MQA is Vaporware

[rickca]

43 minutes ago, crenca said:

maintain the charade of legitimacy

Good one.  MQA has politicized and polarized our hobby.  The trade publications have blown their credibility and they won't get it back.  We're mad as hell.

[shtf]

3 minutes ago, rickca said:

Good one.  MQA has politicized and polarized our hobby.  The trade publications have blown their credibility and they won't get it back.  We're mad as hell.

 

To some, their credibility was blown a long time ago.  Like I said earlier, it took something so over-the-top like MQA to blow the lid off and expose these so-called industry leaders for what they really are.  And for that I am thankful to Bob.   Hmmmm. You don't suppose that Bob was also tired of the BS in the industry and he invented MQA just to expose the industry for what it really is?  I'm reaching.

 

[Fokus]

7 hours ago, crenca said:

 

@Jim Austin, @John_Atkinson, @ARQuint, why don't you take this very reasonable (in content, style, word length) summation of the "cons" of MQA, clean it up a bit and publish it?  

 

Yes.

 

Mans’s is about the best summary I’ve seen so far. Its only omission is that it does not mention that MQA’s vendetta with wide filters has not been proven to be beneficial once above CD rate.

 

It deserves to get a wider audience.

 

Is there any way to carry this to the audio press? Perhaps dress it up a bit and send it in as reader letter to paper mags?

 

 

 

[adamdea]

9 hours ago, mansr said:

The Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem provides a sufficient condition for fixed-interval sampling to fully capture a signal and enable subsequent reconstruction. Later research has defined other conditions allowing certain signals to be accurately captured without fulfilling the Shannon-Nyquist criterion. A search for terms like sparse signal, sparse sampling, compressed sensing, and finite rate of innovation will turn up hundreds of papers spanning decades.

 

None of this is new. The reason it hasn't been applied to audio is that it is unnecessary. An audio signal has such a low bandwidth to begin with that the Shannon-Nyquist requirement is easily met. The data rates involved also pose no problems for processing, transmission, or storage systems. Even if some form of sparse sampling of audio could cut the data rate in half, say, there are good reasons not to do this outside very specific applications. Traditional sampling produces a signal that is easy to process in a multitude of ways (think of all the operations a DAW can do). That isn't necessarily true of sparse sampling. Why should we complicate everything only for the sake of a data rate reduction we don't need? I can't think of a single reason.

 

With MQA it gets worse. Even if it is based on some clever sampling method that really does reduce the data rate, it is still a proprietary system. Nobody can do anything without Bob Stuart's blessing (and the handing over of a tidy sum of money). On top of that, the distribution format has various DRM features that can never be in the interest of consumers.

 

It is clear to me that MQA is a collection of (alleged) features, each designed to appeal to a particular step in the music production and distribution chain. Sound quality for the listener. Data savings for the distributors. DRM and control for the content owners. Money for Bob from all of the above.

 

More damning still is the fact that every time a claim about MQA is poked, it falls apart like a house of cards. Bandwidth reduction? Standard FLAC does better at comparable quality. Sound quality? Accurate comparisons are made extremely difficult (why?), and with the material available, listeners are anything but united in favour of MQA. DRM? We don't know what the labels have been promised, so assessing this is impossible at this time. We do know that every DRM system to date has been broken. The odds are not in MQA's favour. Authentication (a subset of DRM)? Shoddy at best. Mastering engineers report that their work has been MQA'd without their knowledge, let alone approval. Based on my analysis of MQA firmware, tricking it into turning on the blue light is probably not difficult.

 

In the end, what have we got? By the looks of it, MQA either fails to deliver or is outright harmful in every aspect it purports to improve.

This is such a good post that an up arrow is not enough to do it justice. 

 

Leaving aside the immediate issues, the twos JAs might wish to ruminate on the following.

 

There are some of us who really want to learn and to understand the technical issues involved in digital audio. I have spent in aggregate months of my time trying to find out what sampling means, what filters are for, etc etc. And I have found in the end that there was more to learn from individuals on forums with real expertise than from the mainstream audio press. 

