MQA is Vaporware

[Charles Hansen]

15 hours ago, mansr said:

Those are just some possible configurations. The Meridian Explorer 2, for instance, has a full MQA decoder on the XMOS chip that also handles USB input. Since all MQA-enabled DACs to date are merely firmware updates of existing models, there can't be a dedicated MQA chip involved.

 

Hi Mansr,

 

I'm pretty sure that this is not the case for the Mytek DACs. Looking inside there is a powerful Altera FPGA, an ST ARM processor, an NXP processor, plus an XMOS chip. My guess is that their designs used the Altera for a lot of things - but not digital filtering. All of the Mytek DACs simply offer the consumer to select between the digital filters built into the ESS DAC chip used, and unlike (say, Chord and Ayre) do not implement any custom digital filters in it, even though most FPGAs include specific features to make this quite easy.

 

 

 

If Mytek were more clever, they could have taken the approach used by the AudioQuest Black and Red Dragonflies - just use the FPGA to load the MQA coefficients into the ESS DAC chip's programmable digital filter. But instead they apparently just used the implementation that Meridian had developed (using the XMOS chip to perform both the upsampling and digital filtering required for MQA) and added that on top of their existing design. Not that there is necessarily an performance disadvantage to either method, just that the AudioQuest approach is more economical, in terms of overall cost, PCB space, and power consumption.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

 

EDIT: It is possible that (just as with the Meridian Explorer2) that Mytek is using the XMOS chip for the USB decoding as well. In that case it could just be a matter of changing the firmware - as long as the chosen part had enough extra computing power to add the MQA functionality. But clearly there is a lot of computational horsepower inside the Mytek, and they could be doing their USB decoding in any one of at least three of those chips. It would likely be easiest in the XMOS as XMOS supplies the Thesycon driver required for most versions of Windows (except for the very latest release of Win 10) to use Class 2 audio and go past 96kHz.

[Charles Hansen]

13 hours ago, firedog said:

Well the claim by people who's ability to write about is restricted by NDA is that there is more going on than the filtering and that Archi's tests aren't doing anything like testing MQA vs non MQA.....

 

Hi Firedog,

 

Who is saying that? One should remember that almost all of the people who have signed up are those that don't know how to make their own digital filters. I've been surprised at some of the claims made by those using MQA. I don't think they are lying, I think they truly don't understand the technology. There are less than a dozen  companies making their own digital filters.

 

Thanks,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/member.php?u=14119

I believe the poster in the link is John Westlake, known audio/dac designer.

 

Hi Firedog,

 

As Mansr noted, it requires registration. Would you mind copying his post here? Thanks!

[Charles Hansen]

3 hours ago, firedog said:

http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/member.php?u=14119

I believe the poster in the link is John Westlake, known audio/dac designer.

 

Hello All,

 

I think I have found the post that John Westlake made:

 

