MQA is Vaporware

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12 minutes ago, StreamHiRes said:

Bob Ludwig; One of the most renowned recording engineers in the world,  means nothing to you? Oh my😲. You must be one of those who listen with a calculator.

 

Why would knowing who "Bob Ludwig" is have anything to do with listening with a calculator?

 

12 minutes ago, StreamHiRes said:

 

Learn a little something about Bob Ludwig 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Ludwig

 

How do I know that your video is the same person being referenced by Wikipedia? Its all anonymous to me ...

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Nice article. Ok so let’s stream 24/96, I don’t need no proprietary sh*t I’m my DAC.

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33 minutes ago, alfe said:

Hi Jon,

Streaming 16/44,1 is fine for me, bad luck my parents are just human.😉

 

If the user manual that came with *your* parents say so! 😂

 

I’m happy for FLAC compression regardless ... now just imagine if lossy compression were built into hard drives so they could say they stored 64Tb of only the data that you actually need! 😂

 

In all seriousness I’m in favor of doubling the resolution of what you’ve proven you need ... 

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6 hours ago, StreamHiRes said:

You don’t hear an improvement over redbook? I can instantly  differentiate 16bit CD quality from 24bit MQA on Tidal. I instantly reach for the mouse and search for the next MQA track.😁

 

You know I use Spotify for casual listening and to check out new material. If I find something I really like I buy it in as high resolution as is offered. That’s a much better way to support artists and make a real market for artists creating high res material. The artists get screwed by streaming including high res streaming. MQA is bad for artists in this way — those of us who have kilobucks to spend on cables (not that I would ever!) should put that money toward tickets to live concerts and purchasing high res downloads. My opinion. That’s what’s best for the audiophile ecology.

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29 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

Apple’s iTunes Music Store came into existence for one major reason: Napster.  OTH, I believe it was Apple that introduced DRM -- thanks.

 

As far as I’m concerned, the major labels should go away. Artists can produce and sell their own CDs or work with a recording studio. They can sell music online. 

 

DRM was demanded by the studios who own the music (artists should own their music). The iTunes DRM is minimal with an easy out (you can still rip to a CD of your choice)

 

Yes, Apple provided a way for people to access music online without stealing it. Huge win. 

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2 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

DVD-A was simply a container for 24 bit audio. Once we got passed dial up it was destined to die quickly.

 

In my view it died because there is no way for me to play DVD-A on my computer, or store it in my library. I still buy CDs and SACDs ... I started buying SACDs when I learned how to rip these to my computer using my PS-3.

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1 hour ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

When I finally got around to ripping DVD-A discs, was quite disappointed to see the volume maximization and peak limiting.  Just like MQA 🙂

Oh can you rip them? I guess the format RIP'd before I learned how to rip 

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8 minutes ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

??? I have been ripping DVD-As of every sample rate for over a decade. As easy as ripping a CD.

 

Right, I understand — last time I looked into it was pre-Blu-Ray no doubt. So ... what is a good place to buy these?

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1 hour ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

right here-

http://www.dvdae.com/

 

No I mean the DVD-A discs themselves ... the usual places I buy don't seem to have wide range of DVD-A

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25 minutes ago, psjug said:

Ignoring the possible flaws in that analysis (and flaws of the studies drawn upon), do you really find the conclusion very compelling?  

 

Overall, there was a small but statistically significant ability to discriminate between standard quality audio (44.1 or 48 kHz, 16 bit) and high resolution audio (beyond standard quality).

 

Thats what this hobby is all about. My iPhone & earbuds are pretty good. We are looking exactly for small but meaningful differences.

 

My cellphone usage is unlimited as is my 1Gbs fiber to home. I’m not concerned about audio compression, heck I’m happy to have 8k or whatever movies.

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17 minutes ago, psjug said:

In the analysis I see the small, not the meaningful.

That’s everyone’s own decision. I see a ton of stuff around hear that isn’t even proven, not that I’d say meaningful. I’m happy to consider anything small but proven to be meaningful to whomever thinks so.

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16 minutes ago, crenca said:

I am not so sure.  I suspect meaning is not so radically subjective 😉

 

Radically subjective? That’s sounds political 😂 Ummm ... I break things down into physically possible & verified vs physically possible & unverified vs not physically possible & unverified ... 

 

The last I don’t bother with. The first I’m fine with. The second doesn’t bother me. 

C’est la vie!

