MQA is Vaporware

[PeterV]

Well.. I was triggered by the fact that soxr was using my post with my picture on a post at the Blusound helpdesk page and that he promoted me as a 'fanboy' with no knowledge how my DDFA amplifier works..   For someone with a background in engineering not very smart from soxr not to know that even a Direct Digital Feedback Amplifier requires an analoque output signal to steer the loudspeakers ...  I can imagine that his boss will not appreciate such stupidity and that it would jeopardize his employment.. So my apologies for revealing soxr's name..

[Jud]

21 minutes ago, fung0 said:

But openness won.

 

In the case of VHS, it was lower price and longer playing time, rather than anything to do with openness.

 

I think your point about companies strangling their own products by being too restrictive is well taken (SACD, anyone?), and doesn’t require further embellishment.

[mansr]

7 minutes ago, Jud said:

In the case of VHS, it was lower price and longer playing time, rather than anything to do with openness.

It was also the lack of licensing restrictions making VHS the pick of the porn industry.

[PeterV]

Well, that is not the first time that someone assumes that I am being paid by MQA.. Soxr also did and also at other internet fora. My Name is Peter Veth and ii live in The Netherlands. I have no background in electrical engineering, but a chemical background. Music and audio are my passion and I was one of the lucky guys to own a relatively affordable audio set with the 2 x 150 Watt DDFA Dac/amp and Bluesound streamer with which I am now listening to music in Wave, Flac and MQA format. Loudspeakers are Wilson Audio Watt Puppy 5.0 (modified) and the combination seems to be able to reveal the difference between MQA and non-MQA encoded music files. I like what I hear and it is convincing. But I am not being paid by anyone for just being interested about the developments and discussion around MQA. I was and still am very surprised by the hostility when it comes to this format-war and am actually also very interested what is really behind all this.. What is there to lose, what is there to win..? With regard to the claims of MQA, I am very interested to get more confirmation if the algorithm is capable to reduce time-smear or not. All discussion here and elsewhere are not focussed enough to this aspect. Is anyone capable to measure the difference in time resolution between a MQA and non-MQA music file or not..?  I only am here to find confirmation to what I hear and what I seem to like.  So if this is disrupting someone's beliefs or backward engineering tactics in which the magic of MQA is nothing but úpsampling' I believe that is very naive.  Other arguments pro- and against are required to convince me that MQA is 'vaporware' to me that is a pre-occupied opinion and nothing more than that. Let's focus top the time-domain claims.. much more interesting!  if there are other algorithms ou there which are capable to repair past- and present time-smear.. well, let's listen, test and measure but do it correct please..

[Jud]

24 minutes ago, mansr said:

It was also the lack of licensing restrictions making VHS the pick of the porn industry.

 

I bow to your superior knowledge in this respect.

[soxr]

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

At this point in history, it's been well-demonstrated that open standards are vital, enabling maximum progress for consumers and maximum profit for businesses. It is also obvious that open standards don't always materialize by the grace of the market's 'invisible hand.' Or survive in the face of corporate onslaught. Sometimes, consumers and experts need to speak up.

I thank my former & current career to open source, open standards & open file formats.

Allmost every player software including closed source software is based on open source decoders and/or open standards. Almost nobody is going to write their own flac decoder.

Then some company comes along and claims: all that you know about audio sampling is wrong, we have the solution. They infect open formats like flac and redbook by inserting encrypted content which can only be decoded via a licensed decoder. Without decoder it becomes high frequency noise / hissing. This is a form of hacking: hack the file formats to technically inferior versions for those who don't have the decoder, provide articles to the hifi press which are almost impossible to debunk as the technical details are hidden or simplified because the solution is a black box.

Like any proprietary format, decoders will be hacked, decryption keys leaked ... it's just a matter of time. Look at DVD and DeCSS. BluRay was hacked.

SACD was hacked because the PS3 fat models with SACD drive had the decryption keys onboard, and a custom firmware could be installed. I had some fun installing this on two old PS3's so a customer could make a legal backup of his SACD to DSD files which he could then play using open source software like MPD and open DSD decoderss. So a closed encrypted format was unpacked into an open file format, while keeping the DSD data intact.

The same applies for MQA. Input & output of MQA decoder and render stages can be rerouted to files or virtual devices. The proof is in the open source code that was revealed in the technical MQA thread. So what if technical users take matters into their own hands?

Output of the first unfold can be sent to a much higher quality upsampler without the post-ringing trickery that makes MQA sound thinner than the original studiomaster, which audiophiles may wrongly interpret as "more air" "more stage" "more reverb" "more echo".

