MQA is Vaporware

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1 hour ago, PeterV said:

To my logic, the MQA algorithm is proprietary and will not reveal all its secret by doing some reverse engineering by using emulation, upsampling or filter method trickery. And in case such an emulation process would result in complete deciphering, than the emulated software would also be able to authenticate the source and result in a Blue or Green light confirmation, but much more important: it would also sound indistinguishably the same.

This is no logic. This logic is not based on engineering principles and ignores the issues that @mansr has brought up.

 

Your blatant, unscientific bias is astonishing if you aren’t being paid to shovel this nonsense (being paid to say these things would be more respectable)

 

If you simply like the sound of the product then say so (you have) and be done with it. Your amateurish attempts to make technical arguments when you claim to have no knowledge of the “secret algorithms”, are nothing more  than chatter. The fact that you persist in making these pseudo-technical arguments about some blue light-green light calls into question the basis for your strong opinions.

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45 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

Spoken like a true scientist...NOT
You and @mansr should attend the AES meeting in NY and meet some REAL scientists:

http://www.aes.org/events/143/specialevents/?ID=5624

Someone’s gotta pay for the meeting. As said by ?Jimmy Carter I’m a member for the articles ? http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication Files/10-018.pdf

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1 hour ago, PeterV said:

You cannot threaten anyone and this time hou have fucked with the wrong guy!

Now that’s the way to deblur a post!

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4 hours ago, Charente said:

Do I sense a witch-hunt ? 

The level of counter hype has hardly approached the level of hype. 

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1 minute ago, Archimago said:

 

Please, let's not be so concrete in our thinking. If it was only about the $10/month, that would not be an issue.

 

t's the idea that the system would even consider standardizing on something that many here feel to be a backward step in the broader issues of fidelity, potential for progress and benefit to the consumer (eg. unclear DRM implications).

The basic principle is that data formats should be open, documented by an open implementation though other  implementations can be proprietary.

 

The idea of standardizing on a proprietary closed format is to be strongly avoided.

 

A whimpy counter argument is a joke.

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42 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

If Bruno is the engineer he claims to be he should invent something better than MQA instead of going around whining about it.

 

He nailed the issue. A convolution is a convolution is a convolution. “Deblurring” we’ve been doing since the 1970s but seriously in the 1980s. I’d say the only quibble would be that with a CPU as opposed to hardware, the resolution of the convolution kernel is not limited. Do it in HQPlayer — room correction, the whole shebang. Get one of those new Intel CPUs and an NVidia P100 and go to town. Multichannel DSD512 beats any pathetic MQA. Math is math. If MQA can’t be represented as a convolution then let’s see the math. Ain’t there until you show me otherwise. I don’t need to “listen” to know this with mathematical certainty.

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2 hours ago, witchdoctor said:

Bruno sells speakers that compete with Meridians, what did you think he would do, embrace Bob Stuart? Business is business I guess. Like I said, attacking is hardly a new marketing approach.

 

 

You are into “immersive” multichannel but don’t grok a convolution kernel ??? — not everything is politics and marketing. 

 

Bruno Putzey’s or anyone else’s technical arguments stand on their own. As I said math is math. Understand?

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1 hour ago, christopher3393 said:

He has published research on immersive sound, has done research with people like Sean Olive, attends international AES conferences, where he presents research and moderates panels. He is a researcher in the field. I would be curious as to how some of his research is funded and if there might be some conflict of interests regarding some of what he promotes.

 

There’s a lot of crappy research. There’s also a lot of so-called research which is funded by companies that have strong biases.

 

For example the NFL had research panels that trashed the concept of CTE. Tobacco companies had “scientists” who trashed the idea that tobacco was harmful etc.

 

All I can go by is what he posts. If you are a professional in the field of immersive audio and don’t understand what a convolution is, you get no respect from me. What Putzey said is factually correct ( I posted long ago about this) regardless of what his biases are.

