MQA is Vaporware

[fung0]

20 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Gosh, I bow to your superior wisdom, and your superior semantic skills.

 

Sarcasm does very little to further your argument. Consider editing it out. Fortunately, after years on the Internet, I have become immune...

 

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Well, Twitter was certainly built using open internet standards, but do you have their source code?  No.  That is proprietary.

 

There's certainly some proprietary code running on Twitter's servers. But it's entirely irrelevant. Twitter could open source it tomorrow, and without affecting its business in the least. In any case, it's the open Web standard that enabled Twitter to even be a concept in the first place. Even now, there's negligible proprietary code required on the client side. None at all, to simply view Twitter - I do it all the time, with even JavaScript blocked. Posting undoubtedly requires some JavaScript, but again, that's an open platform.

 

Facebook is a better example, especially when we're discussing MQA. Facebook dominates not because of its brilliant technology, but because it has users locked in to a proprietary communications protocol. There have been suggestions (especially in Europe) that Facebook should be forced to 'open up' that protocols, so other companies could compete on a level footing. There's nothing innovative about those protocols (never was), and they should be standardized. Alas, it's hard to close the barn door once you've allowed the horse to own the barn.

 

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Yes, Linux is open.  But, IBM and Microsoft invest much more on and receive much greater revenues from their own proprietary stuff than on Linux support.  Do you disagree?

As it happens, I do disagree. IBM's mainly sells services, with a business model that's built entirely around Linux and open platforms. Some of their code is undoubtedly proprietary, but that's the way Linux is meant to work - you open source the stuff that benefits everyone, keep stuff closed that's specific to your own work. The model works. IBM was once 100% proprietary, now it's largely open - and 100% based on open standards.

 

Microsoft makes most of its revenue these days from the enterprise market. That presumably includes sales of Office, a perniciously closed product, which succeeds only by virtue of lock-in. But otherwise, Microsoft is moving rapidly to embrace open standards. It recently opened all its programming tools, and has contributed big chunks of code to open projects - including Linux. Talk to their enterprise guys, and you'll see the vast shift in mindset that's already well underway.

 

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JVC did not give VHS away.  Licensing was simply much more favorable to licensees than was Beta.  Beta, by the way, was widely considered better in all respects except maximum playing time, but Sony were simply SOBs about the licensing.

 

 

It's impossible to go into exhaustive detail on each example. VHS was effectively "open" - at the scale that mattered to its users (large corporate manufacturers). If anything, it shows how openness and profit are not mutually exclusive.

 

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I do not know the Fraunhoffer story.  But, was there no licensing whatsoever required, meaning no revenue stream to them?  Weird.  OK, just googled them.  MP3 is patented and licensed from Fraunhofer, not a free open standard.

 

MP3 encoders were licensed by Fraunhofer (to software and hardware companies) at a very affordable rate. MP3 decoders were allowed to exist without royalties. Even the definitive LAME encoder was allowed to exist as source code, widely compiled by amateurs. Another example of a standard that was sufficiently open to be a standard. The various flavors of MPEG video fall into the same category.

 

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CD was not a free, open standard, BTW.  The players and discs were manufactured under license from Sony/Philips.  Dolby on cassettes was also not free and open.  DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, DTS and Dolby codecs, HDMI, etc.   all require licensing.

 

 

CD is another commercial standard, more than 'open' enough for its users. It probably helped that CD was not exclusively owned by just one company - like SACD, for example. Or Blu-ray, which undoubtedly helped accelerate the shift to streaming as opposed to ownership of video.

 

Dolby was a bit of an oddity - every tape deck had to have it, but nobody I knew used it. Sort of a needless tax on the market. Similar to the one MQA would like to levy.

 

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So, you are miffed because MQA chooses not to do business in the completely open standards way that you consider correct and just give their process away.   Shame on them.

 

 

A feeble straw man argument - I never said any of this. You again undercut your own position.

 

I am 'miffed' (if that's the right word) because MQA chooses to sell what could and should be open and, more importantly, standard - if it's worth having at all. MQA asks us to pay for what should be open, and keeps secret what might actually be worth paying for.

 

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However, in spite of your philosophy, many other companies have been quite successful while maintaining proprietary protection over their unique technology.  In fact, doing so is mandatory to satisfy investors looking for a return on a new idea.  That was my point.