JohnW Trade: Lakewest   Join Date: May 2010 Posts: 12,250

Quote: Originally Posted by Julf That was the original story, but as soon as Tidal became their main vehicle, all mentions of the added levels seem to have ended. We have seen no evidence of the supposed additional processing in hardware. Julf, I don't want to wade into the merits of MQA or not - but IMO the tests are flawed because they do not take into consideration the final "critical" rendering stage of MQA which strives to correct for the time domain issues of the DAC and "normalize" the entire replay chain. The first stage unfolding of MQA compressed data is not sonically relevant (which is the subject of the tests) - its the second DAC "Rendering" stage that's sonically most significant. Having a far few products pass through the MQA certification process I can testify to the fact that there a SIGNIFICANT engineering effort made by the MQA team to optimise the "renderer" for each DAC variant - which can also be extended to compensate for the DAC's Analogue LPF if required. Every MQA certified DAC has the hardware rendering stage. From the single direct DSD to MQA conversion "test file" I've heard, I still prefer the DSD track so while MQA is a step in the right direction, its sad that Native DSD is not more prevalent as its IMO sonically the closets "digital" format to the source material. MQA does try to "advance" the lowest common denominator - without the efforts of MQA I see nothing to stop us sliding into even lower Download audio quality - with files of unknown origin etc.

~~~~~~~~~~

 

It seems pretty clear from this that we have two conflicting sets of information. The first is that John Westlake designed a DAC for Pro-Ject that uses ESS DAC chips. He was told a story by MQA about all the "engineering efforts made by the MQA team".

 

However it seems that the story is just that -- a story. When Mansr and Archimago dumped the filter responses of MQA "renderers" using completely different DAC chips (Burr-Brown in the Explorer2 and ESS in the DragonFly), the results were identical. In other words no difference at all between the filters whatsoever.

 

Based on the evidence, I can reach no other conclusion than that John Westlake is simply repeating (yet another) story told by MQA that happens to be untrue - NDA or no NDA.

 

Hope that helps,

Charles Hansen

 

EDIT: PS - Please note that even John Westlake prefers DSD to MQA. He just sees it as a step up from the standard brickwall filters used by most DACs. No need for a proprietary format with licensing fees, royalties, and DRM to use better sounding digital filters that make all of your music sound better and not just the MQA files.

[Charles Hansen]

5 hours ago, firedog said:

 

http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/member.php?u=14119

I believe the poster in the link is John Westlake, known audio/dac designer.

 

Hi Firedog,

 

As noted John Westlake has designed many DACs, starting with one for Pink Triangle many years ago. However I can find no evidence that he has ever designed his own custom digital filter. This situation is very reminiscent of when HDCD was popular in the mid-'90s. Very few of the high-end manufacturers understood digital at all. There were only two companies on the planet making their own custom digital filters - Wadia and Theta. All of the rest were happy as clams to buy digital filter chips from a third party. There were only a few choices back then, and the HDCD "decoder" chip included one in it. At the time, Robert Harley (then with Stereophile) was claiming that in his experience all of the best sounding DACs used the HDCD digital filter.

 

Many, many, many companies were happy as clams to be able to purchase "the best" digital filter without having to know anything more than how to connect it. But that was over 20 years ago. Today there is little excuse for this - except for mid-fi products, or those trying to meet a very low price point. To implement a custom digital filter requires at the very least a little knowledge. Almost all of the ESS DAC chips allow for custom coefficients to be programmed (which is what was done for the Pono Player) and that keeps the cost down.

 

To go to the next step up in performance requires more computational horsepower than is in the DAC chip, so either a DSP chip or an FPGA must be used. Both of these add significantly to the cost of the unit, plus require an understanding of how digital filters work. And all custom digital filter solutions require that someone has done a thorough investigation of what the available variables affect in terms of sound quality. There are still only around a dozen companies that have taken the trouble to do so.

 

