Jump to content
IGNORED

MQA is Vaporware


Recommended Posts

16 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Do MQA threads hover around the top of the general section of the forum?  Yes.  Has discussion of MQA "taken over" CA?  Hardly.

 

You're not only reading the threads you seem to abhor, you're posting in them.  The majority of threads in the CA forum are not about MQA.  Just because the MQA threads are getting lots of action doesn't mean the other threads or forum sections have fallen silent.  I think @crenca's advice is spot on.  Avoid the MQA threads (this forum has a thread ignore feature) and you'll be happier.

 

Actually, I mostly do ignore the MQA threads. When I do look them over I click on the View Unread icon, skip the first half dozen or so unread pages and go to either the last or second to last unread pages. As far as posting (OMG, the HORROR!) in a MQA thread, out of 261 pages in this thread, I have posted exactly 3 (now 4) times, all in the last 24 hours.

Link to comment
20 minutes ago, daverich4 said:

 

Actually, I mostly do ignore the MQA threads. When I do look them over I click on the View Unread icon, skip the first half dozen or so unread pages and go to either the last or second to last unread pages. As far as posting (OMG, the HORROR!) in a MQA thread, out of 261 pages in this thread, I have posted exactly 3 (now 4) times, all in the last 24 hours.

 

I appreciate what you're saying.  And I see that you and I agree that Scoggins is an "industry representative".  :)

 

Quote

One big downside of this is that Industry representatives are slammed the minute they show up. Lee Scoggins has allowed himself to be a punching bag way more often than I ever would have.

 

Using a public forum to brazenly promote your "brand" and disseminate vendor marketing propaganda is acceptable to some.  I get it.  But that doesn't make it ethical IMHO.  Scoggins deserves to be called out on what he's doing here.

Link to comment
4 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Ron,

This 262 pages has been going on for more than a year. To keep up is less than a page a day. My favorite thread on GolfWRX is "Does Anyone Still Game Ping Eye 2's?" Started January 31, 2012 and has 270,819 views as of today. This thread is closing in on that after 13 months. My point is most successful site have a few big threads. 

Keeping up over a year is one thing, but it is daunting for a new member to go back to the start.  There is no doubt that MQA has created the most intense controversy among Audiophiles in many years.

Link to comment
6 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

 

I receive many PMs every week asking that I reign in the objectivists and reign in the subjectivists, and everything in between.

 

You would think they would PM you about important things. Perhaps peace in Palestine, or saving the whales,  or those large German girls that are still absent on the new site...

Hey MQA, if it is not all $voodoo$, show us the math!

Link to comment
9 minutes ago, Fokus said:

And, sadly, there is no such thing as bad publicity.

Try telling that to Tiger Woods....:(

Windows 11 PC, Roon, HQPlayer, Focus Fidelity convolutions, iFi Zen Stream, Paul Hynes SR4, Mutec REF10, Mutec MC3+USB, Devialet 1000Pro, KEF Blade.  Plus Pro-Ject Signature 12 TT for playing my 'legacy' vinyl collection. Desktop system; RME ADI-2 DAC fs, Meze Empyrean headphones.

Link to comment
2 minutes ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

Keeping up over a year is one thing, but it is daunting for a new member to go back to the start.  There is no doubt that MQA has created the most intense controversy among Audiophiles in many years.

 

It may be daunting but worthwhile. Focus on music and DAC filters for a start. Then notice that one of the things I talked about earlier in the thread having choice of filters and what is on page 261. Choice  of filters is important and MQA wants to limit your choices. 

Link to comment
51 minutes ago, Fokus said:

 

Sigh.

 

Deep sigh.

 

Very deep sigh.

 

Where does all this nonsense come from?

 

What MQA does is really rather simple.

 

Example:

 

Given a 192kHz recording. It will have ringing at 96kHz, because it has been produced with an industry-standard half-band AA filter in the ADC.

 

MQA will downsample this to 96kHz. After all, 96k is all that can pass through their pipe.

For this operation they do not select a standard AA filter, but a tailored one. Their filter will reach null at 96kHz (to kill the recording ADC's ringing), but otherwise it will be very leaky, i.e. it causes aliasing in the target 0-48kHz band. How much aliasing? According to their original literature (and f...ing please go and read the AES papers, instead of coming here with new fabrications every time), the intention is (was?) to select a filter such that the aliasing that falls below 20kHz always remains below the recording's noise floor (or a similar criterion). (This selection was to be done by humans, on a track by track base, ideally under supervision of dead artists, i.e. the touted white glove treatment.)

 

Thus they obtain a 96k file. This can be folded to 48k and back, in what we know is conceptually a lossless operation (in reality it is lossy, because the 24 bits of the container have to be distributed over the two bands).

 

Upon playback, after unfolding to 96k, the stream is upsampled to the original 192 by once more a leaky filter, one of the 32 that Mansr/Archimago documented. These rendering filters add little or no ringing, and according to the original plans each filter ought to be specifically tailored to the DAC in use. (But we know now that this is not happening, as totally different DACs have been seen using the same filter coefficients*.)

 

Voila: a 192k recording is passed through a 48k channel without having been subject to steep AA or AI filtering.

 

 

For masters of higher resolution the same applies, but more.

 

For masters of lower resolution the above does not work.

 

For a 96k master (ringing at 48kHz) they presumably** insert a short low pass filter, thus removing the 48kHz component (some would call this apodising).

 

For a 48/44.1k master they cannot do this, because the result would show a reduced treble in the audible band. They do have a funny patent about applying an all-pass filter with severe phase lag above 20kHz, so that any pre-ringing is literally taken up and dropped down again after the main impulse. Oh, the ways these people go in their chase of ghosts!

