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MQA is Vaporware


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20 hours ago, firedog said:

You are really being funny now, even though I know you don't mean to be.

 

I suggest you view the video of Chris' attempt to make a balanced presentation about MQA in front of an audience. 

The MQA people and their audio press lackeys simply interrupted, shouted him down, pounded tables, engaged in ad-hominem attacks instead of countering what was being presented. That's what you do when you have an economic motive to protect a product that is based on lies, and can't stand up to any kind of factual analysis/presentation. If you have real confidence in what you are selling, you don't mind the truth.

Bob & Co. have been asked for  five years in various places to factually counter the technical claims of people such as Archimago, Miska, Mansr, etc. - and have never done so.

There's a reason for that - they can't.

Auralic - they discovered that an actual MQA license meant MQA interference in the workings of their equipment/ecosystem, and decided to forgo the pleasure. They didn't want MQA dictating to them their customers listening experience.

Wow, thanks for posting this. I heard about this event and missed it I didn't know there was a recording. It's funny as soon as Archimago's slide comes up they immediately try to get Chris to admit that Archimago is "just a guy on the Internet". I'll watch the rest of this later.

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9 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

I downloaded all the 2L test files and set up each performance in Roon like this:

 

Capture.thumb.JPG.0e0c00e9a5b17e6f40aff9966f9b4d25.JPG

 

I am not able to reliably discern an audible difference among the formats.

 

That’s interesting. To me the difference between MQA and DXD was minor, but the difference between DXD and MQA-CD was pretty significant. My system for this test was my custom audio PC, Mytek Liberty + linear power supply, Mjolnir 2, TH900 with balanced cables. What were you listening with?

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11 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

@GUTB

Re the Joseph Haydn; String Quartet In D  --  DXD vs MQA-CD.  Still not hearing a difference.  If you are hearing a difference with this performance or others from the test bench, if you could, would you please note the time stamp where such differences are obvious and I will try to zero in on that.  Thanks.

Right from the beginning you should hear a greater dynamic presence or "pop" from the piano on the DXD. Drumstick taps sound more "present", there's an overall sense of dullness in the MQA-CD vs DXD. Pay attention to  the bass starting at 1:55 in the DXD you should hear deeper into it making it seem more present / real.

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  • 4 weeks later...
7 hours ago, JoshM said:

I’m not sure whether here or the comments on @Archimago’s article is the best place to ask this, but is there a definitive answer on if and how resolution is compromised on MQA CDs if one doesn’t allow any “unfolding”?
 

My understanding from the rest of this thread is that MQA-CDs are effectively 15/44.1, with that last bit being used for the MQA gobbledygook. So if one doesn’t unfold it, is the compromise just the loss of potential dynamic range by sacrificing the 16th bit? Or is the MQA encoding process doing some deeper damage?

 

I ask because I’m disturbed that quite a few very good masterings now exist only on MQA-CDs. In the past, I suspect they would’ve been issued in dual Redbook/SACD formats. 

It's not gobbledygook but rather a functional compression scheme. From my own testing MQA-CDs played back in a non-MQA system are indistinguishable from regular CDs (using the MQA test CDs) in casual listening. I haven't performed a detailed listening comparison so there may be mild artifacts. I'm actually not sure if it's just the least significant bit dedicated to MQA data. Using a MQA-CD capable system (in my case, a Mytek Liberty and a regular CD transport connected via SPDIF) the quality improvement is on the level of a 96 kHz master, and significantly inferior to high-rate DSD and DXD masters. Bear in mind that all (most?) of these MQA-CDs are coming out of Japan and being mastered onto UHQCD media. In testing UHQCD (again using a sampler pack to compare UHQCD vs regular CD with the same tracks) I found there was a mild but noticeable improvement to lower frequency definition, something you normally don't get with MQA so it's not as simple as saying MQA-CD is just like a 96 kHz PCM or a low-rate DSD (SACD). It's been a long time since I listened to SACD so I can't honestly say that MQA-CD is the best physical digital format currently.