 

 

The 'unique' part may indeed be proprietary. But not the part that's expected to become a roadblock to further development. (Archetypal open licenses like the the GNU GPL 3.0 attempt to encode this principle in legal logic.) It's the old 'one bridge over the river' problem: if you want MP3 to be a standard, you shouldn't expect to keep it as your own exclusive ('closed') property. Of course, fully 'open' standards are ideal, but in most cases 'benign stewardship' suffices. MQA has shown itself to be anything but benign.

 

As I've noted, the market does generally reject attempts at creating tightly proprietary 'standards.' But unfortunately not always. Many abortive attempts at owning the only bridge over the river have been extremely expensive for everyone. We should have learned something by now.

[fung0]

13 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

But, look at it this way.  If you are right that MQA has adopted a course proven to fail in the marketplace, then they have done you a favor.  They will fail, and since you don't like their technology anyway, you will be happy.

 

As I've tried to make clear, MQA's technology is not my primary concern. What I dislike is the company's attempt to take over a part of our relatively open audio distribution ecosystem, with a proprietary and conspicuously closed 'standard.'

 

Also, based on the historical examples I cited (and others), I do not agree that MQA's chosen course is "proven to fail." Here's what I said in my last post (emphasis added):

 

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..the market does generally reject attempts at creating tightly proprietary 'standards.' But unfortunately not always. Many abortive attempts at owning the only bridge over the river have been extremely expensive for everyone.

 

MQA could take a long time to "fail," and do a great deal of damage along the way. Fortunately, we are under no obligation to sit in pious hope that "the marketplace" will swiftly produce the optimum outcome.

 

If even a few people are persuaded by what they read in this forum to 'wait and see,' to refrain from signing up for early MQA offerings, the impact could be very significant. If even one or two prominent audio journalists are persuaded to reconsider their early enthusiasm for MQA, the impact could be even greater.

 

Maybe MQA audio really is terrific, the greatest thing since Edison. Maybe. But so far, MQA hasn't begun to make a case strong enough to justify ceding part of the music landscape to its new format.

[fung0]

5 hours ago, Jud said:

Vote with your dollars (as in, the absence of them from MQA).  It's a language that gets listened to.

 

Exactly! In our eagerness for what is new and surrounded by hype, we often forget this 'golden' rule...

[fung0]

5 hours ago, Fokus said:

Ironically, if MQA had been a bit more open from the beginning they would by now have been in a position with a much better chance for long-term success. But no ... they chose to be driven by maximum greed.

 

Absolutely!

 

MQA is seeking to launch not just a product, but a whole new way of distributing music. The right way to do that would be to gain expert acceptance for the technology, and create consensus among all the participants. Or simply forward the spec, as 'bread cast upon the waters,' and let it succeed or fail on its merits. Clearly, this is not an easy way to make big profits.

 

Instead, MQA chose to limit expert testing of its new technology, and surround the specs with patent barriers, non-disclosure agreements and bafllegab. Worse, it tailored its proposed new format to appeal not to consumers, but to the basest short-term instincts of large publishers and distributors. The 'authenticated' part, in particular, has been shown to have no connection whatsoever to the claimed benefits of 'audio origami.' It's an anti-feature which has no obvious purpose other than to encourage corporate buy-in and maximize licensing revenue.

 

Forging new standards is dreary, thankless work - if done the right way. Designing and marketing a new standard with profit as the primary consideration is at best a perversion of the process. It isn't proof that the underlying technology is without merit, but it should certainly raise a lot of skepticism, if only on procedural grounds.

[fung0]

4 hours ago, Fokus said:

Magazines sell stories. Positive stories sell better.

 

Actually, no - negative 'clickbait' generates the most traffic.

[fung0]

7 hours ago, Bob Stern said:

I don’t think Stereophile is that cynical and unethical.  John Atkinson has stated repeatedly that Stereophile forbids its reviewers from accepting perpetual free "loans" of equipment.

 

As a journalist who's spent decades reviewing all kinds of electronic equipment, including audio gear, I can offer some perspective.

 

First, let me point out that it's difficult to buy a good review by letting the reviewer keep a bad product. Also, practically speaking, it's impossible for reviewers of expensive equipment to remain current without at least some 'long term loans.' But in the case of MQA, specifically, what would reviewers get to keep? If it's a DAC, its real value doesn't depend on its MQA capability. The manufacturer will probably be very happy if the review says "It's a terrific DAC, but the MQA stuff is a waste of time."

 

Second, and more important, anyone who specializes in reviewing a particular type of product becomes a part of that industry. After a while, they identify less with average consumers than with their 'peers' - in the business they cover. This 'camaraderie' is a big source of subtle bias. Gifts of gear may factor into it, but it's the absorption of identity that really matters. Publications can counter this effect by encouraging tough review standards - but most don't.

