MQA is Vaporware

[jabbr]

29 minutes ago, Paul R said:

If you reverse engineered the software, you probably did something that is actionable. I do not know, and I am not a lawyer or giving any legal advice

 

IANAL either, but interestingly MQA explicitly claims NOT to contain DRM, so AFAIK the DMCA doesn't apply. I think that if MQA claimed to be DRM then DMCA might apply ... 

 

I'd assume that if there were any real IP (again "temporal" deblurring is not a new concept ... see wavelets etc) then IP infringement might be an issue

[mansr]

30 minutes ago, jabbr said:

Now if MQA really spent millions developing its software, they should've hired @mansr (how much did you spend "documenting" it?

At my usual rate, I guess about $50k.

[Jud]

4 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Wow, what a joke. Stream-ripping! Recording audio in real time is such a joke. Just like movie studios who go after people using camcorders in movie theaters. The people buying those movies wouldn't have paid anyway. The people stream-ripping aren't paying anyway. The people buying from the stream-rippers aren't paying full price anyway. 

 

Get over it people.

 

The criticism of the Big Tech companies is really amusing in an ironic sort of way.  As I've said before, Apple saved the music industry's bacon from utter disaster, and they are bound and determined never to let themselves be saved again by people who know what their customers want far better than they do.

 

There probably are answers to this, but I can't think offhand of another industry that regards its content providers as dupes, its customers as thieves, and its partners as pariahs.

[crenca]

27 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

...There is new innovation here as MQA has invested time in building a deblurring filter for most of the studio ADCs.  Then they further figured out how to use machine learning to ID the ADC and deploy a deblurring filter.

 

Thing is, you don't have the foggiest idea what this even means (in truth it's technobabble).  Guys have sold (or given you) thimbles full of "nanotechnology" and you really believe you have thimbles with "nanotechnology" in them.  The only "innovation" in all this is...I don't know, something to do with a confidence game...

[mansr]

21 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

Some corrections here:

 

1.  They have sold the software to the studios which came after testing done by all the individual labels.  MQA offers a cloud service so the studios can batch process files that way.

 

2.  There is new innovation here as MQA has invested time in building a deblurring filter for most of the studio ADCs.  Then they further figured out how to use machine learning to ID the ADC and deploy a deblurring filter.

All of that, if real (which it isn't), could be done on the production side and distributed in a standard format.

[Jud]

56 minutes ago, mansr said:

I have done nothing unlawful, so I fail to see how reporting what I've seen is in any way brave.

 

46 minutes ago, Paul R said:

If you reverse engineered the software, you probably did something that is actionable. I do not know, and I am not a lawyer or giving any legal advice. 

 

Not a profitable discussion.  If @mansr is not concerned, I don't see that any one of us needs to be on his behalf.   

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, crenca said:

Thing is, you don't have the foggiest idea what this even means (in truth it's technobabble).  Guys have sold (or given you) thimbles full of "nanotechnology" and you really believe you have thimbles with "nanotechnology" in them.  The only "innovation" in all this is...I don't know, something to do with a confidence game...

Aluminium atoms are tiny. Very nano.

[wgscott]

0.143 nm atomic radius.

 

That's less than 15% of a nano.

[Ralf11]

too sticky

 

and not just in alloys - it's the organo-Al stuff that is bigly

[Jud]

36 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

2.  There is new innovation here as MQA has invested time in building a deblurring filter for most of the studio ADCs.  Then they further figured out how to use machine learning to ID the ADC and deploy a deblurring filter.

 

This is factually incorrect.

 

This is marketing.

 

What has actually happened is this (a little bit of the longer tech piece I still haven't had time to write):

 

- The MQA filters don't "ring" (the more common name for what MQA calls "blurring" - what it really is you can find here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon ) themselves.  However, one of the means the MQA filters employ in order not to "ring" is that they don't cut much at all.  **In particular, they do not cut at the ringing frequency of ADCs, so they cannot "de" anything.**  In other words, while they don't add to any "blurring" already present in a file produced by an ADC, they absolutely cannot remove any "blurring" present therein.  And not only don't they remove ringing, they don't remove ultrasonics that interact with each other and with audible tones to create intermodulation distortion and harmonic distortion.  (Luckily, on a lot of program material there isn't sufficient ultrasonic response in the first place for this distortion to be audible.  But both @4est and I noticed, long before MQA became controversial, that there were particular tracks/albums that simply sounded bad to us, so perhaps these did contain enough ultrasonic response to result in nagging distortion.)