Almost everything about the Pro-Ject S2 DAC is simply well-implemented off-the-shelf solutions - from the XMOS USB receiver to the MQA custom filter to the choice of 7 other filters built into the ESS DAC chips used to the ESS headphone amp chip to the ESS DAC power supply chip. The only innovation I see in that unit is a circuit to clean up the incoming power from the USB cable that powers the unit. That is certainly a good idea, although many already do something similar. Perhaps he has done it better, but he also states on the Pinkfish forum thread that the sound is significantly improved by using a better external power supply. So that innovation is limited at best, it seems to me.

 

It certainly seems to be a good solid design and competent for the money, but there is only so much anybody can do at that price point - €350. Every penny counts when making that kind of product, even at the very high volumes that Pro-Ject is able to reach, with their vast European marketing network. But we have not reached the point where people are turning lead into gold or water into wine. If that's all the money you have and it provides the features you want, it is likely a very good choice. But it does not even offer an Ethernet input for direct streaming, so one either needs to attach a computer or dedicated streamer (such as the micro-Rendu) to even take advantage of the MQA feature. All of a sudden you are looking at something that is well over $1000 in order to listen to the only MQA source currently available - Tidal.

 

Just keeping things in perspective here. In that regard, it is not that much different from the Meridian Explorer2, currently for sale at $200 on Amazon, or even the AudioQuest DragonFly Black ($100) or Red ($200). It adds two S/PDIF inputs (co-ax and Toslink), has a nicer form factor (IMO), and has separate headphone and line outs (single-ended only). If those features are important to you, it may be worth roughly twice the price of the Meridian, or quadruple or double the price of the DragonFlies (I don't know what the US retail of the Pro-Ject is yet). It's a big world, with lots of products at all kinds of price points with all kinds of feature sets.

 

Despite Mr. Westlake's experience designing complete DACs, it doesn't appear that he has a thorough understanding of designing digital filters. As I've noted before in this thread, this seems to be very common. One can attribute the anti-MQA attitude of those who design custom digital filters either to greed on the part of those manufacturers (as they want to retain their proprietary performance advantage) or to greater insight as to what MQA is actually doing to the music. (I'm not sure why one would be predisposed to select the first choice as obviously there is also a greed motive for MQA.) One would have to think that all of the anti-MQA digital audio designers are greedy and selfish, while MQA and all of the MQA adopters are wonderful, charitable organizations to come to that conclusion.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

3 hours ago, Don Hills said:

Mans, I haven't seen anything about the coefficients of the filters used to split (and later rejoin) the audio into the 0-24 and 24-48 KHz bands for "origami" folding. Are they also leaky and "time optimised"? I would expect the performance of these filters to be more critical than the anti-alias / anti image filters. 

 

Hi Don,

 

In the Pinkfish thread where John Westlake (designer of an MQA-enabled DAC) posts, he claims the exact opposite - that the "real secret" are the reconstruction filters used in the DAC:

 

http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/showthread.php?t=206723

 

(No registration required to view.)

 

In this post:  http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/showpost.php?p=3210264&postcount=69   Mr. Westlake shows his lack of understanding as he apparently does not realize that the ESS DAC chips used actually allow the digital filter to be completely bypassed.

 

Further underscoring his lack of understanding is here:  http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/showpost.php?p=3210276&postcount=71  where he regurgitates the MQA talking points despite the fact that Mansr and Archimago have measured them and shown them not to be true. In that same post he shows further lack of understanding by claiming that "many DAC's are only 24 but [sic] input limiting the mathematical precession [sic] of the process - hardware rendering avoids all these issues" as apparently he doesn't realize that MQA limits the audio resolution to only about 17 bits (MQA's noise-shaped dithering results in the noise floor varying throughout the audio band) so there is very little point in using filters with more than 24 bits of precision.

 

Finally in this post:  http://www.pinkfishmedia.net/forum/showpost.php?p=3210290&postcount=76  Mr. Westlake believes that he understands the advantages of MQA but that MQA has simply not properly explained them to the public, which I find to be somewhat ironic.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

5 hours ago, firedog said:

And do have any idea what he means by this:

As I also mentioned the Renderer also has other processing - not just the Time domain processing.

 

Hi Firedog,

 

