MQA is Vaporware

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On 7/22/2019 at 6:24 PM, KeenObserver said:

 

I guess the main thing I missed not being here for several months is that Paul took over for Lee.

 

I don’t see it this way at all. Paul has his own opinions. Not everyone needs to be rabidly anti-MQA. Some people may even like the sound. I personally don’t even care about the sound — Ive stated my objections. People are entitled to have a rational discussion without being labeled a shill. If we can’t we mind as we’ll end this thread because everything relevant has been said.

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11 hours ago, botrytis said:

 

Well, it is known that the remasters of Led Zepplin are highly compressed. That and with most MQA being 1.4 -6 db higher in playback, that explains a lot.

 

I prefer Barry Diament’s 16/44 Zep remasters over high-res precisely because they sound less compressed.

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49 minutes ago, GUTB said:

 

I'm neurotypical. "Greatest thing since SACD" means the greatest innovation in sound quality since SACD, not that it necessarily competes with the quality of SACD (it does). 

 

You are decidedly not neurotypical by any reasonable definition of the term. BTW that last sentence is incoherent. Do you mean that MQA is an improvement over SACD (greatest innovation in sound quality) or competes with SACD? Understand that my world is not bandwidth limited, nor has been since 1980. 

 

In my world the greatest innovation since SACD is DSD512. Since when do you cut corners, and go for lossy compression? Get a real phone.

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8 minutes ago, Paul R said:

 

Of course, there is no benefit to going past DSD256. Can't possibly hear any difference! (grin) 

 

Your brain isn’t up to date with the greatest innovations! You are probably merely neurotypical  

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1 hour ago, GUTB said:

Why not invest into a MQA playback chain and listen for yourself? If you're an audiophile, that is.

 

No real audiophile invests in lossy playback. That’s so pseudo 

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8 minutes ago, GUTB said:

Easier to just pretend CDs are the best sound available.

A reasonably debatable point whether CD vs 24/96 vs DSD64 are best. 

8 minutes ago, GUTB said:

 

But why the effort in denying MQA?

 

Its simply lossy compression of something else. If 24/96 isn’t good enough you could argue 24/192 or DSD64, 128, 256 etc. MQA is nothing more than lossy compression of something else. 

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9 hours ago, GUTB said:

Why not invest into a MQA playback chain and listen for yourself? If you're an audiophile, that is.

True audiophiles don’t invest in lossy compression schemes

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4 hours ago, John Dyson said:

If someone insanely wants 768/32 quality to begin with, then why distort it with MQA?  Why distort ANYTHING with MQA --we already easily handle the high rates as used as INPUT to MQA.

People like @GUTB are pseudo-technical — they trash Class D yet embrace MQA. We know that DSP can enhance listening, compression can enhance loudness on noncritical listening etc. 

We know that tubes & vinyl (both of which I like) aren’t as accurate as the best transistors & high res digital. Yet they give a nice warm nostalgic feeling. MQA provides none of that — it’s role is as an  MP3 Quality Assured !

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2 minutes ago, GUTB said:

1. Part of MQA is based on research into the human auditory system which shows our time domain acuity is far higher than our frequency domain acuity. Do you disagree with that research? Does MQA not improve time domain resolution?

 

No “temporal deblurring” in MQA is pure fiction (some have have been doing actual deblurring for >30 years)

 

MQA is merely MP3 2.0 also based on human auditory system research  

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2 minutes ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

But...BUT..based on playback of MQA CDs with a cheap Chinese CD player, it is the bomb!

My local mapo dofu does all the gustatory deblurring I need  

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3 minutes ago, GUTB said:

Based on my own testing using a good MQA DAC there is a clear and significant audio improvement over the non-MQA version.

Your ears suck. 

No true audiophile advocates lossy MP3 over native hi resolution recordings. 

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1 minute ago, PeterSt said:

 

Aha. I guess it costs 20K+, right ?

Or do you have other means to define "good" ? What actually is an MQA DAC, you reckon ?

 

An MQA DAC makes MP3s sound just like DXD  

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2 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

Can you describe your MQA playback chain?

 

I’m an audiophile. I don’t have an MP3 playback chain. Lossy is for losers. 