 

Or perhaps he does know and is trashing Putzey as biased,  when he in fact is the one biased. In any case the credibility is lost on me. Full stop.

 

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52 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

Picky pickey, did you notice sennheiser made the list? How wromg can they be.

If you want to make a million all you gotta do is make headphones with feathers in them?

This sin't a headphone thread. My point is millenials spend money on SQ or they would just keep ear buds (which are also more fashionable than a pair of cans on our head BTW)

My kids: got my son (15) senns: won’t wear them, rather buds or beats, SQ is not really relevant over some minimum

 

My daughter (the musician) could care less — the only SQ she cares about is her instrument & bow and there is zero recorded music that comes close to the SQ of her orchestra (s)

 

Slight incremental SQ differences are irelevent to them, AAC vs ALAC on the iPhone, FLAC vs DSF on land. The terabytes of music on our home media server are streamed via Roon/HQPlayer. Works great. 

 

We have unlimited data so minuscule compression formats are meaningless. MQA vs FLAC is meaningless in my bandwidth unlimited world. That’s the future.

 

Lets see: filters? I’m very happy with @PeterSt, @Miska and @Charles Hansen etc’s so ?MQA? how much are you paying me to want that? I don’t need it.

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1 minute ago, witchdoctor said:

However they are monumentally important to the ARTISTS! If an artist puts their music out they want it to be heard as intended, period.

 

Some of my very good friends who are artists used to get serious $$$ yearly in the days of Telarc etc and we’re more interested in the SQ of their recordings. Those residuals have dropped off to a few thousand a year and they aren’t so interested in recording. Artists by and large make their $$$ on live performances nowadays. That’s how folks can hear their music exactly as intended.

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6 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

Now if you want a hit over your head, in your face, improvement in SQ that people from 8 to 80 will appreciate come visit my thread on immersive audio (or just go down and experience it yourself at your local theater).

I think there is potential for immersive audio. The experience I am looking for would be something like “being there”. I get to be there up front and close and our systems aren’t there yet. (Complex issue) that said, I don’t see MQA as being relevant to this solution — immersive multichannel is an entirely different kettle of fish.

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3 hours ago, mansr said:

I made a nice description of MQA bitstream format: https://code.videolan.org/mansr/mqa/blob/master/mqa.rst

It should be easier to understand than reading the scanner source code.

 

Big thanks for doing this project!

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22 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

No on all of the above.  I receive no compensation whatsoever.

 

So you are an unpaid MQA fanboi/groupie? How’s that working out for you? Rock groupies at least get f*cked by rockstars. 

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5 hours ago, Paul R said:

I do think the personal attacks are excessive and inappropriate, speaking of all the personal attacks in here against *anyone*. 

...

5 hours ago, Paul R said:

 

Well thought out, with lots of good points.

 

My thought is that in the unlikely case of MQA being embedded in most devices *and* DRM is universally switched on, someone will put a reverse engineered MQA decoder in front of the device and stream non MQA data to it.  

 

Until enough home brew devices without MQA get out there again. Or a converter to strip out the MQA. And the thriving indie market will flourish even more. 

 

Oh, maybe one of the guys here will become the Al Capone of audiophiles, with MQA being equivalent to Prohibition? Bathtubs full of illegal flash drives, and cement boots for record company execs? 🤪

 

IP encumbered data formats cannot be resisted too strongly. MQA doesn’t provide access to its format without NDA — that’s unacceptable.

 

Since you might not have been following this too closely, it’s significantly @mansr who has published his own reverse engineering (if that’s the proper term) which has enabled a significant degree of technical analysis. 

 

SACD and DVD were IP encumbered and I remember when I couldn’t play the content I purchased on my Mac — thankfully folks like @ted_b and others have allowed us to convert our SACD disks to files on hard drives — and for this reason alone I’ve purchased lots of SACDs. Otherwise I download. 