 

Third, in advertising-driven publications reviewers are always under an invisible pressure to be positive, especially to companies that are likely to provide ad revenue. The degree of influence varies a lot from one publication to another. I've worked for a few that truly did insist on tough reviews - typically because they were in a boom market, where readership was more valuable than any one advertiser. (In Maximum PC, for example, reviewers were judged by how fully they used the 1-10 ratings scale. Giving a 7 was especially frowned upon, as it was viewed as a 'safe' and largely meaningless rating. I once gave a product a 2; the publication was fine with that, but I was hounded online by overprotective fans who managed to discover my personal email address.)

 

Fourth, and most important of all, any reviewer who's in it for the long haul is very conscious of maintaining his or her reputation. That means being very careful not to publicly offer opinions - especially negative opinions - that could later prove to be wildly incorrect. It is this fear that leads to the worst problem - what has been called 'pack journalism.' You can be wrong if everyone else is, and you can usually get away with being the only one to praise a product. But if you 'pan' something all by yourself, you're sticking your neck out. It's the Emperor's New Clothes syndrome, and it's very real. (Some might call it 'riding the wave.' For instance, I saw numerous journalists gain prominence by trumpeting the dangers of Y2K. None of them suffered any career disadvantage when Y2K turned out to be total hogwash. Meanwhile, predicting that Y2K would not be a problem gained me no traction with major publishers, and brought me no credit after the fact for having been proved correct.)

 

In all this, nobody makes a conscious decision to bias their reviews. And no company makes an overt effort to bias them. Only a few of the most disreputable publications (easily identified) encourage them to be biased. What happens is more like geological pressure. Over time, people's views adapt. Companies don't offer bribes as such (if only!), and gifts of gear are insufficient to buy anyone's ethics. (In fact, forbidding gear 'keepers' doesn't make your reviewers more honest - just more self-righteous, which plays directly into the more important mechanisms I've outlined above.)

 

Manufacturers exploit this system by exerting steady influence. They start by getting a few of the more influential (and more easily-led) reviewers on-side. Once they've planted a few of those benchmark opinions, the rest of the industry tends to go along. It's a lot like herding sheep. But it's just basic human nature in action.

 

Reviewers can be counted to to make glowing statements about something like MQA for many reasons. It's new. It's technically obscure, allowing them to sound clever by explaining it. It sounds 'better' according to their well-honed confirmation bias. And by becoming early pundits, they get to be out in front of what looks like the next big trend. Yielding to these pressures is how you build a career. Resisting them is how you get marginalized and ignored.

 

None of this is conscious. None of it is 'deliberate.' It's a mindless system that wasn't created by anyone; like the Internet, it just evolved. It's subtle, but it works superbly. And it leaves behind no 'smoking gun' for cynics to discover.

[fung0]

20 hours ago, Charles Hansen said:

Hello Fung0,

 

While I agree with your very well articulated premises for most publication. I am fairly certain there are exception to the above quoted sentence.

 

I know of at least one US print magazine and one US webzine that allegedly only review equipment if you advertise. (They may occasionally break their own rule, so as not to make it too obvious.) Advertisers are allegedly guaranteed good reviews, and the more valuable the ad contract (size and frequency of placements, along with contract duration) allegedly the better the reviews will be. One publication allegedly took a loudspeaker company from start-up mode to major player  within 3 years, almost single-handed. One publication allegedly will sell cover shots to the highest bidder. One publication allegedly  will write lengthy positive reviews in exchange for non-financial incentives such as all-expenses-paid luxury vacation (which can be easily disguised as "travel expenses/reimbursements").

 

As you correctly note, the product being pimped must meet a certain level of performance (at least in the writer's mind) or else it would be too obvious and the reviewer/publication would lose credibility.. You will never see a mediocre product promoted in this way. But "sweetening the pot" can result in reviews that are more praiseworthy than would they would otherwise receive.

 

It's also well known that some manufacturers allegedly will not submit products for review to certain magazines. I think even Magnepan publicly acknowledges that they will not submit review samples to Stereophile, due to the fact that they do not measure ""well" under JA's loudspeaker test protocol. That is just one example and one reason.

 

Best, regards,

Charles Hansen

 

I've certainly seen occasional extremes of collusion between publishers and vendors, as you describe. But I think you'd agree that, in general, influence is more subtle. We know there are 'paid shills' out there. But 'useful idiots' are far more numerous.

