MQA is Vaporware

[rickca]

2 minutes ago, esldude said:

Maybe you should listen to the geezers a bit now.  They know not to listen to you on MQA. You have no standing. 

@witchdoctor posts here to promote his studio and talks about himself in third person.  

[Archimago]

16 minutes ago, witchdoctor said:

Archimago:

 

The level of vitriol from the malcontents is over a $10 a month decision. Better to take that passion and direct at things that matter in the world. How music lovers spend their money and spare time is up to them. They shouldn't be shamed by a bunch of geezer crusaders.

 

 

 

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

 

It'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).

[Shadders]

Hi,

Apologies, off topic, but do US people know what a geezer is ?. Is it current US slang ?

(as in diamond geezer).

Regards,

Shadders.

[witchdoctor]

1 minute ago, Shadders said:

Hi,

Apologies, off topic, but do US people know what a geezer is ?. Is it current US slang ?

(as in diamond geezer).

Regards,

Shadders.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geezer

[esldude]

2 minutes ago, Shadders said:

Hi,

Apologies, off topic, but do US people know what a geezer is ?. Is it current US slang ?

(as in diamond geezer).

Regards,

Shadders.

In the US it is an old crotchety man.  Behind the times, stuck in the past old geezer who can't keep up with modern times. 

 

I understand some places it is not age related and similar to calling someone a dude or hipster. 

[Shadders]

Just now, witchdoctor said:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/geezer

Hi,

UK version means something different - not odd as per US, but is someone who is sound, and down to earth, and bit of a lad.

Regards,

Shadders.

[jabbr]

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.

[Archimago]

3 minutes ago, jabbr said:

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.

 

Absolutely. Openness is a core component to progress and ultimately a good thing for consumers.

[cbee]

17 minutes ago, Shadders said:

Hi,

UK version means something different - not odd as per US, but is someone who is sound, and down to earth, and bit of a lad.

Regards,

Shadders.

From the urban dictionary:-

A geezer is a descriptive word in the UK which is used to define a mans characteristics. A geezer will be found usually out side a pub with a pint in his hand on match day. They commonly like football, scrapping, beer, tea, tits, and Barry white. Geezers often acknowledge other geezers by a greeting each other by saying geezer followed by a nod and a thumbs up.

Nigel: Alright geezer how much is a can of red stripe 
Charles: For you nothing my friend because your a top geezer 
Nigel: arr Cheers geeze *nod* *thumbs up*

Charles: *nod* *thumbs up*

 

 

[mansr]

26 minutes ago, jabbr said:

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

And this is why Dolby and DTS were forced to open their specs in order to be included in the ATSC and DVB standards.

[FredericV]

3 hours ago, mansr said:

And this is why Dolby and DTS were forced to open their specs in order to be included in the ATSC and DVB standards.

I'm glad the VLC project can decode these. When I was using a HTPC, VLC was my main player for .mkv and and any video file, and TMT was my player for blu-rays.  A 3 Ghz core2duo + Radeon HTPC card worked like a charm.

Somewhere in 2008 I bought 2 HDI dune players, and no longer using the HTPC.

Sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to do the first unfold in OSS, to recover the ultrasonics embedded in the MQA files. I couldn't care less about the second unfold, which is not compatible with room correction systems or any other form of DSP.

DMCA can't prevent interoperability.

[mansr]

43 minutes ago, FredericV said:

Sooner or later someone is going to figure out how to do the first unfold in OSS, to recover the ultrasonics embedded in the MQA files.

Maybe. Unless it becomes popular, nobody will bother. Now that I know the overall architecture, I've pretty much lost interest in figuring out the finer details.

 

43 minutes ago, FredericV said:

I couldn't care less about the second unfold, which is not compatible with room correction systems or any other form of DSP.

That part I could easily replicate. I see no reason to do so, however. It's just upsampling with insane filters.

[Allan F]

6 hours ago, esldude said:

In the US it is an old crotchety man. Behind the times, stuck in the past old geezer who can't keep up with modern times.

 

I understand some places it is not age related and similar to calling someone a dude or hipster. 