This can even be legal: just create a vitual audio device, and send that data to some post-processor. Alsa can do that easily. You can create slave devices which write to a pipe. Under windows, such solutions can also be developed, just look at dirac live, which uses a similar setup.

I took a different route: instead of trying to crack MQA decoders, I tried to figure out what gives MQA it's distinct different sound compared to the real studiomaster DXD files and figure out how we can benefit from the smaller MQA files without hearing a very different rendering compared to what the studio engineer was working on before sending his files to MQA for offsite encoding.

Studio engineers do not listen to MQA in realtime. Even though this is claimed on the MQA site, actual discussions with real studio engineers on gearslutz proved there are no realtime tools yet. Several GS engineers provided a lot of info and exact logistical workflows, and for the technical side we have to thank mansr and archimago to cut fact from fiction and expose the inner workings of the black box that the hifi press cannot grasp.

The problem with the hifi press is that they just copy paste the official versions, or do not understand them, which leads to video's like this, where the admit they were wrong:

This is why I became member here and decided to disclose the sox method so others can benefit from my research. I also became member because I want to have obective fact vs fiction, and I do not take the canned material from the MQA marketing for granted.

There needs to be a counterweight to bring everything in balance. I am part of that counterweight.
I'm not 100% against MQA, as I can still benefit from MQA smaller file sizes which are free on Tidal (I don't have to pay extra for MQA) and throw a minimum phase upsampler at it, and hear virtually what the mastering guy was working on, not the MQA guy in some remote encoding facility which makes the choices of encoding parameters.

[Shadders]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

It was also the lack of licensing restrictions making VHS the pick of the porn industry.

Hi,

I used to work in the telecoms area.

One of the senior managers wrote to all that "it is disgraceful that 50% of the then internet traffic was due to porn".

A colleague wrote "Yes, it is bad, they should bring back Sunday school".

I then responded, "Do i get a recognition award".

No one laughed. B*st*rds.

Regards,

Shadders.

[esldude]

13 minutes ago, soxr said:

The problem with the hifi press is that they just copy paste the official versions, or do not understand them, which leads to video's like this, where the admit they were wrong:

 

 

Wow, that video is like a kernel that can unfold into all the ways MQA is a bad idea, how misinformation about it is presented and about half a dozen other angles.  I hardly know where to start.  Bottom line is MQA as it is being sold is nothing at all like what it serves out as a resulting music distribution format.  Fairy tales within fairy tales and still obscuring what it really does. 

 

The one that sticks out to me is on the one hand saying undecoded MQA sounds better because partial deblurring has occurred.  It sounds different when fully decoded.  And may sound better or worse depending upon the choices made by the engineer during MQA encoding.  This is the system that is supposed to fix errors and give us a transparent pipeline to exactly how things should sound and authenticate we are getting exactly what is intended?  Hans seems oblivious to the multiple contradictions in his presentation. 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

2 hours ago, fung0 said:

 

My own objections to MQA have nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the company's assertions. My concern is simply that proprietary 'standards' (an oxymoron if ever there was one) are a horribly bad idea, and must be forcefully resisted at all times.

 

Unfortunately, your optimistic "business scenarios" in this regard are not supported by historical information. Here are just a few examples of bad standards that have been implemented by corporate will-power, at great expense to both consumers and markets:

• Sony literally killed digital recording and distribution by incorporating DRM in the DAT standard, which would otherwise have been eagerly adopted by legions of musicians and concert-tapers.
• Sony pushed Blu-ray as the video-disc standard by monopolistically low-balling its PlayStation 3. BD displaced the arguably superior (and far less DRM-infested) HD DVD standard. Many early adopters got burned. Disc sales never recovered.
• Standalone media boxes like the Apple TV, WDTV and newer Kodi players use superior, open-standard formats such as h.264 and h.265. But even now they're being held back from market success by intense opposition from the content industry, even though both engineering and common sense make it clear that this is how home entertainment ought to work.
• Microsoft adopted eternal updates, added a loony 'tiled' interface, replaced Toolbars with 'Ribbons,' and added privacy-destroying 'telemetry' to Windows. User protests (very similar to the one now tackling MQA) were ignored, because (like the music-publishing cartel), Microsoft has a hammerlock on its market.
• For similar reasons, Microsoft has refused to adopt open document standards. Many people and organizations have protested, to no avail. Microsoft continues to change ("upgrade") its proprietary standards, inconveniencing billions of users in order to drive software sales.
• W3C recently inserted DRM into the Word Wide Web standard, against vast opposition from users and advocacy groups, and with support only from corporate participants, including Google, Microsoft and Netflix. This is a clear case in which we didn't yell loudly enough.