 

- Whether MQA invested time in machine learning, I don't know.  But the idea of essentially custom filtering for every ADC is absurd for two reasons: (1) There is a choice among 16 or 17 MQA filters, if I remember @mansr's technical work correctly.  That's it, no special one customized for your particular studio's ADC, just one of the 16 or 17.  (2) As noted previously, all of MQA's filters are built specifically not to cut enough to ring, meaning it is technically quite impossible for any of them to eliminate any ringing due to the ADC.  So your choice of 16 or 17, but not one of them will do anything at all to "deblur" the files from any ADC you have.

 

- MQA then takes the results of this bad filtering and applies lossy compression to it.  This compression is very likely applied not for technical reasons, but to protect intellectual property - that is, the fact that it is lossy is at best musically innocuous, at worst deleterious, but makes MQA harder to reverse engineer.

 

- Summary: The technical facts are that MQA consists of 16 or 17 bad filters that are absolutely incapable of "deblurring" anything (but do produce some amount of distortion), with lossy compression applied to the results.

[Paul R]

58 minutes ago, mansr said:

I very much doubt that. I never agreed, even by clicking a web link, to any restrictions. Nothing I have published is a derivative of anything subject to copyright or patent.

Good.

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, jabbr said:

 

IANAL either, but interestingly MQA explicitly claims NOT to contain DRM, so AFAIK the DMCA doesn't apply. I think that if MQA claimed to be DRM then DMCA might apply ... 

 

I'd assume that if there were any real IP (again "temporal" deblurring is not a new concept ... see wavelets etc) then IP infringement might be an issue

 I am not sure that DRM has anything at all to do with whether something is covered under the DMCA or not...

 

 

[kumakuma]

30 minutes ago, Paul R said:

 I am not sure that DRM has anything at all to do with whether something is covered under the DMCA or not...

 

I believe he was referring to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

Summary: The technical facts are that MQA consists of 16 or 17 bad filters that are absolutely incapable of "deblurring" anything (but do produce some amount of distortion), with lossy compression applied to the results.

 

Many audiophiles who won’t even use FLAC (WAV is more pure to them) are lining up for MQA. 

 

We went from straight wire with gain to audio origami. 

 

What kind of crazy f’d up world do we live in. 

[Jud]

16 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

Many audiophiles who won’t even use FLAC (WAV is more pure to them) are lining up for MQA. 

 

We went from straight wire with gain to audio origami. 

 

What kind of crazy f’d up world do we live in. 

 

The lossy compression has a better marketing department.

[Don Hills]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Many audiophiles who won’t even use FLAC (WAV is more pure to them) are lining up for MQA.  ...

 

... in spite of MQA files being delivered in FLAC format.

[Fokus]

5 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

2.  There is new innovation here as MQA has invested time in building a deblurring filter for most of the studio ADCs.  Then they further figured out how to use machine learning to ID the ADC and deploy a deblurring filter.

 

You are still clueless as to the deblurring thing.

 

You are clueless as to how to identify ADCs in given recordings.

 

You are clueless as to machine learning.

 

And you are clearly clueless as to how much time was invested to dream up MQA.

 

[asdf1000]

9 hours ago, mansr said:

Many buy legally when they can, but when hindered by geographical restrictions, release windows, and other nonsense, they will turn to piracy. That's all the music and film companies' own doing. If you refuse to sell, don't act surprised when people don't buy.

 

In the news today, with Spotify's launch in India:

 

https://www.recode.net/2019/2/28/18244964/spotify-warner-music-india-lawsuit-streaming-cardi-b-ed-sheeran

 

It covers geo restrictions, artists (not just particular albums) not being available and piracy.

 

It even covers how future contracts disputes between streaming services and labels could result in large chunks of your streamed collection (not just tracks and albums but artist collections) disappearing overnight while disputes are ongoing... yikes.
 

 

[Norton]

50 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

could result in large chunks of your streamed collection (not just tracks and albums but artist collections) disappearing overnight

 

In the UK we have an expression “Can’t see the wood* for the trees”.  Always amazes me that some of the people  who get het up about the potential of DRM in MQA seem to be enthusiastic,  unquestioning users of streaming services, where the issue is not so much the management of rights,  but whether the user has any rights to anything specific in the first place.  

 

AFAIK  no streaming service guarantees its paid-up users continued, let alone perpetual, access to any specific album or track; which (along with SQ) is why I’d only ever use a streaming service to supplement, rather than replace, my own library.

 

*forest.

[sandyk]

13 minutes ago, Norton said:

 

In the UK we have an expression “Can’t see the wood* for the trees”.  Always amazes me that some of the people  who get het up about the potential of DRM in MQA seem to be enthusiastic,  unquestioning users of streaming services, where the issue is not so much the management of rights,  but whether the user has any rights to anything specific in the first place.  

 

AFAIK  no streaming service guarantees its paid-up users continued access to any specific album or track, which (along with SQ) is why I’d only ever use a streaming service to supplement, rather than replace, my own library. 

 

*forest.