 

If I want to play around with SQ “enhancing” DSP I can load kernels into HQPlayer Embedded etc. but I only store my music in lossless formats without exception. 

 

I also have synth software etc so there are many ways to manipulate audio.For temporal and spatial deblurring deconvolutions are effective.

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10 minutes ago, GUTB said:

 

You only had to say "I don't have MQA". You're anti-MQA activism appears to be ideological and/or social.

 

Why not? Weren't you curious about the sound quality improvements being reported?

 

1) I have several DACs that have

MQA playback capabilities. 

2) I am well aware that under a variety of circumstances MP3 can sound just as good as PCM

3) I am more that well aware of the ability to extract, de blur and otherwise manipulate digital signals including audio

4) I have zero interest in storing my music as MP3 or other lossy nonstandard or proprietary formats.  

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9 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

Music through a transducer is an electrical sinewave. PCM transforms this into a square wave. If this is wrong can you please explain the actual process or link to an article that describes it?

 

Music is almost never a sinewave. Neurotypical people don’t make pronouncements when they are asking to be taught how something works. In your case, aside from the excellent introductory video that every actual audiophile needs to watch and understand, there are perhaps thousands of articles written on “sampling theory” and the Fourier equivalence. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform

You really should try to give yourself a basic education on how digital audio works unless of course your goal is to be provocative in a neuro-atypical fashion. 

 

Most neurotypical consumers could care less and are perfectly happy with MP3 and AAC. They simply plop their airbuds in and listen. In your case, you should plug your buds in and read.

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3 minutes ago, FredericV said:

Fact is that GUTB does not understand PCM, like many of the other MQA shills. That's the point of the video. He probably believes PCM uses staircases as well.

I'm not saying I don't believe in hi-res. But my theory is that hi-res sounds better because of better mastering.

 

Yes. We have discussed hi res extensively elsewhere. Admittedly many people get the temporal resolution of 16/44 argument entirely wrong, but even if it weren’t enough then 24/96 or 24/192 surely is. ADC’s capable of DSD256 are now common. If one wanted to spatially “sharpen” the location of a piano for example, that convolution is done on a mastering workstation and the result stored in a PCM file of sufficient resolution. MQA has nothing to add. 

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3 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

So you say 🙂

https://www.stereophile.com/content/aqua-acoustic-quality-aqua-formula-xhd-da-processor-measurements

 

John Atkinson

Technical Editor, Stereophile

 

Well duh!

 

Thats not “PCM” rather a DAC without a reconstruction filter. For giggles look at a DSD DAC without an output filter — hint it’s just an Amanero USB interface — guess what you see?

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5 minutes ago, FredericV said:

Tegenvoorbeeld mismatcher. Yes R2R dac's don't interpolate. But most are delta-sigma which don't show this.

 

No! Most have the requisite output reconstruction filter! That’s really the whole point of upsampling : to ease the reconstruction filter’s corner effects above audible!

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11 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

Perhaps you missed the smiley? I was making a joke.

 

Wrong emoticon 😂

 

Understand that this follows a pot by the “Class D sucks” OP who obviously doesn’t understand this,  and merely parrots what certain folks tell him (I don’t even think you can read that nonsense anywhere)

 

Do folks know why the recon filter is important? I mean we can’t  hear stuff at 192 kHz, or in the DSD MHz range, right?

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1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I have experience listening to safety masters of Miles Davis, Steve Perry, Bill Withers and many more. I admit that it’s a wonderful sounding experience when done right.

DSD256 tape transfers are impressive. 

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3 hours ago, GUTB said:

A sinewave cannot be transformed to and from a square wave without change of data.

 

Utterly wrong. Want to bet? Like $10,000 or $100,000 (but I doubt you are good for it). 

 

Best accept the the fact that you simply don’t understand the math. 

 

3 hours ago, GUTB said:

There is nothing wrong with Nyquist from a mathematical standpoint but only between two arbitrary limits (ie, 20-20k). Liken it to a circle -- no such thing exists in nature, it's a series of lines close enough together that our brains can summarize the shape as a circle, but that is an illusion. However, when Shannon-Nyquist developed the sampling theorem it was at a time before human's time-domain (and high-frequency) acuity was widely understood.

