MQA is Vaporware

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28 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Wait until they get a compressed lossy amount of money and turn it into billions by unfolding the dollar bills. 

So when you deblur millions you get billions?

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8 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Yes, billions with a B :~)

I needed clarification.  Seems the ability after debluring which leads to better transient response might have caused one to end up with trillions.  

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56 minutes ago, KeenObserver said:

Are Tidal's problems attributable to their embrace of MQA?  Well, at least partially?

Just a casual civilian view, I'd say MQA has close to nothing to do with Tidal's problems.  It is more the very simple situation that people won't pay roughly double for lossless files when good lossy files are available for half as much.  Since we initially were talking CD lossless, the addition of supposedly higher resolution MQA has done nothing to help.  If lossless CD has no market value higher resolution has no market value either.  That along with Spotify being already established. 

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Just imagine we have a format known to be fully transparent and blameless under all possible conditions.  Imagine we had the gear to reproduce that with effective perfection for $100.  Imagine we had amplifiers that would do the same for $100.  All that is left is speakers/rooms/headphones as a differential in final sound quality.  Kills much of the industry unless that industry becomes one of the imagination.  There is some room for premium looks, UI etc.  

 

Now I wouldn't say we are at the point described above, but I think we are closer to it than the general idea pushed commercially in high end audio.  Where we are supposed to nervously figure out elaborate ways to connect two wires to something. Or try to lock music into a strange format with ephemeral advantages at best. 

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3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I’m currently on vacation, so will not go into detail. But, Bob’s points have all been debunked several times. I don’t believe people want to waste their own time to wack the mole in another location. 
 

In these days of releasing music to streaming services right after it’s created and the freedom of distribution afforded to artists, I’d bet the farm that the vast majority aren’t interested in another layer in the process (MQA) that nobody has asked for, other than MQA. 
 

Rhetorical question, if MQA Ltd stopped its push on all fronts, do you think the product would die? 
 

If yes, then there is no demand, no need, and no interest in MQA. 
 

If the product is that good, these advertorials wouldn’t be necessary every few months. 

or what if MQA were free. What if the company just said, "hey, we like music, we think it is important music is well presented, so we are open sourcing MQA for everyone to use freely.  Just so the world can benefit for our research."

 

They give up on profiting from it, and make it a gift to the world.  Then if no one wants it .............

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1 hour ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

Extremely interesting post, filled with very questionable information, but worth a read-

 

By David Elias-

 

"This post excerpt comes in part from an email response to my friend Harold in the Netherlands. He was curious about our discussion related to my early MP3 work as an online musician through the 90's into 2000's and how and why my MP3s could have sounded so good back then to literally everyone who heard them. At the same time in another email to audiophile Dez in LA how the audio gear available today has removed 'computer' from the delivery of 'computer audio'. Of course smartphones are all computers too but what we usually mean by computer is a desktop, laptop, or even tablet. The network is becoming transparent. Music libraries can exist in many places and a single playlist can reference any or all of them at will. The quality of the audio delivered to headphones and speakers can be streamed at studio master DXD quality using little more than 1mbps (1024kbps) which even my iffy satellite connection in Hawaii can support. This unfolds to 24/352.8k on my MQA Masters via TIDAL also on 7Digital, Deezer, Qobuz and other streaming lossless services.

If you can listen to studio masters from anywhere at anytime there's no need for a sweet spot in a single room to go to when you want to hear your good sounding music. You don't have to lug it around on computers with you either. It is a new audiophile armchair-less world in these ways these days."

Full post-

https://art-of-listening.com/2020/01/11/the-fading-audiophile-armchair/

 

Why is it interesting?  Nearly all of it is wrong information.  Or unintentional disinformation. 

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15 minutes ago, MetalNuts said:

I think you are too kind not to say misrepresentation.🤣

Well I could have kindly said, if your premises are all wrong then your argument is wrong. 

 

And that would put us right on topic with MQA.

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1 hour ago, wgscott said:

Paul is one of my favorite people here.  

 

Maybe folks could agree to disagree?

I'd cut Paul some slack myself.  

 

On the other hand, it's a hardball world, and we gotta keep our heads until this peace and civility craze blows over. 

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26 minutes ago, ARQuint said:

 

That's just what it is!

Depends upon where the hatchet gets buried.  

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4 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Yes, to some extent, the DolbyA tends to be good at removing noise with random (white or even pink) statistics.  It works in a lot of applications other than tape.  It can work in studio-transmitter links, vinyl, film recordings, etc.    One big advantage of DolbyA over DolbyB/C is that it is very active in the lower frequency bands also (including below 100Hz.)  The disadvantage is that DolbyA is a bit more egregious about what it does to the signal.  (I'd suspect that the modulation effects of B/C would be less impactful than DolbyA, for example.)   DolbyB/C were actually fairly 'smart' ideas doing the frequency response modification instead of pure compression.  SR is a more complex mix of a combo of what DolbyA does and DolbyB/C does.

 

The key for reasonably practical-to-decode feralA recording are:  no extra dynamic range compression, keep the signal levels consistent between album tracks, hopefully keep the 0dB reference level from the source.   DolbyA is even good at dealing with relatively large amounts of hiss -- because of the bands that Mr Genius, R Dolby chose, the modulation of the tape/whatever hiss is pretty much hidden.   The bad news about DolbyA is that it has relatively limited NR and even the precise design concept is limited in how much NR can be achieved (just tuning up the DolbyA design won't really help much with NR.)   More radical approaches are needed for more NR -- the Telcom C4 takes the DolbyA concept for the band choice and compression up to the limit, but also has tradeoffs like generation loss.

 

John

 

Careful Mr. Dyson, we'll end up with MQA DolbyA.