeing the lack of news about MQA over the last few days at places like: Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, HiFi+, Darko Audio (usually happy to post any little press release), Twittering Machines, Positive Feedback... Maybe they'll say something ahead; would be even more fascinating if they say nothing at all because I'm sure posting on this topic would attract eyeballs on the page which is what they're all hoping to get, right? Maybe they're just off on Easter holiday.

 

So far, other than @The Computer Audiophile, the only other audiophile site lead I know who has spoken out about the MQA bankruptcy is Doug Schneider of SoundStage!. 

[krass]

28 minutes ago, botrytis said:

An audio scientist would have studied physics. 

I think you’re a bit harsh on his credentials. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and an extensive background that includes signal processing/ analysis, codecs etc.  That would cover substantial amount of relevant Physics. Audio Scientist suggests a research element… his bio suggests he has also made research contributions in the past, so I wouldn’t dispute the use of that description.

 

You may not like his viewpoint, but he has solid experience & credentials in the audio domain, as well as computing.

[RichardSF]

What do we love to talk about, more than anything else? MQA, of course!

 

This is the most active thread on the forum by far, with almost 26 thousand replies and over 2.2 million views. Nothing else comes remotely close. Let's aim for a stretch goal of 40K replies and 3M views!

 

 

[Iving]

43 minutes ago, Archimago said:

It is interesting isn't it seeing the lack of news about MQA over the last few days at places like: Stereophile, The Absolute Sound, HiFi+, Darko Audio (usually happy to post any little press release), Twittering Machines, Positive Feedback... Maybe they'll say something ahead; would be even more fascinating if they say nothing at all because I'm sure posting on this topic would attract eyeballs on the page which is what they're all hoping to get, right? Maybe they're just off on Easter holiday.

 

Yes!

 

I think we'll see them come over one by one rather than publication by publication.

[Archimago]

3 minutes ago, RichardSF said:

What do we love to talk about, more than anything else? MQA, of course!

 

This is the most active thread on the forum by far, with almost 26 thousand replies and over 2.2 million views. Nothing else comes remotely close. Let's aim for a stretch goal of 40K replies and 3M views!

 

 

LOL. I think that will all depend on whether anyone coughs up the cash to keep this scheme going during the bankruptcy process!

 

I'm personally OK with retiring from MQA talk and just listen to music (stereo and multichannel of course!) going forward. ;-)

 

If SCL6/MQair is just adaptive bitrate streaming software without nonsensical "woo", then there's probably not much to debate about there. Could be "boring" gentlemen and ladies.

[botrytis]

1 hour ago, krass said:

I think you’re a bit harsh on his credentials. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and an extensive background that includes signal processing/ analysis, codecs etc.  That would cover substantial amount of relevant Physics. Audio Scientist suggests a research element… his bio suggests he has also made research contributions in the past, so I wouldn’t dispute the use of that description.

 

You may not like his viewpoint, but he has solid experience & credentials in the audio domain, as well as computing.

 

He was the gent pushing MS to be more closed system with their audio codec. 

 

The old phrase, what has he done lately.

[bogi]

3 hours ago, Archimago said:

the only other audiophile site lead I know who has spoken out about the MQA bankruptcy ...

I don't see it so. Sites clearly related in some commercial way to MQA business closed the relevant threads. Other audio related forums (I'm not sure the term 'audiophile' is well defined) continue discussion. And further audio related forums simply did not discuss much MQA in the past so they don't live with the current news.

What I liked most on superbestaudiofriends discussion is this sentence: "Roon, for example, wasted thousands of development hours that could be spent on improving their product. "

Then I looked at audioasylum. What I found most interesting is post from Krav Maga https://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=critics&m=98991)

Quote

Did you want all digital music to be MQA encoded?

That was MQA's goal.

As a reminder of what the stakes were regarding the MQA audio format, let me remind you what the company's ambitions for MQA are as stated by MQA's Spencer Chrislu (SC) to Jim Austin (JCA) on Stereophile.com. And I quote:

"JCA: What are the company's ambitions for MQA? Do you hope/expect that all digital music will someday be MQA encoded?

SC: Well, that's the goal!" (Link below)
https://www.stereophile.com/content/spencer-chrislu-master-q

That's the point Amir never reflected, never recognized, always befog.
Amir wrote yesterday: "I see no fear of MQA taking over the world and predicted that Apple and Amazon's of the world would never pay a fee to use it. Amazon has since come out with high-res service with no MQA proving that MQA had no leverage over them, or the the labels."
Best reaction to that was: "I resent anyone who tries to steal from me, even if they have no chance of success."

Then I looked at stevehoffman but didn't have time to read it. They have quite long MQA thread too, discussion is ongoing like here. They have about 80 posts on the topic since Friday.

But I agree with you about audio portals (not forums) you listed. We will see after Easter holiday.

[skikirkwood]

With the demise of MQA it's worth looking back at some of the early reactions from audiophile pundits. In a short post on The Absolute Sound in 2016 Robert Harley talks about this "...game changer not only for audiophiles, but for the entire music and audio industries" and linked to this YouTube video of early reactions to people listening to MQA. It's pretty hysterical.