 

13 minutes ago, psjug said:

In general, I'm not sure I have a different POV from you or not.  But regarding the meta study:, do you find it compelling?

 

I’m not easily compelled but I’m fine with storing as close to the recording/mixing as possible — I don’t trust other people’s filters so have an open mind at this point as to whether it’s HD per se or the absence of conversion filters 🤷🏻‍♂️

 

Neither do I find the so-called proof that human beings can’t experience >20kHz compelling.

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8 hours ago, Paul R said:

You don’t agree that ultrasonics are handy for noise shaping? I think they are a great place to push noise into and subsequently, easily filter out. It is why DSD can and often does sound so superior to redbook. 

 

Going on about people being being able to hear ultrasonics or not is just a great big whale sized blue herring. 

 

 

Whether you hear them directly or hear the nonlinear effects doesn't matter to me. That's why this issue that the cochlea doesn't respond >20 kHz doesn't matter to me: obviously the system responds otherwise there would be no need for a LPF and every DAC uses an output LPF!

 

Interestingly take a look at the spectrum from a HDTT (high def tape transfer) at DSD256 ... you don't get the near ultrasonic bump so perhaps the benefit of e.g. DSD256 is that the noise can be pushed further out where it can be even more effectively filtered out ... 

 

In my own listening, the benefit of HD vs Redbook seems to significantly diminish with upsampling so yeah...

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40 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

the cochlea is highly over-rated

 

Totally aside from the benefit or not of having more information than 16/44.1 ... and to be clear, I am not convinced that 16/44.1 is enough but neither am I convinced that 16/44.1 isn't enough -- it seems to be a reasonable conclusion that there is a general consensus that 16/44.1 is a reasonable minimum resolution for what we call CD quality (obviously MP3 has less bits).

 

Its somewhat ridiculous to trade bits within the 16/44.1 range for ultrasonic bits: I mean who is suggesting that 13/88 is "better" than 16/44.1? (aside from MQA).  This really is lossy compression by any definition of the term.

 

At this point one is claiming that we only need 13 bits, and one can easily create a compressed "master" to "prove" that. So really "Mastered for MQA" means "even more compressed"           

 

Digital sleight of hand.                                                                                                  

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21 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

"journalist" has multiple meanings

 

Stereopile is of some value to a consumer, but not much

 

Do you mean because 99% of consumers are not audiophiles?

 

If we take ourselves back before the Internet TAS and Stereophile were one of only scant sources where "Audiophile" information was published. If not for them we would have been left purely to the whims of our local audiophile shops or worse, to the likes of any variety of the other electronics stores over the years ... obviously none of those are working in the consumer's best interest, rather their own bottom line, including payoffs from manufacturers. Nothing different than auto dealers, really.

 

Unfortunately everything is for sale these days including the news, at least TV news. Perhaps 20 years ago a friend who was the GM of a local TV station said to me at a cookout, "Hey man, I've got to make money on the news somehow" -- just to put this in perspective, I am not accusing JA of being bought off. Just let's not hold him to an unreasonable standard.

 

Over the years I've found Stereophile's articles useful to direct me toward listening to products I might not otherwise have.

 

15 hours ago, Paul R said:

 

Beyond being impossible to prove a negative (his not reporting) I wonder if perhaps you fail to consider that this is not anywhere as important to most of the audio world as it is to you.  And, column inches are expensive! 

 

Yes, totally agree and we shouldn't hold JA to an unreasonable standard. Anyone can disagree with anything someone else writes. Of course he is here on the site, and should be accorded the politeness due anyone we are directly communicating with. He is not a "shill" or being sneaky or underhanded. Obviously Stereophile has business issues just like any other business. Let's not be naive and let's take what is written at face value with an appropriate degree of skepticism, just like anything else that you read.

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1 hour ago, Ralf11 said:

rev. 2.0:

 

Stereopile is of some value to the audiophile consumer, but not much - note the use of present tense

 

Its a tough business model. I imagine the market for printed mags has plummeted. I don’t know what % of income was based on adverts vs subscriptions. Photography site like luminous-landscape (just an example) probably make/made more from extras such as symposia/trips, as well as value beyond reviews. DXO makes great measurements and also sells great software. Creative business models seem to be key. nytimes charges extra for their great food recipes. 

 

In any case if your business primarily is selling ads, then your reviews have to cover the advertisers. That said they need to be interesting enough to drive eyeballs to the ads. (That’s my 10,000 foot view, I’m in no way shape or form an expert on this). I’d cut John Atkinson a break, as he’s guided Stereophile through a sea change in the publishing industry.