 

In some cases professional audio writers just don’t have the technical understanding to help anyone else out, but more depressingly, it seems that many just don’t seem to care about getting to the truth.

 

Not for the first time we have an example in Mansr’s  post of something which is simply better written, more carefully thought out and more intellectually honest than anything that Stereophile, let alone TAS, has seems to want to contribute.

 

I come to audio forums because, apart from the banter, I get to meet people who have something to contribute. It’s a privilege to kick ideas round with people who really care. In among the blizzard of mad, dull people or weird stuff  there is some real gold. 

 

I have noticed that some Hifi journalists seem to keep coming unstuck on forums by behaving in the way that forum posters do in their imagination, throwing aggressive an ill-considered insults around and generally posting as though this were a Snapchat squabble with words melting away once typed. But that is not how people achieve credibility and respect on forums.

 

Trust is like virginity, once lost it cannot easily be recovered. 

 

I think that any fair minded and patient reader who wades through this stuff will be able to discern who is sincere, who is thinking really hard about stuff, who wants to get to the bottom of a point.

 

Now this “post-Shannon” expression? Does it illuminate any point of substance? If not, what is it doing in Jim Austin’s article? This is not a timed essay, a tv debate or a playground argument. If there is a proper, reasoned answer I would like to hear it. 

 

[adamdea]

16 hours ago, mansr said:

 

I do find it curious that BS suddenly starts bringing up quantisation. He never mentioned that before. It's almost as if he's given up on the original angle and is trying a new excuse in the hopes that we'll fall for this one.

That’s how it appears. And identifying quantisation as an issue is a bit rich when you are trying to justify turning 16/44 into 13/44 and 24/96 into 17?/96 

 

[Sonicularity]

20 hours ago, Jim Austin said:

Oh, and no, I won't provide the citations. If you want to read them you can find them on your own. 

 

https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.3066

 

Beyond Bandlimited Sampling: Nonlinearities, Smoothness and Sparsity (2008)
by Y. C. Eldar , T. Michaeli

 

https://mafiadoc.com/splines-a-perfect-fit-for-signal-and-image-processing-citeseerx_59bf2c001723ddfb705c3c8f.html

 

SPLINES : A PERFECT FIT FOR SIGNAL/IMAGE PROCESSING (1999)

by Michael Unser

 

Edit: top link was broken

[firedog]

I don’t fully understand the technical side. But I understand something else: mansr understands it a lot better than Jim Austin does. So given a choice of (a) Jim Austin quoting “Bob” saying things that JA doesn’t even know enough about to ask questions about, or (b) mansr; guess who I choose to believe?

[miguelito]

19 hours ago, mansr said:

The Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem provides a sufficient condition for fixed-interval sampling to fully capture a signal and enable subsequent reconstruction. Later research has defined other conditions allowing certain signals to be accurately captured without fulfilling the Shannon-Nyquist criterion. A search for terms like sparse signal, sparse sampling, compressed sensing, and finite rate of innovation will turn up hundreds of papers spanning decades.

 

None of this is new. The reason it hasn't been applied to audio is that it is unnecessary. An audio signal has such a low bandwidth to begin with that the Shannon-Nyquist requirement is easily met. The data rates involved also pose no problems for processing, transmission, or storage systems. Even if some form of sparse sampling of audio could cut the data rate in half, say, there are good reasons not to do this outside very specific applications. Traditional sampling produces a signal that is easy to process in a multitude of ways (think of all the operations a DAW can do). That isn't necessarily true of sparse sampling. Why should we complicate everything only for the sake of a data rate reduction we don't need? I can't think of a single reason.

 

With MQA it gets worse. Even if it is based on some clever sampling method that really does reduce the data rate, it is still a proprietary system. Nobody can do anything without Bob Stuart's blessing (and the handing over of a tidy sum of money). On top of that, the distribution format has various DRM features that can never be in the interest of consumers.