No, it doesn't make any sense to me. One possibility is that he simply doesn't understand what he is talking about. We do know that the Microchip processor used in the AudioQuest DragonFlies does not have enough computational power to actually perform any DSP, so the only reasonable conclusion is that it simply loads the MQA coefficients into the programmable filter used in the ESS DAC chips. That will affect both the frequency response and the time domain response. The Microchip could also easily perform the zero-stuffing required to interpolate ("upsample") the 96kHz audio data from the software (Tidal or Audirvana) decoder. Also the software wends instructions as to which of the 16 filter sets should be used for each track, and again it would be trivially easy for the Microchip processor to implement those commands.. Perhaps those are what Mr. Westlake is referring to.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, Fokus said:

 

He designed among others the Audiolab MDAC, which has a herd of custom filters. Some even different implementations of the (claimed) exact-same response (also claimed are, of course, vast audible differences between these  filters, because digital is, well, much more mysterious than EE-educated people think).

 

He is also the creator of the Lakwest MDAC2. Crowd funding was done in 2013. The design goes on, and on, and on, and on, ... There is a healthy secondary market of people buying and selling their MDAC2 order tickets.

 

Hello Fokus,

 

Thanks for the correction. As you hint at, this is a bit mysterious. I could find no good photos of the insides, nor any test reports from any publication that makes measurements. The manufacturer's website claims the unit uses the original ESS Sabre 32 ES9018 DAC chip, which only has two filters built=in - a sharp rolloff and a slow rolloff. However the filters are custom programmable, and it appears this is what Westlake has done with the M-DAC. It becomes curiouser and curiouser as one reads the descriptions of the filters. As you point out three of the filters are called "Optimal Transient" with no claimed ringing, which is a difficult task to pull off, let alone with three different implementations that are claimed to have identical frequency response and time domain response.

 

The digital filter in the ESS chip is somewhat unusual as it is an 8x interpolation filter (like many, many other DAC chips),. However instead of the typical concatenation of three 2x sections to achieve 8x, it uses a 4x followed by a 2x. It is difficult for me to understand how Westlake could arrange two building blocks in three different ways to achieve the exact same results. That is just the beginning of curious things I've never seen claimed before, not only for the digital filters but also for a "Digital Data Decorrelation Engine" that sounds like it simply dithers data with word lengths less than 24 bits,. Finally it has a feature whereby it is claimed to "correct Windows LSB rounding errors", which is a very interesting feature indeed. I've never heard of the "problem" before, and it is unclear to me how one would know whether the rounding had been up or down (in order to properly correct it). But who knows? Perhaps he is right and everybody else is wrong. None of us know what we don't know, and perhaps Mr. Westlake is simply that far ahead of everybody else.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

2 hours ago, Fokus said:

I have been asking this since nearly a year now: is an MQA DAC's standard CD replay filter (as seen in Fig.4 here Explorer 2 review at S'phile) part of these two QMF pairs? And if so, what does this mean for the other 3 QMF filters, and thus for the quality of the non-decoded MQA signal (i.o.w. has it been infected with aliasing in the audible band)?

 

Hi Fokus,

 

No that graph is of the digital reconstruction filter used by MQA. It turns out that the BlueSound and the DragonFlies have a choice of 16 different filters. I don't recall if that is the case for the Explorer2 or not. I think Archimago touched on that in his blog, but don't recall for sure. At any rate it is definitely not part of the band splitting/recombining process.

 

Hope this helps,

Charles Hansen

[Charles Hansen]

22 hours ago, witchdoctor said:

Well if you are THAT interested here are links to the MQA related presentations. I can't send you the papers themselves but you can access them one of two ways. By joining the AES or by purchasing the paper as a non member.The papers have already been uploaded and are available. I recommend this one since the malcontents here seem obsessed with this topic. This study includes both objective data and subjective blind listening tests:

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19340

Perceived Differences in Timbre, Clarity, and Depth in Audio Files Treated with MQA Encoding vs. Their Unprocessed State

 

Witchdoctor -

 

You have just exposed yourself as a fraud and a shill. Since you have full access to the paper, you will know that it is a proposal for a study that has not even been designed yet, let alone conducted.

 