 

Unfortunately, few publications these days truly support their writers in pushing for high standards of accuracy and honesty. (Doing proper research is expensive, for a start.) Even fewer publications make any pretense of fairly presenting all facets of every issue. About the best you can do is find one whose slant you can live with.

 

I've definitely encountered manufacturers who avoid bad reviews in the way you describe regarding Magnepan. Once you're on their 'black list,' you're lucky to get a polite answer to an email. You certainly never get interview access to company execs, and you needn't dream about getting product for review. The companies that have treated me that way have generally been ones selling products that were greatly over-valued, and vulnerable to having their bubble punctured.

[fung0]

16 minutes ago, Charles Hansen said:

Hello Fung0,

 

Actually, unfortunately I have to disagree. There are only two audio print magazines in the US, and 50% is more than "occasional" in my book. There are far more online publications, and there I would agree with you - one known example and one or two suspected examples out of many dozens of websites is more in line with what I would call "occasionally".

 

EDIT: I agree 100% with all of your other points, I find them to be extremely insightful. To have the wisdom for self-reflection like that is rare, and I commend you for sharing your insights with the world in general. It will even have the honest reviewers and publications thinking twice about what they are doing.

 

Cheers,

Charles Hansen

 

Sounds like the last survivors in print are being forced to make increasingly horrible compromises...

 

Thanks for your kind EDIT. I think about this stuff a lot - the whole problem of disseminating useful information to an appallingly gullible public. We have endless information a few clicks away, but most people seem no have no ability (or inclination) to discriminate between genuine insight and total hogwash.

[fung0]

6 hours ago, Em2016 said:

Not only this, but linking to @Jud's earlier comment about the 99% vs us (1%), good luck convincing them (the 99% happy with Spotify and Apple Music) to pay double for their monthly streaming subscription.

 

Exactly. The streaming market has found its sweet-spot price points, and they're not likely to shift. They're certainly not going to double, in exchange for claimed benefits that the average consumer can't hear or even understand. Nor is there much new money to be extracted from the 1% audiophiles - especially not by downgrading the quality of the data.

 

The adoption of MQA must be about something other than increased revenues.

 

Discussions took place in the boardrooms of the big companies that have already signed on. Graphs were presented in PowerPoint. What do you suppose they said?

[fung0]

4 hours ago, lucretius said:

And so says someone brought up on this book.  I really think we need some new books in the curriculum.

 

Orwell did his best to warn us, but couldn't anticipate everything. He nailed the roles of propaganda, surveillance and thought control... but under-rated the role of economics, especially corporate greed and the concentration of wealth.

 

This may explain why, 'post-1984,' so many people continue to believe that corporate entities are essentially benign. That a company like MQA simply couldn't be as utterly amoral as its own statements clearly indicate. That the anointed heads of gargantuan global music-distribution cartels must still be focused on the stated goal of fostering creativity and getting music efficiently out to the masses - and not simply working to maximize their own multi-million-dollar annual bonuses by any means necessary.

 

Getting down to cases: it is preposterous to suggest that the financial history of the companies Meridian and MQA is somehow irrelevant to the current debate. The business press routinely prints such analyses, without apology, as a basis for guiding the (stock) purchases of its readership. The audio press surely owes its readers the same service.

 

To be sure, the background may not matter so much if I'm buying a single new DAC. But if I'm being asked to buy into - or tacitly agree to - a far-reaching new technological standard, I'd definitely like to know everything I can about the people and companies proposing it. Their past actions and current financial structures are vital in assessing their goals and their prospects. (All other considerations aside, I wouldn't willingly agree to a new standard that depends on a company that isn't financially stable. I've already got too many files in my archives that I can no longer access.)

 

Orwell was wrong: the darkest future isn't one in which Big Brother controls everything. It's a world in which the population believes unquestioningly in the God-given right of Big Brother Inc. to own everything, in perpetuity. Not just the products of creative labor, but even the underlying mathematics that allow creations to be stored or transmitted. A world in which questioning that corporate status quo has become a thought-crime.

[fung0]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I don't believe 4k video was something consumers asked for or need. I'm not sure it's actually that good for anyone other than those with giant screens who sit close, and the people selling goods. 

 

Lossless 1080p, which isn't sent into homes via streaming, satellite, or cable, would be better. When people see how good an over the air HD video looks compared to lossy 4k, they may think twice about 4k. The same can be said for great 44.1 versus high resolution and MQA.

 

You make two excellent points, one regarding 4K video and a wider one regarding media formats in general.