On the other hand, there are also numerous examples of public will - or competition, where it has existed - overcoming potentially devastating mis-steps:

• ARC tried to lock up file-compression. Zip triumphed, purely by virtue of the willingness of the personal computing world to make a huge shift in established habits. (PC users were a very rational, focused bunch back then. Unlike, say, today's audio enthusiasts...)
• Adobe gained de facto control over digital fonts, with PostScript Type 1. This became a huge roadblock to the evolution of desktop publishing. Microsoft (yes, the same Microsoft) fought back with TrueType, and today we have OpenType.
• Adobe voluntarily released its PDF standard royalty-free, enabling the creation of endless software tools, and ensuring universal acceptance of the format.
• Sony released a consumer video recorder. The content industry was outraged, and fought a massive legal battle against it. Sony (yes, the same Sony) dug in its heels and won, opening a vast new market for home video.
• When Sony refused to license its Beta technology on reasonable terms, everyone else - consumers included - adopted the more-open VHS standard. Eventually, even Sony was forced to go with the flow. (I still own an excellent Sony VHS machine.) To this day, many fans claim Beta was superior. But openness won.
• Digital recording eventually recovered from the DAT (and DCC) debacle, owing purely to an upsurge in illicit MP3 distribution, driven entirely by users with zero corporate input or support. (Apple rode that wave rather shrewdly.) Fraunhofer imposed only very modest royalties, ensuring that MP3 could become a universal standard, and allowing evolution of projects like LAME, a user-driven encoder far superior to Fraunhofer's own.
• Recently, the emerging medium of virtual reality was headed for a nightmarish future of multiple standards. Valve Software and groups like Khronos pushed for open standards, and front-runner Oculus was at last persuaded to sign on. (Microsoft, unfortunately, remains a stubborn outlier, and could still end up needlessly fragmenting the market.)

There are many other tales that could be told, from various markets related to media and digital technology.

 

At this point in history, it's been well-demonstrated that open standards are vital, enabling maximum progress for consumers and maximum profit for businesses. It is also obvious that open standards don't always materialize by the grace of the market's 'invisible hand.' Or survive in the face of corporate onslaught. Sometimes, consumers and experts need to speak up.

Well, you have your version of history and your opinion of what has been "well demonstrated". Others have their own.  I know well that proprietariness pisses people off like you would not believe, and I understand that everybody, especially consumers, wants everything to be a free commodity good, everybody, that is, except the guys who invested in bringing the idea to market.  

 

I went through this in a post several days ago.  As a former venture capital executive, I would not waste my time talking to someone who had an investment idea based on developing an open technology standard.  Sorry.  

[Jud]

5 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

As a former venture capital executive, I would not waste my time talking to someone who had an investment idea based on developing an open technology standard.  Sorry.

 

What proprietary technologies is Facebook based on?

[Digital Assassin]

45 minutes ago, soxr said:

I thank my former & current career to open source, open standards & open file formats.

Allmost every player software including closed source software is based on open source decoders and/or open standards. Almost nobody is going to write their own flac decoder.

Then some company comes along and claims: all that you know about audio sampling is wrong, we have the solution. They infect open formats like flac and redbook by inserting encrypted content which can only be decoded via a licensed decoder. Without decoder it becomes high frequency noise / hissing. This is a form of hacking: hack the file formats to technically inferior versions for those who don't have the decoder, provide articles to the hifi press which are almost impossible to debunk as the technical details are hidden or simplified because the solution is a black box.

Like any proprietary format, decoders will be hacked, decryption keys leaked ... it's just a matter of time. Look at DVD and DeCSS. BluRay was hacked.

SACD was hacked because the PS3 fat models with SACD drive had the decryption keys onboard, and a custom firmware could be installed. I had some fun installing this on two old PS3's so a customer could make a legal backup of his SACD to DSD files which he could then play using open source software like MPD and open DSD decoderss. So a closed encrypted format was unpacked into an open file format, while keeping the DSD data intact.

The same applies for MQA. Input & output of MQA decoder and render stages can be rerouted to files or virtual devices. The proof is in the open source code that was revealed in the technical MQA thread. So what if technical users take matters into their own hands?