 

 Please elaborate on your comment " (along with SQ)"

[asdf1000]

11 hours ago, mansr said:

There are also studies showing that regular pirates actually spend more than average on legal purchases. Many buy legally when they can, but when hindered by geographical restrictions, release windows, and other nonsense, they will turn to piracy. That's all the music and film companies' own doing. If you refuse to sell, don't act surprised when people don't buy.

 

Lots of action today. Here's an example where the artists don't want their music streamed but labels and most streaming services are going ahead anyway....

 

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/de-la-soul-catalog-streaming-services-tidal-801064/

[SoundAndMotion]

11 hours ago, mansr said:

You and Chris are actually in agreement. He's saying that someone visiting a pirate site wasn't going to pay for that copy today.

 

There are also studies showing that regular pirates actually spend more than average on legal purchases. Many buy legally when they can, but when hindered by geographical restrictions, release windows, and other nonsense, they will turn to piracy. That's all the music and film companies' own doing. If you refuse to sell, don't act surprised when people don't buy.

What studies?

I'm interested because I met some guy in the mirror this morning who owns thousands of CDs and DVDs, and continues to buy, but has no patience or tolerance when people won't take his money. Mostly a problem for regional language limitations for TV shows....

[John Dyson]

10 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Some corrections here:

 

1.  They have sold the software to the studios which came after testing done by all the individual labels.  MQA offers a cloud service so the studios can batch process files that way.

 

2.  There is new innovation here as MQA has invested time in building a deblurring filter for most of the studio ADCs.  Then they further figured out how to use machine learning to ID the ADC and deploy a deblurring filter.

You might not even know what 'blurring' or 'jitter' does and how it cannot manifest in the way that some clueless people might believe.

 

Firstly, if you have fast jitter, and a limited bandwidth (like 22.05k, 24k, 48k), and some ps of fast jitter, then most of that jitter cannot get through.  it is because the FM/PM modulation caused by the jitter requires associated modulation products (sidebands if you will), which fall far out of the bandwidth.  This means that IF there is jitter, as soon as you have a reconstruction filter, then the jitter mostly disappears (cannot manifest because of not enough bandwidth.)  The only place where the jitter can really manifest a change in teh audio is in an D/A and A/D conversion.  Even then, it doesn't change down the chain, and only changes the sampling point.  Much of that noise cannot manifest because of the digital filters after the input.  As soon as there is a bandwidth limit after said jitter, then it becomes progressively more difficult for the jitter to manifest.  Chopping the sidebands is a lot like grabbing an AM signal and doing a narrow filter on it -- then the modulation disappears (progressively losing more and more high frequencies until theoretically you just have the carrier.)

 

If there is 'blurring' or 'jitter' on the input, it must be at a relatively low frequency -- and that would be horrible.  Again, jitter can manifest, but it is a purely analog phenomenon, and the effects are at least partially removed by bandwidth limits.  A sane, recent design isn't going to manifest much jitter, but IT DOES EXIST.  Such jitter is like the 'angels on a pin' type thing -- there are many more important matters about audio processing. (I want to clarify that the effects of jitter do exist, even with the filtering, but is more of a PM/FM to AM type conversion process.)

Before playing with 'blurring', there are infinite numbers of other defects in the distributed audio, including total botches like not doing DolbyA decoding on older material.  Such talk only clarifies the point to me -- too much marketing-speak that is being used to sell something bad to everyone.

john

[Jud]

3 hours ago, Norton said:

 

In the UK we have an expression “Can’t see the wood* for the trees”.  Always amazes me that some of the people  who get het up about the potential of DRM in MQA seem to be enthusiastic,  unquestioning users of streaming services, where the issue is not so much the management of rights,  but whether the user has any rights to anything specific in the first place.  

 

AFAIK  no streaming service guarantees its paid-up users continued, let alone perpetual, access to any specific album or track; which (along with SQ) is why I’d only ever use a streaming service to supplement, rather than replace, my own library.

 

*forest.

 

There's always this possibility, and I would be very sorry to see streaming go away (though I wouldn't be to see the artists get a greater cut at the expense of labels).

 

However, Qobuz at least makes it convenient to purchase music you hear and like, and at its highest tier, makes that positively financially attractive.  (You "recover" extra money spent on the subscription in the form of steep discounts on purchases.)

 

Your fear is of course one of the things that's been discussed about MQA - its proprietary nature and potential for DRM mean that even MQA music you purchase might be rendered unplayable.

[mansr]

2 hours ago, SoundAndMotion said:

What studies?

I'm interested because I met some guy in the mirror this morning who owns thousands of CDs and DVDs, and continues to buy, but has no patience or tolerance when people won't take his money. Mostly a problem for regional language limitations for TV shows....

A few seconds on Google yielded this: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pirates-buy-more-music