Chris - I suggest that you look into Witchdoctor's affiliations with the industry, as nobody would post this misleading clap-trap if they weren't working for MQA.

[Charles Hansen]

18 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

With respect to audio, consumers have never shown an interest in quality.

Bob said to me on an MQA panel that consumers have never had the option.

 

Hi Chris,

 

Maybe  Bob said that the consumers never had an option to hear quality music because the equipment that Meridian sells doesn't provide it.

 

Just one possible interpretation of a remark taken out of context....

[Charles Hansen]

18 hours ago, witchdoctor said:

Hey didn't you know there is a HUGE population of witchdoctor's and growing? What other people like is not my concern, sorry. The fact that the labels are converting their catalogs to MQA is their call.

 

And the record companies are happy to have someone spend millions of dollars to promote their products. The only reason they are letting MQA convert any titles is because MQA is paying for it. If the labels had to pay for it, they would have to make money on it. Nobody is making any money from MQA, especially not the labels.

 

The indicator would be if subscriptions to Tidal Hi-Fi increased due to the MQA titles being available. It's not happening. MQA are desperate as Big Daddy Rupert (who is financing them) wants to see some ROI. Bob Stuart is sweating bullets, as he may soon be on Rupert's hit list. Just like you don't screw with the Mafia, you don't screw with the Ruperts.

[Charles Hansen]

18 hours ago, crenca said:

 

As he has already said - I think he is just spamming this thread.

 

Yes, and almost certainly being paid (or otherwise compensated) to do so.

[Charles Hansen]

2 hours ago, fung0 said:

This thread lately seems to be suffering from a rash of posters who insist on being deliberately obtuse and repetitive, as if that were clever somehow.

 

Yes, that is because the MQA-organized group has directed its trolls to distract from all threads about MQA - much like happens in political races where there are "astro-turf" (fake grassroots) campaigns designed to deceive the public.

 

MQA has set up a private (by invitation only) Facebook group whose purpose is to promote MQA and includes Bob Stuart, Morten Lindberg (2L), Mike Jbara (left Warner's to join MQA as CEO), Steven Stone (TAS), Pål Bråtelund (Tidal CTO), Hans Beekhuyzen (Dutch reviewer), Frank Vermeylen (MSB Technologies), Guido Tent (Tentlabs), Jamie Howarth (Plangent Processes), Michael Bovaird (Florida retailer and runs " The Audio Shark" website), Lee Scoggins (reviewer for Part-Time Audiophile), Jan de Jeu (Dutch reviewer), Rene van Es (Dutch reviewer), Theo Wubbolts (former Dutch reviewer, now a distributor), Bjorn Mattijsen (Dutch retailer), Garmt Vanderzel (Dutch retailer), Ferry Kremers(Dutch retailer), Peter Chattelin(Dutch retailer), Charles Rievone (Philippines retailer), Hessel Veldmen (Dutch retailer), Jaap Veenstra (Dutch retailer), Jan Hart (AudioQuest NL), Rudo Meijer (Dutch retailer), Robert Nauta (Dutch retailer), Bert Oling (Dutch audio researcher), Ferry Kremers (Dutch retailer), Johan Groenestege (Dutch retailer), Bjorn Mateijsen (Dutch retailer), Ronald Hartjes (Dutch retailer), Peter Chattelin (Dutch retailer). and many more names I do not recognize.

 

https://www.facebook.com/groups/689938551214806

The entire group is administrated by Peter Veth (now banned from CA), who posts constantly and super-enthusiastically (shills) in many of the online forums (see Computer Audiophile and Digital Audio Review as two examples in English) whenever MQA is mentioned, yet denies any affiliation whatsoever with MQA - more lies from those in and around MQA.

[Charles Hansen]

1 hour ago, lucretius said:

 

It looks like a general interest group started by Peter Veth and not some industry group. Thou doth protest too much?

 

Please see this post to understand my position:

 

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/critics/messages/8/88367.html

[Charles Hansen]

21 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

Also a legendary Shunyata shill over at the Hoffman forums.  I've never seen sycophantic name dropping in "reviews" like this guy does.

 

Hello Samuel,

 

Thanks for the info. I don't know why some people do such shilling. Are they paid to do so, or are they just so insecure as to need "approval" from some authority figure like Bob Stuart or Caelin Gabriel. (The fact that Caelin Gabriel chose a Japanese sounding name for his company makes me very suspicious right off the bat. Why would he want to potential customers to think that he was based in Japan? It's kind of the reverse of Korean company Astell & Kern who deliberately chose a British-sounding name for their company. It makes the opposite impression on me than what was intended, as it clearly implies that they are being deceptive from the ground up. Then you get really weird things like designed in the Netherlands, made in China equipment from a company that chose a grammatically-incorrect Spanish name of "Prima Luna" - first moon - it should be "Luna Prima". Their latest ad is obviously attacking Audio Research and claims that ARC's PCB are wave soldered "overseas" - I doubt this is true - while completely glossing over the fact that all of their equipment is made in Chinese sweat-shops.)

 