Geezer in North America describes an old, perhaps crotchety or eccentric man.

Diamond geezer is a UK expression and refers to a reliable, good or special man, as in "He's a good sort".

 

 

[crenca]

10 hours ago, jabbr said:

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.

 

 

10 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Absolutely. Openness is a core component to progress and ultimately a good thing for consumers.

 

9 hours ago, mansr said:

And this is why Dolby and DTS were forced to open their specs in order to be included in the ATSC and DVB standards.

 

One thing Robert Harley got right in his "10,000" feet article is all the reasons "the industry" (including the trade publications, manufacturers - everyone but the consumer) desire a closed standard.  It was Mr. Harley (in spite of his incongruent protestation to the contrary) that convinced me more than anyone that MQA is first and foremost a DRM/IP/closed format play.

[bobbmd]

I can’t stand anymore of this- I have unfollowed MQA is vaporware. Either one likes it or doesn’t like it. Just enjoy the music and stop being irrelevant and irreverent to others. y’all have too much time on your hands

[crenca]

1 minute ago, bobbmd said:

I can’t stand anymore of this I have unfollowed MQA is vaporware

 

I like blue, but not yellow.  I can't stand the smell of cooking ham, and women with high pitched squeaky voices...

[firedog]

13 hours ago, witchdoctor said:

Archimago:

 

The level of vitriol from the malcontents is over a $10 a month decision. Better to take that passion and direct at things that matter in the world. How music lovers spend their money and spare time is up to them. They shouldn't be shamed by a bunch of geezer crusaders. 

Can you imagine the vitriol if the price goes up to $11? My goodness this thread might explode

 

 

 

 

You clearly cannot get out of what's going on inside your own head. The discussion here has nothing to do with the price at Tidal. Many of us were subscribing to the hi-fi version before MQA.

The person who can't seem to give it up (passion?) is clearly you. You keep repeating the same argument about how great you think MQA sounds, and don't answer any of the comments that involve facts, and not opinions. Apparently you aren't able to counter any of the arguments, so you ignore them.

[Indydan]

16 hours ago, witchdoctor said:

To all the malcontents here, thanks for reading my posts. If you don't like MQA don't buy it, I am good with that.

. FWIW MQA will not make you gain weight, cause heart disease or cancer. Even if you spend the extra $10 a month no one will force you to listen to it, you can still play the FLAC versions of every MQA track.

Please make your crusade more meaningful, why not go take on the tobacco industry?

 

 

 

If anybody here sounds like they are on a crusade, it is you. It seems you have made it your life project to defend MQA. 

[FredericV]

Breaking: "No Scientific Tests Were Done, Says MQA Founder"
 

Here's the full unfold of his FB post:
 

Quote

 

This isn't a prelude to suddenly becoming active on FB but I felt I had to share this.

Yesterday there was an AES session on mastering for high resolution (whatever that is) whose highlight was a talk about the state of the loudness war, why we're still fighting it and what the final arrival of on-by-default loudness normalisation on streaming services means for mastering. It also contained a two-pronged campaign piece for MQA. During it, every classical misconception and canard about digital audio was trotted out in an amazingly short time. Interaural timing resolution, check. Pictures showing staircase waveforms, check. That old chestnut about the ear beating the Fourier uncertainty (the acoustical equivalent of saying that human observers are able to beat Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), right there.

At the end of the talk I got up to ask a scathing question and spectacularly fumbled my attack*. So for those who were wondering what I was on about, here goes. A filtering operation is a convolution of two waveforms. One is the impulse response of the filter (aka the "kernel"), the other is the signal.
A word that high res proponents of any stripe love is "blurring". The convolution point of view shows that as the "kernel" blurs the signal, so the signal blurs the kernel. As Stuart's spectral plots showed, an audio signal is a much smoother waveform than the kernel so in reality guess who's really blurring whom. And if there's no spectral energy left above the noise floor at the frequency where the filter has ring tails, the ring tails are below the noise floor too.