 

It's pretty obvious that 4K (a.k.a. UHD) exists purely because a) the video industry needs something new to sell, and b) because higher-resolution LCD panels just keep rolling off the production lines at lower and lower cost. Neither of these reasons has anything to do with 4K being better for the consumer. Nor is much said about the obvious trade-off you bring up: 4K with greater compression vs HD with less compression. I've got 9GB DVDs today that look better than most Blu-ray transfers, and I've seen plenty of HD that wastes its spatial resolution by introducing horrible temporal artifacts.

 

It's been suggested that audio is 'evolving naturally' through a succession of formats: LP, Redbook CD, MP3, DXD, 24/192 FLAC and now, at last, MQA... or something like that. This is at best a disastrous over-simplification. Many of the steps in this evolution have involved significant trade-offs. MP3, for example, sacrificed quality compared to CD, but enabled digital distribution at a time when bandwidth and storage were not adequate to handle early lossless formats like SHN and APE. Today, there's little reason for MP3 to exist, other than momentum, but we're is stuck with it.

 

MQA similarly is not a clear step forward - and its compromises are not nearly as well attuned to our current technical situation as those of MP3 were in its early days. MQA is a lossy format, at a time when we no longer need to accept lossy encoding. It offers smaller data sizes than 'high-res' FLAC (yet bigger than CD-quality FLAC), at a time when bandwidth and storage are no longer constrained. And it's DRM-encumbered ('authentication' is by definition a form of 'digital rights management') at a time when we've largely shed the useless baggage of DRM.

 

Meanwhile, the preponderance of evidence tells us that MQA is not audibly superior to 24/192 PCM/FLAC. Fans do claim otherwise, but are unable to provide either empirical evidence or theoretical corroboration of their subjective opinions. MQA Ltd. itself has conspicuously failed to provide (or even enable) extensive, well-constructed, third-party, blind testing, suggesting a certain lack of faith in its own technology. And it has attempted to keep theoretical details under wraps, even though they're heavily protected by patents. (The intended purpose of patents is the sharing of technological innovations, not their obfuscation.)

 

At least 4K 'does no harm,' in that it's effectively a complete superset of HD. It may bring some inferior mastering in the short term, but in the long run there's no reason not to adopt it - just as there's no conceivable harm in extending the PCM standard to include 24/192 in addition to 16/44. The extra storage and bandwidth required in either transition is barely important today, and will be completely insignificant going forward.

 

Not so with MQA. This is more like moving from 16/44 FLAC/PC to some kind of ultra-high-bitrate 24/192 MP3. Some might say they "prefer the warm sound, the involving soundstage, the subtle presence" of 24/192 MP3 - but that's not nearly enough to justify the establishment of a whole new audio distribution format. Or, at least, it shouldn't be.

[fung0]

49 minutes ago, PeterSt said:

There is no warmer sound in MQA. The contrary.

 

Very well, then: "the greener sound of MQA." All subjective judgments are ultimately alike. (Especially metaphorical ones.)

[fung0]

5 hours ago, firedog said:

I'm pretty sure that if MQA was making the revolutionary and game changing difference I keep reading about, then it should be obvious to almost anyone, much like the difference between old standard TV and HD TV is (even when it is compressed), or as Chris said, the improvement of 1080p over the old standard - you see it right away and it is clearly better. 

 

If even the small differences were consistently positive for MQA, I'd have a better opinion of it, but that isn't what I hear. I don't see any great advantage to it. 

 

And again, if it was just another format choice, I'd be fine with it. I could choose to get an MQA remaster or not in many cases. But I don't think that is what is going to happen and I don't think that is the intent.

 

This is very well put. Attempts to make this debate about sound quality are mis-conceived.

 

Even the most glowing reports place any possible sonic advantage of MQA at no better than 'extremely subtle' - while the many less-positive reports (not to mention essentially all detailed technical analysis) indicate no better than placebo levels of improvement, at best, and at least subtle levels of sonic degradation, at worst. Even by the most charitable reading of available evidence, MQA is clearly not a significant step forward in audio quality compared to FLAC/PCM or DXD. And very possibly a slight step backward.

 

Against that, we have the format's numerous, overt and absolutely undeniable practical drawbacks. It's lossy, it's proprietary, it's expensive (at every point in the distribution process), and it introduces mild DRM (with a significant chance of truly onerous DRM in future) into a distribution system that is at last almost entirely free of it. To counterbalance these negatives, MQA would need some sizable positives... and, very clearly, there are none to be had. (Other than the thrill of buying yet another shiny new DAC.)

