MQA is Vaporware

[Norton]

36 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

Personally, I see anti-MQA sentiment as a type of consumer advocacy

 

Would that be the kind of consumer  advocate whose interest in computer audio was seemingly not enough to have warranted participation on this particular site until very recently?

[The Computer Audiophile]

7 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Suspicious of what? I joined here to specifically participate in this thread.

 

I have my issues with MQA, but I am also trying to understand all the venom spewed towards it.

 

The email i created was so I could keep track of this forum and its posts. No malicious intent.

Thanks for the follow up. 

 

I'll take you at your word. Even though the signs point to something nefarious, they could equally be benign. 

 

Hopefully you understand my suspicion because MQA is such a volatile topic and many people have shown they can't handle this thread without losing their minds.

 

 

[FredericV]

7 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Thanks for the follow up. 

 

I'll take you at your word. Even though the signs point to something nefarious, they could equally be benign.

Why does he need to randomize his IP? It only means he has something to hide.

[Samuel T Cogley]

9 minutes ago, Norton said:

 

Would that be the kind of consumer  advocate whose interest in computer audio was seemingly not enough to have warranted participation on this particular site until very recently?

 

I'm almost following where you're going.  I think it's human nature to be vigilant against being victimized by entities more powerful than the individual.  And that's where I believe the motivation to post in opposition to MQA ultimately comes from.  Perhaps it's a sign of the times, but for every person who resigns themselves that "The Man" cannot be successfully opposed, there others who simply cannot resist the opportunity to oppose tyranny as they see it.

 

Is MQA a form of tyranny, or is the mere notion that it's tyranny itself hyperbole?  We'll know, eventually.  I think it's too soon to say today.

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

6 minutes ago, FredericV said:

Why does he need to randomize his IP? It only means he has something to hide.

I don't judge. There are plenty of other CA members doing the same thing. But, it doesn't help anyone when pleading a case that he is here for a good reason.

 

 

[Brinkman Ship]

27 minutes ago, esldude said:

Okay. I am no expert, but maybe can give a summary others can add to or correct.

 

MQA is lossy.  For quite awhile they pretended it wasn't or were vague. 

 

MQA purports to be better quality than hirez originals.  

 

MQA claimed to authenticate you were getting the master, and it does not. 

 

MQA claimed quite a bit of new innovative use of the digital medium fixing "blur".  Subsequent investigation uncovers it can't do anything over 96 khz, it simply oversamples.  It does unfold to 96 khz from 44 or 48 khz, but the extra stuff after the unfold is lossy in encoding. It uses filters that allow some aliasing.  

 

It appears to only have 17 bits of resolution. 

 

Unencoded it reduces quality of the track to maybe 13 bits.  

 

There are a few other issues. 

 

My main complaint is it can function as DRM.  And even if never used that way it prevents anyone from using digital room correction or speaker correction.  The latter is a big boon to performance.  Offset against a questionable improvement brought by MQA it makes MQA a non-starter for many.  

 

There is plenty more, but that should be a good start for you. 

Thank you for the summary.

 

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

And why have they all consistently said it sounded *better* than the master file?

[eclectic]

9 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Thank you for the summary.

 

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

And why have they all consistently said it sounded *better* than the master file?

 

Probably for the same reasons in the 1970s and 1980s that the hifi press constantly told us that the Linn LP12 was in a different league to any other deck. Source first and the flat earth etc.

 

Because they see it as the next big thing to stimulate a moribund market. More sales, more people buying magazines (and these days, more clicks).

[Abtr]

1 hour ago, Tony Lauck said:

The preach level is entirely justified when it comes to the importance of precise level matching whenever subjective sound quality comparisons are performed.  People who don't do this are either ignorant or dishonest shysters.  This one factor goes back throughout the history of audio, in my case all the way back to the late 1950's when I started getting interested in hi-fi.

 

If you want to measure levels accurately between two formats where a proprietary decode process is bundled into a DAC you will have to conduct measurements at the analog output of the DAC.  You can do this by tapping into the analog output going to your preamplifier and sending it to high quality analog to digital converter running at a high sampling rate and bit resolution.   Then you can take the captured waveforms of both signals and process them with an audio editor and any other analysis software you want. 

...

 

MQA and non-MQA tracks *from the same master* should play equally loud at the DAC's output, right? If so, the problem is reduced to finding MQA and non-MQA tracks or albums from the same master..

[Samuel T Cogley]

1 minute ago, Abtr said:

 

MQA and non-MQA tracks from the same master should play equally loud at the DAC's output, right? If so, the problem is reduced to finding MQA and non-MQA tracks or albums from the same master..

 

Other than the scant examples on 2L, I've not found instances where a >44.1kHz/16bit version can be compared apples-to-apples with the MQA version.  Comparing Redbook examples (presumably from the same mastering) to MQA is not really a good test, as MQA is claiming to be better than hi-rez and there were likely digital filter(s) applied when the material was downsampled to Redbook.

[FredericV]

25 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Thank you for the summary.

 

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

So you did not read my article?

 

https://darko.audio/2017/07/kih-46-mqas-missing-link/

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, FredericV said:

So you did not read my article?

 

https://darko.audio/2017/07/kih-46-mqas-missing-link/

Or this one: https://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/questions-answers-mqa-interview-andreas-koch/

[firedog]

1 hour ago, FredericV said:

He's probably using TOR or some VPN provider with different global exit points. In tor browser bundle, you can change your exit node by just clicking on some button.

Are TOR / VPN ip's allowed to post CA? Some fora filter those IP's, some admins already filter it in the webserver, so it does not reach the forum backend.

I generally use a VPN when I surf and switch countries depending on which server is fastest at a given time. 