 

MQA is something we as customers need to resist in the strongest of terms.

 

@The Computer Audiophile was treated in a shockingly rude fashion by a rabid pack of MQA  supporters pounding their fists on tables. @Lee Scoggins has been trying to defend MQA and it’s supporters as nauseum, and frankly the way he is treated is what he has brought about by months of posts. At some point rude behavior begets rude reaction and we are beyond that point. 

 

Just some context. I enjoy having no skin in the game and being able to call it purely as I see it  

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2 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

False, the desktop pounding was done solely by Derek. No one else pounded the desks.

 

He seemed like at least two people pounding their fists into their applesauce. It seemed like applesauce and mashed potatoes and peas were flying everywhere. But who knows that was just my impression. I thought that perhaps a local nursing home had a community outing. Who knows. Who cares, it registered a strong impression. Your continued perseveration does nothing to change my impression.

 

My suggestion is to give up the Internet and go back to playing scrabble, not that scrabble isn't a great game, but if by your age you haven't figured out this whole open data format thing on the Web, then you might not get your driving license renewed  

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22 minutes ago, jabbr said:

if by your age you haven't figured out this whole open data format thing on the Web

 

Um... my intention is not to suggest that older people ought not be on the Internet at all, and having been at many technical conferences with very heated debates (frequently with very senior scientists well into their 70s) the behavior displayed was frankly shocking and out of the norm for polite discourse, or even heated arguments. Typically one would call this childish, even infantile, and similarly a two year old might pound their fists into their applesauce and peas, so let's just say that this behavior is not adult, and anyone who understands the web ought know that video recordings live on forever. @Lee Scoggins is yet again giving us supposed slide by slide review of @The Computer Audiophile's talk when anyone can go and watch for themselves and draw their own conclusions. Whether one guy pounds his fists or another guy beats a dead horse, it all seems like pounding -- dead tree, dead horse, who cares? ... and still no detailed technical explanation. Pounding fists and waving hands is all I'm seeing.

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10 minutes ago, Paul R said:

Philosophically, I agree with you. But I also have IP out there that I want to get paid for. Mercenary of me, but still

 

 

Right, so this technical arguments about MQA are total BS the best I can tell...

 

So let's say they do have a great way to "time deblur" the ADC ... ok then sell the software to the studios to process their old masters giving a new deblurred master.

 

Or sell it to Tidal and let Tidal distribute a "deblurred" version. 

 

No need to involve my DAC.

 

(I'm still pissed that iFi removed DSD512 in lieu of MQA in the new firmware ... bye!)

 

There is nothing fundamentally new about deblurring ... even combining that with compression aka JPEG2000 ... whaaat? 2000 that's 19 years ago!

 

I'm not anti IP, and the status of software post-WWW is much better than pre-WWW. The WWW exists because HTML and HTTP are both simple and open.

 

Now if MQA really spent millions developing its software, they should've hired @mansr (how much did you spend "documenting" it?

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33 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

I have seen scientists do worse, but only herpetologists...

 

I remember going out for drinks with a couple of astronomers who had differing views on whether Pluto was a planet! I heated discussion occurred but I only remember the Tequila   What I remember is thinking: can someone make a career out of studying one planet? Years later this debate came out in the press ... (not the one at the bar)!

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1 minute ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Some corrections here:

 

1.  They have sold the software to the studios which came after testing done by all the individual labels.  MQA offers a cloud service so the studios can batch process files that way.

 

2.  There is new innovation here as MQA has invested time in building a deblurring filter for most of the studio ADCs.  Then they further figured out how to use machine learning to ID the ADC and deploy a deblurring filter.

 

If that's really an innovation, then why don't I see 24/192 or whatever files that have been deblurred? If that's the innovation, then why do you want to f*ck up my DAC?

 

err DAC!