 

It is clear to me that MQA is a collection of (alleged) features, each designed to appeal to a particular step in the music production and distribution chain. Sound quality for the listener. Data savings for the distributors. DRM and control for the content owners. Money for Bob from all of the above.

 

More damning still is the fact that every time a claim about MQA is poked, it falls apart like a house of cards. Bandwidth reduction? Standard FLAC does better at comparable quality. Sound quality? Accurate comparisons are made extremely difficult (why?), and with the material available, listeners are anything but united in favour of MQA. DRM? We don't know what the labels have been promised, so assessing this is impossible at this time. We do know that every DRM system to date has been broken. The odds are not in MQA's favour. Authentication (a subset of DRM)? Shoddy at best. Mastering engineers report that their work has been MQA'd without their knowledge, let alone approval. Based on my analysis of MQA firmware, tricking it into turning on the blue light is probably not difficult.

 

In the end, what have we got? By the looks of it, MQA either fails to deliver or is outright harmful in every aspect it purports to improve.

Fabulous post @mansr! Thx.

 

I want to make one thing pretty clear: I am very happy to pay for true innovation and delivery. To me, MQA making money for Bob Stuart would be ok if MQA would be the signature of higher quality sound, specifically those "white glove" albums out there which do sound good.

 

But those white glove albums are few and far between, and in my opinion MQA is by and large a scam: untrue to its stated purpose and ONLY designed to put money in Bob Stuart's pocket. And when I say untrue to it's stated purpose and PR, just consider:

1- The concept of fixing ADC faults - recording and production chains are rarely mic->mixing->ADC.

2- "As the artist intended" - really? Show me one case other of a major artist doing this. One.

3- Rendering - Now we can do DSP prior to rendering, allowing DSP and keeping the ability to enforce licensing fees on hardware.

 

Mr Stuart: This is all BS. I don't wish you success.

[miguelito]

6 minutes ago, firedog said:

I don’t fully understand the technical side. But I understand something else: mansr understands it a lot better than Jim Austin does. So given a choice of (a) Jim Austin quoting “Bob” saying things that JA doesn’t even know enough about to ask questions about, or (b) mansr; guess who I choose to believe?

Just consider reading Bob's incomprehensible gibberish vs @mansr clear statements. Really, it is not that Bob is speaking at a more complex level. It is gibberish.

[miguelito]

1 hour ago, Sonicularity said:

 

https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.3066

 

Beyond Bandlimited Sampling: Nonlinearities, Smoothness and Sparsity (2008)
by Y. C. Eldar , T. Michaeli

 

https://mafiadoc.com/splines-a-perfect-fit-for-signal-and-image-processing-citeseerx_59bf2c001723ddfb705c3c8f.html

 

SPLINES : A PERFECT FIT FOR SIGNAL/IMAGE PROCESSING (1999)

by Michael Unser

 

Edit: top link was broken

Jeezus fecking christ. How is b-splines a meaningful concept other than a way to interpolate?! FFS... I'm talking about the gibberish from BS.

[kumakuma]

1 minute ago, miguelito said:

Just consider reading Bob's incomprehensible gibberish vs @mansr clear statements. Really, it is not that Bob is speaking at a more complex level. It is gibberish.

 

In my experience, truth can be explained in simple terms. Lies on the other hand... 

[miguelito]

18 hours ago, tmtomh said:

I must say, the one surprising aspect of the visits by you, ARQuint, and John Atkinson is the degree to which you are going after @The Computer Audiophile himself, and the intensity with which you are focusing on denigrating this community. Atkinson's done it in a polite and civil (albeit sometimes condescending manner). But the other two of you are just rude - totally your prerogative, but don't complain when you get the inevitable response.

Very trumpian. Surprised this guy is not tweeting nonesense as well.

[Ralf11]

The real question here is whether Jim Austin misunderstood the papers he refused to cite, or if he is actively engaged in a witting deception.