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14 minutes ago, botrytis said:

 

I have found the UHQCD's to be hit and miss really. And why put a lossy compression up against CD. If I had wanted a lossy system, instead of CD's, well MP3 is the way to go AND I don't have to have specialized software/hardware for it.

 

Do you see how stupid the idea is?

It's true that MQA is lossy, but it seems that they've successfully identified what can be lost and still maintain high resolution audio. With MQA-CD specifically there does appear to be a loss of definition vs higher bitrate masters (176-384), so if it's a choice between MQA-CD and DXD or high-rate DSD than MQA-CD would be the last choice. However, high-rate DSD and DXD (or 176-192) don't have physical media (I wonder why?). So if you want physical digital media, and a lot of audiophiles (especially in Japan) do, there's 2 choices currently: SACD and MQA-CD.

 

SACD isn't lossy, but it's stuck with a lot of noise close to the audio band which requires an aggressive filter. It's not optimal for DSD, which really takes off at DSD-256. With MQA-CD, it seems to result in lossless-like performance up to 96 kHz. I also consider SACD to be somewhere around the 96 kHz level....but DSD isn't directly comparable that way so in some cases it provide great results that can't be matched by any PCM, certainly not on a CD format.

 

Another thing. I'm not really sold on the benifit of the time-domain correction. There is absolutely something happening to the sound which some of you guys say you don't like. Personally I don't mind it, but it doesn't make things sound more analog if I were to compare to my vinyl. So, if it's an analog master than SACD is still probably the best physical format. However. These huge libraries owned by the labels can be batch-converted to MQA, they can be just as easily pumped out in MQA-CD. It's turning out that for many titles on physical media MQA-CD is going to be the only high-res format available.

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1 minute ago, botrytis said:

 

Sorry, I don't wand BS and company determining FOR ME what is important or not. Until they show HOW they determined what is and is not important, I don't want it. MP3 - one can determine what is being thrown away because the protocol is an open book.

 

With MQA there IS NO TIME CORRECTION. That is one of the big fallacies. If anything it makes it worse.

How was it determined that there was no time correction?

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  • 1 year later...

Oh, I really did start page 1000. Maybe you guys should take that as a sign from up on high?

 

I didn't know MoFi got into trouble. Hmm. My commentary: claiming your source is analog when in reality it's digital is simply lying -- false advertising. I do understand why they felt the need to lie; no studio is going to let these precocious masters get worn out doing many plays so MoFi "cheated" and used DSD. The fact is, DSD is just an analog signal being carried in a digital one. If the equipment is good and the engineers are talented, than to me, DSD is essentially no different from the master tape. As long as they are doing their EQs in the analog domain -- or whatever perfect lossless intermediate format these high end mixing boards use -- than it could be said that the end result is analog. All of that context and explanation won't fit into a marketing blurb so they just decided to lie about it.

 

As for MQA-CD I've put that experiment on hold for now. I'm waiting patiently for Schiit's CD transport with it's USB controller. That will open up a huge range of MQA DACs; most MQA DACs use a software decoder installed onto the XMOS USB controller chip -- meaning you'll only get MQA processing on USB. With that opening up you can match it with very high-performance DACs.

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  • 6 months later...

ASR is as far away from science as I am from the Moon.

 

Also, it appears that MQA is here to stay. I don't know how Tidal's finances work but they've survived all these years so far. It's become easy to find audiophile albums encoded in MQA. All the big Chinese manufacturers support MQA now. Many of the big Western names -- maybe around half? -- also supports MQA. The biggest DS chip manufacturer, ESS, also have products with MQA built in (ie, 9068, 9280). A big part of MQA's success has to be the Tidal and major publisher deals along with those automated MQA encoding tools. I read that the newer tools utilize AI for automatic encoding.

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2 minutes ago, Archimago said:

 

Really???

 

You heard today that Tidal's planning to go lossless hi-res soon with no more "unfolding", right? I certainly want Tidal to survive.

 

I won't be holding my breath, but the Tidal comments are at least encouraging so far.

I hadn't heard. Certainly interesting I'll be sure to follow developments on that. I'd definitely be interested in testing MQA vs lossless hi-res directly from Tidal.

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