Output of the first unfold can be sent to a much higher quality upsampler without the post-ringing trickery that makes MQA sound thinner than the original studiomaster, which audiophiles may wrongly interpret as "more air" "more stage" "more reverb" "more echo".

This can even be legal: just create a vitual audio device, and send that data to some post-processor. Alsa can do that easily. You can create slave devices which write to a pipe. Under windows, such solutions can also be developed, just look at dirac live, which uses a similar setup.

I took a different route: instead of trying to crack MQA decoders, I tried to figure out what gives MQA it's distinct different sound compared to the real studiomaster DXD files and figure out how we can benefit from the smaller MQA files without hearing a very different rendering compared to what the studio engineer was working on before sending his files to MQA for offsite encoding.

Studio engineers do not listen to MQA in realtime. Even though this is claimed on the MQA site, actual discussions with real studio engineers on gearslutz proved there are no realtime tools yet. Several GS engineers provided a lot of info and exact logistical workflows, and for the technical side we have to thank mansr and archimago to cut fact from fiction and expose the inner workings of the black box that the hifi press cannot grasp.

The problem with the hifi press is that they just copy paste the official versions, or do not understand them, which leads to video's like this, where the admit they were wrong:

This is why I became member here and decided to disclose the sox method so others can benefit from my research. I also became member because I want to have obective fact vs fiction, and I do not take the canned material from the MQA marketing for granted.

There needs to be a counterweight to bring everything in balance. I am part of that counterweight.
I'm not 100% against MQA, as I can still benefit from MQA smaller file sizes which are free on Tidal (I don't have to pay extra for MQA) and throw a minimum phase upsampler at it, and hear virtually what the mastering guy was working on, not the MQA guy in some remote encoding facility which makes the choices of encoding parameters.

Brilliant. Thank you. Facts. Logic. Good things.

[Ralf11]

2 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

What proprietary technologies is Facebook based on?

 

they are called algorithms 

[Digital Assassin]

17 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Well, you have your version of history and your opinion of what has been "well demonstrated". Others have their own.  I know well that proprietariness pisses people off like you would not believe, and I understand that everybody, especially consumers, wants everything to be a free commodity good, everybody, that is, except the guys who invested in bringing the idea to market.  

 

I went through this in a post several days ago.  As a former venture capital executive, I would not waste my time talking to someone who had an investment idea based on developing an open technology standard.  Sorry.  

 

 

"One way this happens is through the ecosystem of open standards and open source contributors that can allow competitors to pursue your customers. While this may result in less control and less margins for the competitor, the reduced overall costs, the ability to scale, and the increased rate of innovation afforded by open source can outweigh the benefits of a proprietary platform. A good example for this is how Google has created an open source platform with its Android operating system as compared to Apple’s more proprietary and closely controlled iOS."

 

https://hbr.org/2016/11/ceos-need-to-ask-the-right-questions-about-their-digital-businesses

 

 

 

 

[Jud]

Just now, Digital Assassin said:

"Among the “top questions” in the HBR article is the relationship between current and future open standards. In our opinion, when it comes to developing a successful digital business, open standards and open source create an ecosystem that benefits the core economics of a company. That article points out that, “While this may result in less control and less margins for the competitor, the reduced overall costs, the ability to scale, and the increased rate of innovation afforded by open source can outweigh the benefits of a proprietary platform.”

 

"...the increased rate of innovation afforded by open source can outweigh the benefits of a proprietary platform. A good example for this is how Google has created an open source platform with its Android operating system as compared to Apple’s more proprietary and closely controlled iOS."

 

https://hbr.org/2016/11/ceos-need-to-ask-the-right-questions-about-their-digital-businesses

 

 

 

 

 

Which shows that both can be successful.  Each has advantages and disadvantages.

[Digital Assassin]

1 minute ago, Jud said:

 

Which shows that both can be successful.  Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Hi You replied, while I was editing my post. I quoted from an article quoting the actual article.

 

I fixed it so the correct quote and actual article are linked. Apologies!

[kumakuma]

57 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

I understand that everybody, especially consumers, wants everything to be a free commodity good, everybody, that is, except the guys who invested in bringing the idea to market.   

 

Surely, as a "former venture capital executive", you must realize that we are talking about wanting data to be free of encumbrances, not about wanting the data itself to be free of charge.

 

For example, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars on music because it is in a format that allows me to do what I want with it (stream internally, listen to on my iPhone, copy to a USB drive for the car, whatever I want).

 

I can't imagine myself spending a dime on music delivered in a proprietary format like MQA. 