 

 

The real tragedy about MQA in general is that a lot of time and resources have been wasted that could have gone into something useful - like better and cheaper DSP, much less electrochemistry or object recognition for vehicular transport.

[miguelito]

16 hours ago, HalSF said:

There definitely is a crisis of audiophile authority, however. The same loop keeps playing over and over again: MQA makes extraordinary claims; seems incapable of offering extraordinary proof beyond abstruse jargon and scientism; while subjective audiophiles insist MQA sounds amazing in brief, carefully controlled show demos

This is key. I went to a demo in March 2015 and the MQA versions were quite better. But looking back and after all of the experience listening and comparing albums on TIDAL (MQA, TIDAL redbook, ripped redbook, and high res versions I own), it is pretty clear that the MQA gains in some albums are entirely due to remastering and not to MQA itself, and as such it could clearly be accomplished with PCM alone.

[skikirkwood]

On 5/12/2018 at 6:13 PM, crenca said:

 

You know what one of the important takeaways of this picture is?  If there is anyone in it below 55 (including all the people in the background) I will eat my socks.  

 

These folks are set in their ways, and trying to disprove their Art & Wine Voodooism is vanity.  Art Dudley and all the rest will be gone before we all know it, and we will remember them for the things they got right...no matter how short the list 

 

Edit:  Recently I have been spending a bit of time at some HP/personal audio/value "high fidelity" (vs. art & wine "high end") sites and it is a real pleasure not to hear much about Stereophile, TAS, or much of anything of "high end", and when they are mentioned it is almost always to laugh at the absurdities.  These folks are in a hole they are never going to get out of and I am increasingly coming to a "let the dead bury the dead" attitude towards them...

 

I think you guys are just taking this MQA stuff too seriously.

[Ralf11]

"these are not the DRMs you are looking for"

[Jim Austin]

On 5/14/2018 at 2:17 PM, mansr said:

I must have spent hundreds of hours reverse engineering MQA for some other reason then.

 

I thought I'd go ahead an answer a few posts. I can't keep doing this however; there's simply not enough time, and only a few things here are worth responding to. 

 

It's apparent to me that you spent hundreds of hours reverse-engineering MQA in order to try to prove that it's invalid. 

[Jim Austin]

On 5/16/2018 at 1:26 AM, Fokus said:

First, I assure you that BS is quite capable of dreaming this up.

 

Second, he was not alone in doing this: there has been a decades-long cooperation with Peter Craven (who brings a lineage going back to Michael Gerzon). Ages ago Craven and Stuart started a war with orthodox steep linear phase reconstruction filters. This informed the design of Meridian CD players and DACs for a while. MQA is just the next step, getting rid of the filters altogether.

 

Exactly right. And for what it's worth, Charles Hansen, who is now a hero to any here, embraced similar design philosophies. (Hansen was a brilliant designer He deserves praise. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy here.) 

 

A more important point is that people here point to "experts" who agree with them--and many of them are very knowledgeable. I have great respect for (to name two with whom I've privately discussed MQA) John Siau and Bruno Putzeys). Both are anti-MQA, and very knowledgeable. It's clear from these and other conversations, though, that the ideas behind MQA are not in the normal digital-engineer curriculum. You've got to go beyond that to evaluate them properly. My argument has consistently been that there's more to them than critics (like those here) give credit for. They can't be dismissed as facilely as many try to do. Do the homework first, then dismiss if it doesn't hang together. But keep an open mind. 

 

Goes without saying that you cannot judge it if you don't understand it. 

 

jca

[Jim Austin]

On 5/15/2018 at 1:57 AM, Fokus said:

That it replaces free and open PCM with closed-system packaged PCM, and adds the need for special hardware to boot. Without tangible benefit for the consumer.