 

The onus is very much on the pro-MQA camp - and especially MQA Ltd. - to provide a strong justification for such a highly disruptive new format. This they have utterly failed to do. When pressed, they repeatedly fall back on lauding the vague, highly subjective and all-but-inaudible 'coloration' of MQA encoded music. That sort of argument is enough to sell one DAC over another, but not even remotely sufficient to sell a whole new industry-wide audio format.

 

Summing up everything stated so far in this thread (and I have read it all): it's fail, fail, fail for MQA. And yes, that's absolutely taking into account all glowingly subjective reports from people who just love MQA. Folks: you're free to love whatever you love - but you'll have to pardon the rest of the world if it asks a better reason to reshape itself than according with your emotions.

[fung0]

5 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I agree the differences in video are much easier to see, but if 1080p was delivered better, 99 percent of people wouldn't care about 4k. 

 

For instance, HDR could have been added to 1080p video. Even the most ardent fans of UHD agree that HDR is the more important part of the spec.

[fung0]

(This thread lately seems to be suffering from a rash of posters who insist on being deliberately obtuse and repetitive, as if that were clever somehow. I remind the many intelligent posters that replying to such trollish posts - in any way whatsoever - is always counterproductive. Of course, it's your blood pressure, and your time to waste...)

 

Samuel T Cogley, you're quite right: I'd finally managed to blot it out of my mind, but now it comes back to me what a hideous failure Dolby was. You'd start off with a new deck and high hopes, and you'd kid yourself for a while. But when you went back and listened to your carefully-recorded tapes, the results were painfully disappointing. Either Dolby wasn't selective enough with its frequency range, or there was simply too much musical information in the hiss range. (I tended to favor the latter theory, but it really didn't matter: Dolby sucked, either way.)

 

The more avid the audiophile, the quicker the Dolby was disabled. At one point, I was slammed to the mat for offering Dolby-encoded tapes in a live-concert trade. The recipient was horrified, and quickly set me straight: the tape-trading community had discovered early on that Dolby was literally worse than useless.

 

A related, and equally painful memory... That trading community, hundreds of thousands strong, was eagerly awaiting DAT as a replacement for cassette. But after fighting so hard for our VCR rights, Sony torpedoed digital audio tape by building in DRM. That experience is one big reason I now flee at top speed whenever DRM shows its ugly head - particularly when attached to a whole new media format.

[fung0]

MQA at CES

 

1. According to a press release from the company, MQA CEO Mike Jbara will be "chairing a discussion focusing on the lifestyle trends and latest technology developments that are shaping consumer experience." Ominously entitled Music Streaming is Only the Beginning, the session will be held Wednesday, Jan. 10, 11:00-11:30am, in the Hi-Res Audio Pavilion, LVCC 14735. Anyone in Vegas, by all means let us know how it goes!

 

2. The same MQA press release lists several new licensing deals. One that struck me was nugs.net. MQA seems to be available for purchase, which would be an example of MQA moving beyond streaming and becoming an archival alternative to FLAC, et al. Also, MQA seems to be priced exactly the same as proper "HI-RES" audio. (Details of mastering differences are, of course, not available.)

 

3. Two points in the nugs.net FAQ are noteworthy:

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What is MQA?

MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) is an award-winning* technology that delivers master quality audio in a file that’s small enough to stream or download.

What does the A for ‘Authenticated’ refer to?

Authentication refers to the fact that the music file has either been approved in the studio by the artist/producer or has been verified by the copyright owner.

 

It's distressing to learn that all those FLAC files I've been streaming and/or downloading are actually not "small enough" for those purposes. On the other hand, it's a thrill to discover that we can now buy "master quality audio" in genuine Master Quality format... and extremely comforting to know that, at the very least, "the copyright owner" has verified the file.

[fung0]

4 hours ago, mcgillroy said:

Above all there is not a single metric offered in this CES MQA press-release: no number of albums available, streams streamed, DACs sold, new signups in the fold (pun intended), market reach and potential. No revenue to show, simply nothing.

 

This is what struck me initially: it's a press release with no real news hook. "MQA Announces..." 20 new licensees!, or 100,000 albums now available! - those would be newsworthy. But "MQA will have a booth?" or "MQA will host a half-hour discussion"...? Seriously? The fairly vague material about licensing deals is presented more as background, than as news. Odd way to do PR...

 

It is sad to see nugs.net jumping on the bandwagon, but given the number of formats they offer, I suppose it's just a tick-box move for them. Hard to imagine anyone choosing MQA for downloads, especially when nugs' default "Hi-Res" files are the same price, and "CD-quality" (presumably 16/44 FLAC) is usually significantly cheaper. I'm still converting SHN and APE files I accumulated over the years. Who'd want to do that again?