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29 minutes ago, Paul R said:

If you reverse engineered the software, you probably did something that is actionable. I do not know, and I am not a lawyer or giving any legal advice

 

IANAL either, but interestingly MQA explicitly claims NOT to contain DRM, so AFAIK the DMCA doesn't apply. I think that if MQA claimed to be DRM then DMCA might apply ... 

 

I'd assume that if there were any real IP (again "temporal" deblurring is not a new concept ... see wavelets etc) then IP infringement might be an issue

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On 6/28/2019 at 3:25 PM, Paul R said:

I find it amusing that Apple is always made out to be the bad guy, running a closed garden, while the rest of the world knows better and uses open source goodies. Even if there is a little tiny bit of truth in that. 😁

 

So, without Apple, portable music would still be defined as cassettes, perhaps CDs. It would be portable because people would lug then around in backpacks or such. Instead, pretty much everyone has access to almost any music they want to listen to, anytime, anywhere, and on pretty much any device. Thank Apple and their flood of imitators that followed. The freeware / open source software was created more to imitate Apple than to lead the way forward. Not always the case of course, and Apple did create their own supported versions of some existing music formats, including FLAC. Support was important in those days!

 

Yes! MP3 isn’t a free (IP) format. By Apple you mean iTunes here. They created the music download business — they also demolished the closed/locked cell phone ecosystem for those of us who remember when the only apps you could get on your phone were available from AT&T or Verizon on Motorola. Yuck!

 

So now our cellphones run ARM and have Wi-Fi and cellular. I’m happy to cede a good measure of control to Apple in exchange for my phone not crashing at critical moments. 

 

But honestly! It plays music, makes calls, holds my calendar, is a browser, is a camera, operates my Sony camera, stores photos & movies. It also gives my maps, and tells me where to drive to in the morning!

 

Sony never had the vision to give us this. 

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1 hour ago, Sal1950 said:

Whoa, Linus Torvalds should get a whiff of that post.  😖

 

Linus hasn’t gotten so involved in applications. @Paul R is talking about iTunes ... it seems as though the world is moving away from iTunes to streaming services. Roon is the latest to tackle the music library browser business. They don’t have a Linux desktop library browser. I’d love to see a cutting edge open source Linux desktop music library manager app — where is it? (The DLNA / uPNP stuff just doesn’t cut it for me)

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1 hour ago, Paul R said:

 

I missed something, what music is only available in MQA? Streaming does not count unless you can’t buy a CD or Download of the music. Admittedly, I only spent 20 minutes looking, and I did not look on Tidal. 

 

On one hand MQA is harmless because its yet another proprietary compression format which promises to be better yet isn't.

On the other hand its a proprietary locked format and proprietary formats are intrinsically evil and so deserving of vehement disapproval.

 

On one hand Tidal is owned by artists and I would thus wish it well.

On the other hand Tidal uses a proprietary format and thus I won't use it and hope it fails.

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2 minutes ago, StreamHiRes said:

I can’t understand how “audiophiles” don’t hear the marked improvement over regular FLAC

 

What makes your opinion matter to me? You've got 10 posts, all about MQA and I have have zero reason to trust your listening skills. We've seen this pattern of shills come and go. Come back when you have something interesting to say, or good advice that helps us.

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5 minutes ago, StreamHiRes said:

You are misinforming the public with unsubstantiated claims of MQA authentication indicators being a marketing ploy. Show me a file that is not MQA, but can somehow mysteriously indicate it is authentic. This site seems to be for few critics of MQA, and that’s fine. It’s good to vent. I’d much rather believe  Bob Ludwig than some critical anonymous people online.

 

You are misinforming the public about your own so-called unbiased impressions.

 

Why should I believe "Bob Ludwig"? Is he unbiased?

 

Since anyone can say anything about anything on the Internet, I choose to listen to recommendations from individuals that have proven their advice to be worthy. The so-called "anonymous" people have perfectly good Internet names that I trust far more than the so-called "Bob Ludwig" who means nothing to me.