 

 

Just accept the the fact that you have no idea what you are writing. Shannon-Nyquist has nothing to do with the limits of human hearing. 

 

Perhaps humans can hear >20k in some fashion. Ok use 24/96 then. 

 

Your babble about sine and square waves remains nonsensical. 

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27 minutes ago, GUTB said:

 

Nyquist is mathematically correct, but it requires an arbitrary limit -- in reference to audio, the limits being between 20 Hz and 20 kHz. In reality, humans react to moments of sound far beyond our frequency-domain acuity would otherwise suggest. Additionally it was shown that humans do in fact respond to high-frequency music information even though we cannot consciously detect high-frequency sound. If our audio sensory system deals with frequency and time-domain elements differently, the reliance on frequency sampling as a way to get to "perfect sound" becomes problematic.

 

This is catching up with the FACT that people can perceive the benefit of high-resolution audio and various types of filtering. I think many people in this thread have heard the benefits of high-resolution audio for themselves.

 

Yes. If you have read my posts, then you would know that I don't accept that CD Redbook necessarily captures all that we experience, and moreover have advocated storing audio at the resolution it was recorded.

 

I have also suggested that cochlear nonlinearities are a possible explanation for ultrasonics having an effect on the audio experience. (see thread).

 

Indeed this is my prima facie objection to MQA throwing out yet more information from the original signal (I would not throw out bit depth nor frequencies > 20k). As I've said over and over, I don't care how "good" a lossy format sounds, I want high resolution audio -- indeed if the audio was mastered as 15 ips tape, then I'd like a DSD256 transfer.

 

I think the application of the term "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" to Fourier time/phase is a bit unfortunate (because they aren't the same when applied to audio) but perhaps what you are getting at wrt CD Redbook, is that the phase differential in the stereo pair is quantized by the reconstruction window --- this is to say, for example, that if a sound in recorded in space, when the auditory system reconstructs the localization from a stereo pair (R/L) then the temporal relationship between the R and L signals are quantized -- there is not an infinite time resolution. As the bit depth and sampling frequency go up, the temporal relationship between R and L can be more precise (time/phase quanta are smaller).

 

Without getting needlessly technical its best to sample at higher than the Nyquist limit -- hence the suggestion of 24/96 (DSD64 is between 24/96 and 24/192). So.... MQA throws out bid depth in order to upsample ... uggghhhh, that's not adequate. That's not 24/96. At some point this is sleight of hand. Just because selected tracks "sound good" doesn't mean this "is good".

 

Similarly one can find perhaps many or even most CDs that are heavily processed and mastered at low resolutions, and it those cases CD Redbook is as good as you are going to get. That doesn't mean that there are other, better, recordings for which 24/96 or DSD64 aren't a better format. Why not stream DSD64? That I'd subscribe to. 

 

 

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2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Sure, but live to two track digital PCM or DSD is far more high fidelity. 

 

Certainly, but old recordings don’t have that option. New recordings should be done in hi-fi eg using the RME ADI or similar

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17 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

That's not fair. There's no economic case for hi-res.  😊

 

By that logic, there’s no economic case for anything “audiophile” then.

 

Folks like Cookie Marenco and Barry Diament & AcousticSounds / Analogue Productions would beg to differ. I purchase music in as close to the native recording format or in as high resolution as I can (module different masterings). 

 

Better to start out with a great recording than to expect a magic power supply to transform a crappy, low res and/or lossy recording.

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The issues of common mode noise, ground plane & differential mode noise as well as whether high-res audio is “better” are complex subjects. 

 

Many people are looking for the proverbial holy grail whether it be a transformative external clock, usb cable or a magic audio encoding such as MQA which promises to turn lead into gold. 

 

Electrical tweaks are harmless and can be educational (I’ve made many cables and have reclocked motherboards in the past)

 

MQA is far far different. It’s supposition is that the entire music chain from remastering all the way to re-engineering the DAC is necessary to achieve the sonic hold grail. The very best minds eg Isaac Newton, have succumbed  to the quest to turn lead into gold, and thankfully we have participants here who have been able to wash away the gold paint and let us see the lead underneath.