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, mansr said:

Or this one: https://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/questions-answers-mqa-interview-andreas-koch/

And another: http://www.soundstagehifi.com/index.php/opinion/1104-mismatched-masters-and-false-frequencies-is-mqa-better-worse-or-just-different

[esldude]

28 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Thank you for the summary.

 

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

And why have they all consistently said it sounded *better* than the master file?

Okay, good question.  Think about it.  How could it sound better than the master file?

 

The claim was there are errors and blurring in the old ADCs and they could retroactively correct them.  Now that raises lots of questions.  

 

What about old recordings that were from tape?  What about digital processing in between that isn't from the DAC on multi-track recordings?  How can you undo all that?  We were assured they could.  How can you take the time to puzzle thru every single recording of hundreds of thousands and it not take forever?  We were assured they could. 

 

Then its found they are taking masters, performing some different filtering, some lossy encoding, and folding it which necessarily means fewer bits (apparently about 17), and aliasing they say will always be below the noise floors.  So how is that better than a lossless FLAC compression which doesn't do those things to the master?  And this of course doesn't even attempt to meet the promises that the MQA would be better.  Sometimes they would claim it perceptibly equal.  Again, give us the FLAC master and it is fully bit for bit equal no questions.  We don't need a proprietary format that requires different hardware and prevents using DSP upon playback.  

 

So MQA principals and the established print media have been coy, supportive and less than direct about addressing any of these issues. 

 

Plus we were promised the undecoded CD would not just sound equal to a regular CD, but because of blah, blah, blah deblurring better.  Yet it only leaves us with 13 bits that are clean. Either 13 bits is clean enough so 16 is too and what do we need with MQA.  Or we are being told we can have it both ways for their benefit.  It simply wasn't addressed honestly. 

 

I am only scratching the surface here.  They generally have not made available regular CD, the original hirez and MQA to do a straight up comparison with.  Why is that?

[beetlemania]

53 minutes ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Thank you for the summary.

 

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

And why have they all consistently said it sounded *better* than the master file?

Great questions! (Don't know why you'd take anything in TAS at face value)

 

You might also read these sources:

https://www.linn.co.uk/blog/mqa-is-bad-for-music

 

http://www.schiit.com/news/news/why-we-wont-be-supporting-mqa

 

http://fairhedon.com/2017/11/05/an-interview-with-mastering-engineer-brian-lucey/

 

 

http://www.soundstagehifi.com/index.php/opinion/954-myriad-questions-about-mqa

 

https://archimago.blogspot.com/2017/10/mqa-final-final-comment-simply-put-why.html

 

 

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

Oh this is too funny.  Or pathetic.  Or both.  

 

mqatruth..................that must be the mqa truth hit squad.  

 

Be careful Chris.  You might be on their hit list. 

 

 

 

 

it would be more efficient to just assign them numbers, e.g. Scrog-2, Scrog-3, etc.

[botrytis]

2 hours ago, firedog said:

It throws away anything over 17bits and 48K. E.g., 24/192 files are turned into 17/96 files. When you play it back in full unfold, it is upsampled from 17/96 to 24.192. 

 

Sorry no. Lossy means you NEVER can get what was removed back. The file will be 17 bit period, you will not have a 192/24. just because they use an up-sampling filter, does not mean if will go back to 192/24 - that is nonsense.

[mansr]

18 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

it would be more efficient to just assign them numbers, e.g. Scrog-2, Scrog-3, etc.

7 of 9. Oh wait, that one defected.

[botrytis]

1 hour ago, Brinkman Ship said:

Thank you for the summary.

 

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

And why have they all consistently said it sounded *better* than the master file?

 

They are getting paid to hawk it. It is as plain as the nose on your face. I mean Stereophile did testing and their graphs show what people have been saying in this thread (it is not exact as the original, etc) and then they say, "See they are the same", when anyone with any background in looking at data can see they are not.

 

 

[FredericV]

1 hour ago, Brinkman Ship said:

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct....

 

Gives a new meaning to "face value": MQA is between 15 and 17 bits:
 

 

Uncle Bob also laughs at 24 and 32 bit in the first minutes.

[John_Atkinson]

1 hour ago, botrytis said:

 

They are getting paid to hawk it. It is as plain as the nose on your face.

 

 

That is incorrect, at least in the case of Stereophile and its associated websites. With respect, you should stick to subjects where you have actual evidence for your statements.

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

[Samuel T Cogley]

I wonder how many PMs Chris is getting right now...

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

I wonder how many PMs Chris is getting right now...

FML. 

[Ran]

2 hours ago, Brinkman Ship said:

So if take at face value all of the information above is correct, why have I not read about any of this in Stereophile or The Absolute Sound, or DAR, or Audiostream?

 

Because these magazines report on what they are given by the industry. There is no investigative journalism, technical research or perspective. Because of that, you as the reader has to take things as face value. If you need the education, do the research yourself or use forums like CA. Bear in mind that most of these magazines lack real understanding of digital technologies, computer audio, math and algorithms.  

[Shadders]

1 hour ago, esldude said:

The claim was there are errors and blurring in the old ADCs and they could retroactively correct them. 

Hi Brinkman Ship,

The technical name for blurring is dispersion.

MQA cannot reverse this. It just is not possible, once a signal undergoes dispersion, that is it - no reversal. NEVER.

If they could, then the entire communications industry would have developed this first and we will have had near infinite transmission speeds.

The best one can do is equalise.

The communications systems use pulses, or frequency/phase shift keying modulation etc. A musical recording is much more complex than a data transmission signal. Again, if they cannot reverse dispersion in a communications signal - which has KNOWN specific/finite symbols, then reversing dispersion in an analogue unknown signal, is just not possible.

[unknown here means we do not know what the analogue signal is supposed to do/be]

Regards,

Shadders.