MQA is Vaporware

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

19 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

To be fair, he is only burning his bridges with some readers that frequent Audiophile Style,

To be fairer...there is a good percentage of older Stereophile readers who only listen to vinyl, and really don't know or care about his embrace of Master Quack.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

4 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

 

Even if JA could share I'm not sure what that would reveal.  The white glove treatment these recordings received is not representative of a random mQa album found on Tidal.

It would reveal a lot..if you had the lossless master file before Master Quack, and the processed file, there are a myriad of comparisons that can be done, both subjective as to how they sound, and technical.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

5 hours ago, StephenJK said:

Fair enough.  Thanks for answering, that does make sense.

No, it does not hold water. JA could easily upload 60 second clips of the unadulterated master file and the Master Quacked file.

 

It would be no skin of his back.  It is not that he CAN'T, it is he WON'T.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

59 minutes ago, lucretius said:

But it still not representative of what one finds on Tidal, so what does it really matter? And what mQa processes would be evaluated?  What would it tell us about the sausage maker that Warner's back catalogue is put through or the mQa processes available to studios?

C'mon, you know that Archimago and others would be able to easily evaluate the differences between the pure PCM file and the Master Quack, and more importantly, the rest of us would be able to see if we hear anything close to what Atkinson claims.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

1 hour ago, MikeyFresh said:

Why would that be OK? Disrupt an RMAF presentation? You sound as if you think that was clever, justified and well done, none of which are the case. 

 

It wasn't their presentation, though they certainly could have waited until the end and made some comments or questioned whatever they wanted to. But to engage in the level of interruption and unprofessional behavior they did when someone like Jbara is the damn CEO, more is expected of both himself and the band he leads into a public arena that is being captured on video. He couldn't have looked more foolhardy, or done a worse job of representing their brand with that gaggle of jerks.

 

Who the hell do you suggest Ken Forsythe is to "disrupt" an RMAF presentation? Should we for some reason be impressed by his tenure at Meridian, or at HiFi Buys? Lee's buddy?

 

Another pathetic attempt at "clever" revisionist history, I'm amazed at how in each and every post you make here you seem to fancy yourself about the most clever guy around. You've only deluded yourself though, no one else is impressed at all with these periodic ARQ summations, your credibility long ago shot.

Utterly perfect, dead on post.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

9 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

First, there is more than one mQa encoder (BS refers to a hierarchy). And do we really need any more technical analysis?  Whether there's 13 or 15 or 17 bits of music, etc. , so what?  iirc, it was mansr who did the technical breakdown.

 

The whole point of the white glove treatment is to present mQa in the best light (not to provide a typical result*).  Noone can be sure what processes mQa limited employed -- perhaps they used some non-mQa processes prior to or subsequent to the mQa encoding.  Also, they are obviously going with the specific mQa encoder (among the various ones they have to choose from) that gives them the best results. Questioning JA's subjective impressions is an act of sheer folly.

 

*E.g. If I were to use a Mytek Brooklyn ADC to produce an mQa file, you know there's no way I could duplicate mQa ltd's white glove treatment.

 

 

 

 

 

Let's try again...I and many others want to know if we heard the Master Quack "magic" JA did-

 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/listening-mqa

 

"Amazing Grace: The first of two recordings of mine I used for my comparisons and for which Bob Stuart had prepared MQA versions, this arrangement by Eriks Esenvalds opens and closes with solo soprano, set against a choral vocalise. I've always been happy with the sound of the original 24/88.2 WAV file, but with the MQA version, Genna McAllister's angelic vocal line stands a little more forward from the choral halo, which itself sounds a little farther back than I'm used to. Overall, there was simply less ambiguity in the spatial relationships between the singers and the surrounding acoustic with the MQA version."

 

and

 

"Water Night: The scoring of this choral work by contemporary composer Eric Whitacre is complex and occasionally dense. But with the MQA version, the inner voices were better differentiated. And as with "Amazing Grace," the relationships of each of the singers to each other and the surrounding space seemed better defined. The reverberation tails in the warmly supportive acoustic of St. Stephen's Catholic Church, in Portland, Oregon, faded cleanly into the room tone in both cases, but at one place in the recording the MQA version just sounded more real: About two seconds before the singers start, there is a very quiet noise toward the back of the choir. It sounds somewhat like a generic tick on the original WAV file, more like a sound made by a human being in a real space in the MQA version."

 

Every hifi forum is filled with thousands of threads questioning reviewer subjective impressions of every speaker, component, and cable..so I don't get your reasoning.

 

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

"Comparisons: I had sent MQA's Bob Stuart the 24/88.2 masters of some of my recordings, for him to produce MQA versions. When he DropBoxed the MQA versions to me, Stuart also loaned me some MQA-encoded hi-rez files that had been used in MQA's demonstrations at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show, as well as a number of MQA-encoded FLAC files accompanied by the original PCM versions."

 

What is good for the goose, is good for the gander folks.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I think asking John for the files is a distraction. People can already get the 2L pure PCM files and mQa versions, if they want to analyze something. 

 

I have all the mQa files made available to the press. I'm looking at the Doors LA Woman right now. It says FLAC 48 kHz 24 bit, MQA 352.8 kHz. I don't think these would lead anyone anywhere we haven't been 

I am focuses just on Atkinson's recordings. They will without a doubt be more of a boutique, purist nature, with presumably no overdubs and not any where near the post production of the average pop album. It would be VERY instructive to hear how mQa changes the sound.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

32 minutes ago, Arg said:

 

He (Amir) is quite transparent about it. It is not a boast about his hearing ability: it is to refute people wrongly saying “no way, no one, no how, can you tell if a music recording is 16 or 24 bit.” It’s in one of his videos. He had to pick out a lead-out section of a track where music levels are very low, put the ABX gear on A-B repeat of 2 seconds, and crank the volume, and listen to the noise difference. He literally says, “you could say I cheated”. He also openly says that neither he nor anyone would have a hope of telling them apart in listening to music passages at normal recording levels. Nothing wrong with that IMHO, and point well made.

 

P.S. to the general discussion in this thread: didn’t Chris encourage discussion of MQA instead of character assassination?

So now we know you are an Amir groupie and an apologist. And probably the reason the last few pages were scrubbed clean. Good job, if so.

 

If Amir took a dump on your desk, you would thank him for the chocolate mousse.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

1 minute ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Stop your nonsense or your gone. 

why did you scrub legitimate posts?

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

51 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

They were nonsense. This is warning 2. One more and you’re gone. 

Don't threaten me you pasty faced Schlemiel. Fucking nonsense.