 

 

Oh, and what about all these MQA references to sparse sampling, new insights since Shannon, triangular kernels, ...   Red fish. Smelly red fish.

 

 

(* And now we have dCS crying that they really are doing something really very special, you have to believe us!)

 

(** When I analysed digital rips of Tidal signals I forgot to look into this aspect.)

 

Hi Fokus,

It is not fabrication, but maybe misunderstanding.

 

Re wiki : "The audio stream is sampled and convolved with a triangle function, and interpolated later during playback. The techniques employed, including the sampling of signals with a finite rate of innovation, were developed by a number of researchers over the preceding decade, including Pier Luigi Dragotti and others.[11]"

 

Are you stating that MQA does not implement the process as per the wiki, i.e. the wiki may need revising ?

 

The presentation as per Dragotti indicates that their method is used for removal of blurring - slide 4.

 

Regards,

Shadders.

Link to comment
17 minutes ago, Fokus said:

Shadders, do you know a red herring when you see one?

 

Hi Fokus,

Yes - i know what a red herring is. As per my previous post on page 261:

 

"So, we will never know until reverse engineered whether they are implementing any processing on the master file. The references to image sharpening study may be just a red herring - to make it look involved and detailed - subterfuge. "

 

That is why i asked the question regarding the wiki, which you responded to. Since no one knows what the processing entails, it is possible that they have implemented the algorithm/process.

 

We cannot discount the information, as we do not know what the MQA process is in detail - someone stated it was a black box.

 

Brian Lucey stated that there are harmonics in the MQA results - pleasing to the ear ? Is this a by product of the stated convolution with the triangle function ? (we do not know).

 

Regards,

Shadders.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, Ron Scubadiver said:

I would have to say choice of filters might be important to some, but the issue which bothers me is MQA might replace the nice 24/96, 24/192 and DSD downloads we can get now, if the labels have their way.  It's debatable as to whether MQA is better than 24/48 as it is.

 

And then possible replace them with MQA 2.0 of the same master.

Roon Rock->Auralic Aria G2->Schiit Yggdrasil A2->McIntosh C47->McIntosh MC301 Monos->Wilson Audio Sabrinas

Link to comment
1 hour ago, Shadders said:

 

Brian Lucey stated that there are harmonics in the MQA results - pleasing to the ear ? Is this a by product of the stated convolution with the triangle function ? (we do not know)

 

Convolving with a triangle is filtering. Any filter has a time domain representation, and their leaky filters will have fairly simple representations. But the referral to the story of sparse sampling and image deblurring and whatever, that is bullshit. Just say that you use a weak filter, don’t dress it up to make it look sciency.

 

Link to comment
30 minutes ago, Fokus said:

 

Convolving with a triangle is filtering. Any filter has a time domain representation, and their leaky filters will have fairly simple representations. But the referral to the story of sparse sampling and image deblurring and whatever, that is bullshit. Just say that you use a weak filter, don’t dress it up to make it look sciency.

 

Hi Fokus,

That is the issue - we do not know. We have no inside knowledge of the process of MQA, and the process artefacts may be harmonics. MQA may use a derivation of the deblurring study.

 

The AES paper i have located is : http://www.aes.org/tmpFiles/elib/20180112/17501.pdf

 

Reference [23] is the Dragotti paper, and this is referred to in Section 4.1, page 9. It does not state it is definitely implemented, but section 4.1 indicates that it is part of the MQA process - else, why describe such an implementation.

 

Even so, any such process is just an effect, an does not guarantee a perfect result (i.e.what the artist heard), but we should not ignore it, although it makes life more difficult to challenge MQA.

 

Regards,

Shadders.

Link to comment
7 hours ago, FredericV said:

 

We had some very unpleasant encounters with Peter Veth. Even on facebook where he wrote that he would expose my company. Yes what we do is incompatible with MQA. Any vendor that sells DSP solutions is incompatible with MQA. He was also planning to boycot a trade show by threatening to making complaints to the organiser. We told him that if he would try to make a public discussion into a trade show room we pay for (these rooms typically cost thousands of euro's for 2 show days), he would be banned from the room.

This person always keeps repeating the same arguments, did not learn anything from the CA forum, and always uses the same fallback arguments:

- GO LISTEN ARGUMENT: when you fail at a discussion with more technical persons than your own skillset, use the go listen argument
- measurements are not important, our ears don't work digitally and other BS to revert to the GO LISTEN argument
- MORE RESEARCH IS NEEDED ARGUMENT: this tactic is used to delay the discussion by claiming you need more research
- BLACK BOX ARGUMENT: you don't understand MQA as you don't know what's in the encoder/decoder, so whatever you bring up are not the real facts, or emulation .....
- AUTHORITY ARGUMENT: I believe Stuart, he is more clever than you
- DON'T LIKE DON'T BUY argument, to silence critics
- TIME DOMAIN argument (which is already debunked so many times)

There are more tactics which seem to be used among all the MQA key opinion makers. They resort to ad-hominem tactics when the above arguments are being exposed and debunked, which is what Lee is now also doing on his own FB profile by making ridicule of CA.

Typical is that they use canned resources and copy paste the marketing lies from MQA, like this article:

image.thumb.png.66c19a3b80021caa014cdf32fa81543e.png


It contains the usual MQA marketing BS like

 


Lee should look at this figure until he understands it:

image.thumb.png.7af7568ba939aad4191fbeab31e62f58.png


 

 

What are the X and Y axes on the chart and what is the source and a link to the source?

Link to comment
8 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

What are the X and Y axes on the chart and what is the source'link?

 

Um, the Y axis is the signal db & the X is signal's frequency - standard audio signal stuff...perhaps you are asking something else?

Hey MQA, if it is not all $voodoo$, show us the math!

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...