And people wonder why so many think high-end audio is a joke...

[Charles Hansen]

On 10/24/2017 at 11:50 PM, PeterSt said:

Is MQA from Holland ?

 

As far as I can tell, MQA has attracted next to no attention in Europe. The main interest in from the US, almost entirely due to The Absolute Sound and Stereophile. There is a small amount of interest from Korea now, I'm unsure what's driving that (other than subsidizing an MQA-equipped streaming service there). Perhaps they think that Holland will be the best "beachhead" for a European invasion. Who knows?

[Charles Hansen]

21 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

Agreed that there is decent new music out there, but you generally won't find it in the "popular" section of your favorite streaming service.  Pop music today is more formulaic than at any time I can remember.  Auto-tune and processed vocals seem to be the norm.  Hip hop seems to have been totally co-opted by the major labels now.  And I totally don't get the Rock God status of Jack White.

 

Spend some time on Bandcamp, try to explore outside of your genre comfort zone, and you might find some modern stuff you really like.

 

Hello Samuel,

 

There are lots of good videos on YouTube on this subject. This one is good, but not amazing. Still you will be shocked by some of the facts about "today's music".

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVME_l4IwII

 

[Charles Hansen]

16 hours ago, rickca said:

I'd bet that Berkeley and dCS got a special deal so MQA would have the cache of some high-end brands.

 

Nearly all of the apparent momentum in MQA is attributable to business development investment by MQA.  It's not like they have revenue pouring in.  It's all demand generation.

 

Hi Rick,

 

Prezactly. For more info on this, please refer to:

https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/critics/messages/8/88367.html

[Charles Hansen]

32 minutes ago, Nikhil said:

Shunyata is Sanskrit.  Very clever name IMO if one understands the nuance of the term.

 

Hi Nikhil,

 

Thanks for enlightening me. While I've heard of Sanskrit, I didn't know what it actually was. Apparently an almost dead language from many thousands of years ago from the region now called India, and important to certain religions such as Buddhism. I mistakenly assumed it was a Japanese word, although now that I think about it this could not be right as it would be extremely difficult to pronounce in Japanese, where there are no stressed syllables. It's really only readily pronounced with an accent on the second syllable.

 

Since I don't know any Sanskrit (there are apparently around 50,000 in India who are fluent), could you kindly let me know the translation?

 

Thanks!

[Charles Hansen]

16 hours ago, synn said:

 TBH, When I am in the mood to discover and sample new music (Or listen to obscure scandinavian heavy metal bands), Spotify has me covered. When I really like something, something that I want to listen to at a higher quality, I go and buy it from one of the various high res stores around.

 

I "Acquire" maybe 10% of what I listen to.

 

I know of many music lovers who use this exact same strategy. I believe it combines the best of both worlds - less than the best sound quality for a very low (or free with ads) cost, when all that is desired is background music or discovering new music, and then buying the things you like in the format  (digital or analog) you like for music that you will want to listen to repeatedly.

 

Cheers!

[Charles Hansen]

15 hours ago, lucretius said:

Look at it this way:  How many people outside of China would buy audio equipment (made in China) from companies with Chinese names?  It's just marketing; some of it makes sense, some of it does not.

 

Hi Lucretius,

 

Yes, there is definitely a grey area. The company now known as LG was previously called "GoldStar" in the US, which is a contraction of its full name "Lucky GoldStar". They are a Korean company, and in phonetically spelled Korean this is Leogki Geumseong, which happens to have the same initials as the English equivalent. In many Asian cultures, it is considered wise to name the company after things that are believed to bring good fortune. In Asian cultures the name "Lucky Gold Star" is about as good as it gets as all three words connote good fortune.

 

However in the US market, "Lucky GoldStar" sounds pretty cheesy and I don't believe they ever marketed anything in the US with their full English-translated name, only the abbreviation "Goldstar". But at some point they clearly felt that even this sounded cheesy and of foreign origin, so they contracted it to LG, which is pretty innocuous.

 