[Sal1950]

5 hours ago, PeterV said:

Well, that is not the first time that someone assumes that I am being paid by MQA.

As much BS as you vomit up in the promotion of MQA I hope your paid well. I'd find it quite embarrassing myself.

[lmitche]

3 hours ago, Jud said:

 

What proprietary technologies is Facebook based on?

Eyeballs

[Don Hills]

4 hours ago, Shadders said:

Hi,

I used to work in the telecoms area.

One of the senior managers wrote to all that "it is disgraceful that 50% of the then internet traffic was due to porn".

...

 

Not very clever of him, biting the hand that feeds him.

[PeterV]

Sad to notice that no one out here seems to have the interest nor the tools to verify the claims by MQA that with their algorithm both the time-smear  and impuls response are drastically improved. Upsampling is a also something fundamentally different to defolding.. It is positive though that this thread is keeping the name recognition and mystery around MQA much alive..?

[Fokus]

And how would you go about verifying a 'drastically improved impulse response' without access to undoctored-with before and after files?

 

It would have been so easy for MQA to promote their process by putting up a website with short before and after clips. That is, if their invention amounted to anything at all...

 

As an aside, I once did public  listening test with a hires file, and two downsampled versions of it, one of which was filtered with maximum phase, i.e. lots of preringing. The listeners had to use quality equipment. The preference rankings were all over the place. Apparently preringing is not that detrimental to musical enjoyment as some would have us believe.

 

Keith Howard at Stereophile got the same result a couple of years ago. But this is quickly forgotten. The industry needs audible difference to sell. It does not matter that these differences are imagined. 

 

[fung0]

10 hours ago, Jud said:

In the case of VHS, it was lower price and longer playing time, rather than anything to do with openness.

 

I'd say VHS won mainly because every manufacturer except Sony supported it. But it's open to debate, of course.

[PeterV]

Well Fokus..let's ask MQA themselves, but also find a way to do proper A/B comparisons in the analogue domain. Is this possible or impossible? Even though loudspeakers and microphones have their own intrinsic (time-smear) flaws, why not test, measure, compare? 

[soxr]

8 minutes ago, Fokus said:

And how would you go about verifying a 'drastically improved impulse response' without access to undoctored-with before and after files?

 

Even manufacturers don't get test tones from MQA so they can't verify transient reponses and do basic QA testing:
http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/mqa/1.html

 

Quote

On the technical side, we requested their decoder to develop proper unit-to-unit QC protocols as we have always done on our end. They only promised a few test tones. Those are insufficient to measure distortion, bandwidth, impulse response, linearity and noise to mention just a few. They seem to be very afraid to divulge more about their algorithm to us, their intended business partners. If we can't properly test our MQA-enabled product, how can we be confident to ship it around the world?

 

8 minutes ago, Fokus said:

It would have been so easy for MQA to promote their process by putting up a website with short before and after clips. That is, if their invention amounted to anything at all...

 

They won't do this. But you can do this blind test:

http://archimago.blogspot.be/2017/07/internet-blind-test-mqa-core-decoding.html

The transient responses of the MQA bluesound renderer, Mytek and AQ Drangonfly are known and seem to be the same. So far no proof of DAC specific tuning. The renderer is a minimum phase upsampler (so yes the 2e unfold is upsampling, no new information is extracted) with some post processing to kill post-ringing.

It's also possible to do the full unfold in software. Custom tools were written by FOSS devs.

So those who claim nobody is interested to verify the claims from MQA are clearly wrong.

 

 

 

[esldude]

20 minutes ago, Fokus said:

And how would you go about verifying a 'drastically improved impulse response' without access to undoctored-with before and after files?

 

It would have been so easy for MQA to promote their process by putting up a website with short before and after clips. That is, if their invention amounted to anything at all...

 

As an aside, I once did public  listening test with a hires file, and two downsampled versions of it, one of which was filtered with maximum phase, i.e. lots of preringing. The listeners had to use quality equipment. The preference rankings were all over the place. Apparently preringing is not that detrimental to musical enjoyment as some would have us believe.

 

Keith Howard at Stereophile got the same result a couple of years ago. But this is quickly forgotten. The industry needs audible difference to sell. It does not matter that these differences are imagined. 

 

 

It does get tiring and disgusting.  Everyone trusts their ears.  They seem to trust them most when you have shown them their ears are full of sh*te.  The slightest hint that someone somewhere under any circumstances hears something important and it is gospel.  Let them demonstrate they can hear no such thing, do so repeatedly, and it has no effect.