A second question, which I didn't even get to ask, was about the impulse response of MQA's decimation and upsampling chain as it is shown in the slide presentation. MQA's take on those filters famously allows for aliasing, so how does one even define "the" impulse response of that signal chain when its actual shape depends on when exactly it happens relative to the sampling clock (it's not time invariant). I mentioned this to my friend Bob Katz who countered "but what if there isn't any aliasing" (meaning what if no signal is present in the region that folds down). Well yes, that's the saving grace. The signal filters the kernel rather than vice versa and the shape of the transition band doesn't matter if it is in a region where there is no signal.
These folk are trying to have their cake and eat it. Either aliasing doesn't matter because there is no signal in the transition band and then the precise shape of the transition band doesn't matter either (ie the ring tails have no conceivable manifestation) or the absence of ring tails is critical because there is signal in that region and then the aliasing will result in audible components that fly in the face of MQA's transparency claims.

Doesn't that just sound like the arguments DSD folks used to make? The requirement for 100kHz bandwidth was made based on the assumption that content above 20k had an audible impact whereas the supersonic noise was excused on the grounds that it wasn't audible. What gives?

Meanwhile I'm happy to do speakers. You wouldn't believe how much impact speakers have on replay fidelity.

________
* Oh hang on, actually I started by asking if besides speculations about neuroscience and physics they had actual controlled listening trials to back their story up. Bob Stuart replied that all listening tests so far were working experiences with engineers in their studios but that no scientific listening tests have been done so far. That doesn't surprise any of us cynics but it is an astonishing admission from the man himself. Mhm, I can just see the headlines. "No Scientific Tests Were Done, Says MQA Founder".

 

 

[PeterSt]

No Scientific Tests Were Done, Says MQA Founder

 

 

 

(I only quoted Bruno Putzeys)

[asdf1000]

1 hour ago, PeterSt said:

No Scientific Tests Were Done, Says MQA Founder

 

 

 

(I only quoted Bruno Putzeys)

 

"no scientific listening tests have been done so far"

 

I'm definitely not an MQA supporter. But what Is a scientific listening test?

 

Does this mean double blind testing with 1500 or more randomly selected people?

 

Are speakers and DACs designed that way?

 

[firedog]

12 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

 

"no scientific listening tests have been done so far"

 

I'm definitely not an MQA supporter. But what Is a scientific listening test?

 

Does this mean double blind testing with 1500 or more randomly selected people?

 

Are speakers and DACs designed that way?

 

NO most speakers and DACs aren't tested that way.

But they also aren't doing what MQA claims to :

a) claiming their product is revolutionary and sounds better than anything available today. Sayng your product is "really good" or "sounds great" isn't the same thing;

and b) aren't demanding the rest of the industry and consumers adopt a proprietary format.

[PeterSt]

8 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

Are speakers and DACs designed that way?

 

Usually not. But with an approach I adhere and apply myself, it could happen (a "community" on a forum with customers, with feedback).

 

But this MQA is larger (broader); if someone is to state that something like MQA is better, it should be (should have been) backed up by a broad audience confirming it.

[asdf1000]

3 minutes ago, firedog said:

NO most speakers and DACs aren't tested that way.

But they also aren't doing what MQA claims to :

a) claiming their product is revolutionary and sounds better than anything available today. Sayng your product is "really good" or "sounds great" isn't the same thing;

and b) aren't demanding the rest of the industry and consumers adopt a proprietary format.

 

I respectfully disagree with a) but definitely agree with b)

 

[PeterSt]

In the end all is moot, because such scientific tests have been applied with Hires just the same and I think with results in favor of Hires. That appears to be BS when Hires can't be practical because insufficiently available. Interestingly, with MQA there suddenly appears to be much Hires around. Half of it is even 192KHz (as I can now see myself - but only unfolded to 96KHz as how I approach it). This urges for the question :

 

1. how did they manage to fake *that* (the 192KHz), knowing that nobody is playing tapes and digitally record from them;

2. how do they manage that it even looks quite OK, contrary to e.g. the HDTracks mess.

 

Ad 1.

I don't even think it is fake. It is like somewhere there's this vault with the labels' pearls indeed and that MQA Ltd was allowed to sniff at it and make a lossless version of it. Now the pearls are still safe.