[fung0]

Our current generation of journalists has been trained to believe it's possible to be perfectly objective and perfectly rational. And, moreover, that new products, new technologies will always get better and better. So when they encounter MQA - brand new, backed by somewhat plausible theory, sold by a somewhat reputable company, adopted across the industry they love - they immediately hear an improvement. That's how the mind works.

 

Subsequently reversing that first impression is nigh impossible. When they see theoretical proofs that MQA can't possibly sound better than high-res PCM, they are... skeptical. When they read A/B tests showing that MQA sounds no better than PCM, and possibly significantly worse... they discount them as being the product of inferior, less-discerning listeners. And when the industry tells them "there's no DRM," they simply can't see what's in plain sight... even though "authentication" is obviously a dictionary synonym for "digital rights management." (Which in turn, is not a synonym for "copy protection.")

 

Will any of these journalists have the humility, the integrity, and the simple good sense to eat crow and admit they've been (quite understandably) led astray? Those very few that do will certainly have my respect.

[fung0]

2 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

Oh shut up.  We are plenty experienced to not be at the whim of a first impression.  I've heard valid MQA demos on several occasions.  And you don't even understand how process standards like authentication differ from DRM. 

 

The real problem here are armchair idiots like yourself who can't respect a differing opinion.  Go back to school and take a Debating 101 course and learn how to present some points backed up by some evidence before slamming the journalists who are working hard to explore audio.

 

"Oh shut up?" Really? I know that several posters have been, shall we say 'forthright' in their criticism of your writing, but I am not one of them. I am merely suggesting, politely, that you are mistaken about MQA - not because you're stupid, or because you're corrupt, but because, like any of us, you can be led astray by your preconceptions, by peer pressure and by cunning marketing tactics.

 

As it happens, I'm anything but an "armchair idiot." I'm an engineer, an author and a journalist who's been writing about things like DRM probably since before you figured out how to plug in an amp. And I've written enough reviews to know how that process works too. Pack journalism has wrought havoc in the markets I've written about over the years, and allowed all sorts of technological monstrosities to thrive. That's why it's important to use wisely whatever leverage we've got.

 

I also know how to do research, and I'm afraid yours is the opinion that lacks evidence. So far, the weight of both theory and experiment is overwhelming: if MQA has any sonic advantage over high-res PCM, it's subtle and subjective at best. In fact, it's pretty certain that MQA actually reduces fidelity, but I'm willing to give MQA the benefit of the doubt on this - because 'close' is simply not good enough, when an entire industry is being herded backward into proprietary formats and DRM.

 

All the arguments you've put forward here and in your column have been thoroughly debunked. But, most importantly, the idea that MQA is the only way we can have a huge library of high-res music is absolute rubbish... provided that we dig our heels in and refuse the ugly compromise that we're currently being offered.

 

My previous post was sincere: I think if you read this thread with an open mind, if you can truly accept the possibility that MQA is nothing more than an industry Trojan horse, you could do a lot of good for audio consumers.

[fung0]

8 hours ago, FredericV said:

 

It's in the Munich interview by Jaap Veenstra:

 

I find it fascinating at 10:04, when BS says in his most pious undertone: "The authentication, which is the only thing in the stream that is secure... is to prove to the customer that they've got the right thing."

 

Of course, we already knew that authentication was in no way a guarantee of mastering quality, or of accurate reproduction (akin to sRGB display calibration). But this admission is still remarkable. All the hoopla about "authentication" - right in the name of the format - to do something that's easily managed by a couple of bytes of metadata? Dare we hope that MQA is the long-awaited answer to our current plague of fraudulent FLAC files?

 

But the revelations continue inexorably... "Is it a lossy or lossless format?" BS: "It's both." But, alas, critics "cannot measure it to find out if it's lossy or not." In fact, critics in general are dismissed as "armchair theorists."

 

Odd, how that "armchair" terminology turns up from this source... almost as if MQA proponents were reading from the same script. Or preaching the same gospel, perhaps...

[fung0]

59 minutes ago, Peter Markus said:

So A/B comparison is possible with CD as well  https://www.stereophile.com/content/first-major-label-mqa-cd-steve-reich-nonsesuch

 

Correct me if I'm wrong... but I seem to recall that, once upon a time in this thread, a number of people claimed that such a thing as an "MQA CD" would never exist. Just goes to show that "never" is never as far in the future as we might hope.