On the other hand Astell & Kern (at least in my opinion) were deliberately trying to be deceptive with their name choice. They arose at a time when many of the storied UK audio manufacturers had been acquired by Chinese interests, often keeping the design and development in the UK and transferring all production to China (eg, KEF). To me it came off as a brazen attempt to either deceive people that it was a British company, or at the very least designed in the UK but manufactured in Korea.

 

Why? Because Astell & Kern are not just words but clearly surnames. It was like copying the name "Bowers & Wilkins", the names of two real English people who really lived in the UK and really designed and manufactured their products in the UK for decades. Contrast this case to (say) ConversDigital, another Korean technology company. While they have clearly chose a name that the English-speaking world can pronounce and understand, I've no idea what "Convers" means. Is it supposed to be a contraction of "converse"? And if so, "converse" has two distinct meanings - one is to communicate with another person, while the other is that something is literally turned around or the opposite. In any event, there is no clear intent to hide the country of origin.

 

There are many factors involved in selecting the name of a company or product. I remember at one time Theta (which uses names for their products, rather than model numbers) had a really cool name for a product but they rejected it, simply because it had so many "r"s and "l"s in it that it would extremely difficult for a native Japanese  to pronounce. (Sorry I've forgotten the name.)

 

But that is very different from deliberate attempts of deception. It would be as if I wanted to sell products in a specific market, whether it were Nigeria or China, and then choosing a name that made it appear that my company was based in either of those two countries.

[Charles Hansen]

16 hours ago, synn said:

You are right though, the 2L tracks are not the best mastered tracks around. I have some albums purchased from the B&W Society of Sound website that are 96 KHz and blow the 2L tracks away.

 

This is an interesting data point. While the mastering clearly will affect the sound quality of any recording, so will innumerable other factors. What recording venues was used? Which microphones were used? Where were the microphones placed and how were they oriented? Which mic preamps were used? Which brand and model of microphone cable were used? What A/D converter was used (if the recording went straight to digital)? What was the original format? Was there a sample rate converter used between recording and release? If so, which one? Here is a link to an article that describes the equipment used by 2L:

 

http://www.soundstageglobal.com/index.php/shows-events/twbas-2012-north-carolina-usa/84-twbas-2012-product-profiles/195-2l-q2l-twbas-2012-samplerq

 

We don't know the microphones, preamps, or cables, but many of 2L's recordings are done in multi-channel. Apparently most of the recent ones use the A/D converter built into the Pyramix DAW made by Merging Technologies of Switzerland. I've no idea how that sounds, as if you think about it, all of the same factors that affect the sound quality of a DAC also affect the sound quality of an ADC:

 

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/35106-how-does-a-perfect-dac-analog-signal-look-different-than-a-cheap-dac/?page=7&tab=comments#comment-713189

 

If you look at the graphs in the linked article, the DAC in the Pyramix really can't do much more than about 96/24 before the noise floor of the converter begins to rise and obscure any musical harmonics that might be captured with a good 192/24 converter. Who knows how good the analog circuitry inside there is?

 

The point is that there is not any particular reason to think that the 2L recordings will sound any better than something made in the '50s by RCA or Decca when they were using ribbon and condenser microphones with tubed signal chains all the way through. Newer is NOT always better...

[Charles Hansen]

19 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

To close this particular topic, I want to bring your attention to this train wreck (now only available on the Internet Archive) that the younger people would rightly call an "epic fail".  It celebrates the rise of the crowd-sourced funding model, and enthusiastically predicts the demise of the more traditional audio gear manufacturers that distribute primarily through brick and mortar.  Scroll to the bottom of the article to see the author.

 

Excellent catch - thanks for the link!

[Charles Hansen]

3 hours ago, Fokus said:

That is not correct.

 

There was electronics company Goldstar, who traded under that name, also in the West.

Then there was plastics company Lucky.

Lucky and Goldstar merged in the 90s, and immediately rebranded as LG.

 

WTF?

 

Can Wikipedia know less than you do?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Corporation