 

 

Yes to your first point--and that is (as I've written) a legitimate concern. (It is not, as I have also written, something I personally worry about much.) As to the second, we have to wait and see. That's what listening tests are for. Given the stakes, this is not something that should be left to some self-proclaimed golden-eared writer--or me. It should be tested properly--and how it sounds is the ultimate test. And as I mentioned previously, word is the McGill tests didn't go well for MQA. If that proves to be true--if MQA (at comparable rate) is found not to be preferred over 24/96 PCM (the comparison they're making)--then the only advantage is some streaming economics. That, to me, is far less compelling. 

[beetlemania]

6 minutes ago, Jim Austin said:

Charles Hansen, who is now a hero to any here, embraced similar design philosophies. (Hansen was a brilliant designer He deserves praise. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy here.) 

 

True that Ayre’s listen filter is similar to MQA’s filter. But I don’t recall that Ayre intended to engineer a closed system that all would have to adopt, from recording to user. Only one of your articles has addressed some of the downsides of MQA, and gently at that. I kindly suggest you interview some of the MQA critics for future articles. 

 

Meanwhile, many of us have compared MQA to true hi-res and we’re not impressed. 

[Jim Austin]

On 5/17/2018 at 5:31 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

2) Old guard print articles calling MQA the best thing to ever happen in digital and repeating falsehoods?

 

It took me longer than it should have to realize what you're on about. You see yourself in competition with magazines like Stereophile and TAS. So there's a bias against ideas espouse by those magazines. 

 

I am curious which "falsehoods" you think are being repeated. Can you cite them? Can you definitively show them to be false? 

 

It appears that your fiduciary conflict of interest compromises your objectivity. 

[Jim Austin]

On 5/17/2018 at 10:36 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

I recently heard something so surprising that I'm trying to back it up with other sources. Trust me, if I can back this up, it isn't good news for MQA.

 

If it's the news about the McGill test, there's an abstract already on the AES website. I've only read the abstract--haven't seen the paper--but I've talked to an expert who has read the paper. If this is your news, I'll break it: The listening tests at McGill failed to establish a difference between MQA and PCM at the same rate. That's an impressive showing for MQA's compression, but IMO it devastates their value proposition. 

 

In other news, the leading producer of DAC chips will incorporate MQA natively into their DAC chips. That's big news, too, but that's been public for a while, so that's probably not it. 

[Mordikai]

23 minutes ago, Jim Austin said:

 

Exactly right. And for what it's worth, Charles Hansen, who is now a hero to any here, embraced similar design philosophies. (Hansen was a brilliant designer He deserves praise. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy here.) 

 

A more important point is that people here point to "experts" who agree with them--and many of them are very knowledgeable. I have great respect for (to name two with whom I've privately discussed MQA) John Siau and Bruno Putzeys). Both are anti-MQA, and very knowledgeable. It's clear from these and other conversations, though, that the ideas behind MQA are not in the normal digital-engineer curriculum. You've got to go beyond that to evaluate them properly. My argument has consistently been that there's more to them than critics (like those here) give credit for. They can't be dismissed as facilely as many try to do. Do the homework first, then dismiss if it doesn't hang together. But keep an open mind. 

 

Goes without saying that you cannot judge it if you don't understand it. 

 

jca

So you understand this stuff but Bruno Putzeys doesn't? Yawn, this is basically trolling at this point.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, Jim Austin said:

 

If it's the news about the McGill test, there's an abstract already on the AES website. I've only read the abstract--haven't seen the paper--but I've talked to an expert who has read the paper. If this is your news, I'll break it: The listening tests at McGill failed to establish a difference between MQA and PCM at the same rate. That's an impressive showing for MQA's compression, but IMO it devastates their value proposition. 

 

In other news, the leading producer of DAC chips will incorporate MQA natively into their DAC chips. That's big news, too, but that's been public for a while, so that's probably not it. 

Not even close.

 

It’s about money and who received it. 

[Jim Austin]

On 5/17/2018 at 7:52 PM, crenca said:

In any case, "post shannon" is a spin term meant to describe a certain philosophy about filtering, audibility/desirability of "ringing", IM, and the like that is all based on shannon.  It's more of the same from the MQA promotion machine...

 

Then why was it widely use in the late 1990s?