 

"...With no MQA designation on the album cover or disc..."

 

Just gets better and better.

[fung0]

58 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

It's now posted on-line at https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-drm-and-other-four-letter-words

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

Reminds me of a medieval theologian trying to prove the existence of angels. Alas, there's no divine mystery here...

 

DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management," and MQA has that right in its name. 'Authentication' is a way of managing a user's rights to interact with digital data. For example, by removing users' natural right to build their own decoders, to modify the files, or even to deconstruct what's been done to the original audio data.

 

Austin invents multiple 'definitions' of DRM, but talks only about different implementations. This is pure sophistry. Any technology that manages user's rights to a digital product remains - trivially - DRM.

 

Austin isn't even consistent. "You can't inspect the contents of an MQA file... This is not, however, an attempt to manage consumers' rights..." Seriously? It's not only an attempt, it's a successful one. Austin admits that consumers are prevented from interacting with MQA data the way they would with a DRM-free format.

 

Quote

In a follow-up email, Stuart wrote that MQA "takes a strong stance against DRM. We don't believe in it for music distribution, we don't provide for it now or in the future."

It is possible that Stuart meant to say "copy protection." But a proper interviewer wouldn't have allowed him to alter the definitions of English words to his own advantage. MQA may have "a stance" against many things, but DRM isn't one of them.

[fung0]

39 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

For the record, I have no financial stake in MQA anymore than Chris Connacker has. Please put your conspiracy theories back in your pocket.

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

Mr. Atkinson, many of us greatly appreciate your willingness to engage with the discussion here. But you should understand that when confronted with seemingly irrational behavior, it is very tempting to come up with irrational explanations.

• The instantaneous whole-hearted acclamation of MQA by the audiophile press was hard to understand on any rational basis.
• The ongoing readiness of the audiophile press to accept MQA claims at face value is equally difficult to explain, especially when the company has - for years now - failed to provide the obvious double-blind A/B testing data that might provide a shred of empirical support for its extravagant theoretical claims.
• The ongoing refusal of the audiophile press to engage with, let alone publish, legitimate technical criticisms of MQA borders on the bizarre. One manufacturer after another adopts a restrictive, secretive technology, yet only CA has published a proper technical critique.
• The often over-the-top emotional responses of MQA-supporting journalists, when challenged on this forum, have been odd, to say the least. To be sure, flames will beget flames. But it is not usual to see professional journalists so personally invested in what is, after all, just another commercial, proprietary technology.

Personally, I've never believed that cash changed hands. But there is something happening here that can't be readily explained by the workings of traditional journalism.

[fung0]

4 hours ago, HalSF said:

The one thing I find slightly irrational about this list of irrationalities is the idea that @John_Atkinson, who has a long well-established, and exhaustively explained skeptical hostility toward double-blind testing as an tool for evaluating hi-fi technology, should be concerned about MQA failing to sponsor double-blind A/B testing of its sound. That's on MQA, not John Atkinson.

 

Wouldn't reviewing high-tech products while maintaining public "hostility" to basic scientific methods be even more irrational than anything on my list?

[fung0]

On 6/7/2018 at 11:39 PM, Brinkman Ship said:

For the record, i do not believe Stereophile writers are paid to mention products ("product placements").

 

I don't think John Atkinson would allow it. TAS..it is possible..but only with certain writers.  But still unlikely. I don't think audio manufacturers would really need to do this. Providing the products for long term loan is sufficient enough incentive to get them mentioned.

 

I recently received an email in response to an article of mine that was published online. The email was from a commercial service that monetizes links. The idea was that if I signed up with them, I could make money every time someone followed a product link included in one of my articles. Clearly, there are companies making a business out of 'rewarding' journalists in this way. So presumably there are takers. It doesn't mean their reviews are slanted, necessarily... but it's not exactly the kind of incentive that would encourage incisive journalism.

 

Regarding long-term loans: yes, they're always a risk. Reviewing tech gear doesn't pay remotely enough to cover the expense of keeping one's own equipment close to the leading edge. So it's extremely tempting to accept 'loaners' or discounted purchases. In my experience, most such insider deals do not have specific strings attached. (Maybe it's just that I've never expressed enough openness to the idea. Or that I've never reviewed anything in the five- to six-figure price bracket.)

 

Also, don't forget that there's both a carrot and stick. Companies definitely tend to become less responsive to journalists who are repeatedly critical of their products or policies. Being shunned by a major industry player can be disastrous for a working tech journalist.