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22 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

The last analysis I did showed that around 47% of products reviewed in Stereophile were from companies that advertised in the magazine. I don't believe that proportion has changed significantly since then.

 

Again, I’m the last thing from a marketing person, but if I had a reviewed product, I’d want an ad on the page if for no other reason than to prevent a competitor from being there 🤷🏻‍♂️ Unless of course the 47% correlated with good reviews 😂

 

When you say stable “circulation” you mean subscriptions, not readers, right?

 

In any case there are so many backroom deals going on everywhere that you need to understand why consumers are skeptical. MQA with its proprietary “secret” closed format is a great example. I’ve learned over the years that proprietary/closed compression formats aren’t worth it — at the end of the day that’s all MQA is.

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15 hours ago, lucretius said:

Now, if you were the manufacturer and you knew that the review was positive, I'd think it would be a good idea to place some advertising in that particular issue.

 

Of course that applies to every review so I don’t think that there’s any financial advantage for any of me review to be better than average. 

 

More realistic is the very natural tendency to give a good review to a “friend” or someone in the industry whom you’ve gotten to know over the years. I don’t think that’s nefarious.

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19 minutes ago, Paul R said:

 

I could easily be mis-remembering, but I think the incident I am referring to was pre-internet, around 1985 or 1986 maybe. 

Ouch! usenet was 1980,  bitnet 1981,  smtp (email) 1982, ftp 1985 ... I'm feeling really old

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2 hours ago, mansr said:

Email in some form existed as early as 1973: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc561

No doubt. Arpanet dated back to ?1969. There were different networks & protocols stitched together with RFCs. Ultimately IP won out. Ultimately URIs were layered on top. Here were are today typing or talking on our phones, laptops, who knows?

 

After all these decades we still have to fight back the forces of end to end closed systems and proprietary data formats. Who would think?

 

Julia & Gen are exciting me these days.

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22 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

Another Stereophile MQA product placement, in a review of a pair of $599 active speakers:

 

I’m confused: does the Nordost USB cable unfold MQA when you unroll it?

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2 hours ago, esldude said:

MQA has gone Chinese. What's Cantonese for shill.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7783640.stm 

 

wumao?

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4 minutes ago, MetalNuts said:

If the mainland Chinese know the potential DRM in MQA, I wonder how many will buy CD or file with MQA.

 

Reverse engineered, copied, distributed ... done deal, who cares?

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2 hours ago, Paul R said:

 

Wow, isn’t that a little cynical? I mean, after all - that applies to almost all commercial entities, doesn’t it? 

 

No, ever since the Internet was commercialized there has been a relentless number of attempts to create proprietary formats when open non proprietary formats have existed.

MQA is yet another. Let’s look at physical music distribution: LPs are resurging. CDs are the most popular. “Improvements” to CD namely DVD-A and SACD have largely died because of the proprietary nature of the format.

I started buying relatively large quantities of SACD when I learned how to rip using my old PS3 (shout out to @ted_b) and probably would buy DVD music except for the PIA labeling tracks etc.

 

Make it easy for people to legally purchase music and keep it on their computers —- and stream it to their phones —- then there’s no need to “steal” hi-res.

 

Proprietary formats are a non-starter for me.The struggle is real.

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1 hour ago, Paul R said:

 

I was really referring to this line, which is heavy sarcasm and means the opposite of what it says... 

 

" I trust someone who can screw me over at any instant, someone in business to make money, to not ever do that to me.  "

 

Cynical.

 

Not purely cynical, rather smart. When you purchase physical media, you should be able to own it and use it on whatever hardware you want. If a CD or ripped media goes out of print, you can still play it and use it. The studio can't screw you over by taking the CD away. The media companies, with their licensing restrictions and keys etc have attempted to take away these natural usage rights in favor of requiring licensed and restricted hardware e.g. you can't play a Blu-ray movie on Linux using open source software  -- well except that the collective has been able to break encryption and DRM.

 

MQA is brutal and sneaky in this regard -- they want your DAC to be licensed. 

 

We need to teach the media companies that these sneaky/subversive practices are doomed to failure -- there are good ways that artists can and should be able to make money from their talents and efforts. The current streaming economic model is broken but MQA is worse than Spotify. Sony unfortunately has the longest history of coming up with great technologies that they ruin with moronic DRM.