MQA is Vaporware

[fas42]

On 3/1/2019 at 7:57 AM, Lee Scoggins said:

Slide 17:

This studio sound slide implies MQA are remixing the master.  In fact, the differences between the master file and MQA are very small.  MQA is applying filters to correct the time smear of ADC.  ...

 

This is the bit that gets me. In the article, https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-questions-and-answers-tutorial-temporal-errors-audio, they say

 

Quote

There is no standard measure for temporal blur but we believe our use of the term is clear and intuitive. A causal transmission system has dispersive properties which result from filtering or attenuation. Fine details in the time waveform can be smeared or obscured if the end-to-end impulse response is not sensitive to the signal and to the receiver (human listener)

 

Ummm, if you want gibberish, this to me is a perfect example, . Sciencey talk which contains nothing. I want to see a piece of real music recording, before and after MQA is applied, which clearly shows how the signal is altered - by getting a diff of the result - and an explanation for why the MQA variety is "more accurate" to what the microphones heard. Talking about theoretical, impulse responses does not compute - what is the ear hearing that makes the difference; with a genuine music signal?

 

 

[sandyk]

12 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Quoting Lee Scoggins : There is no standard measure for temporal blur but we believe our use of the term is clear and intuitive. A causal transmission system has dispersive properties which result from filtering or attenuation. Fine details in the time waveform can be smeared or obscured if the end-to-end impulse response is not sensitive to the signal and to the receiver (human listener)

 

Sometimes this may be achieved by the simple expediency of slightly increasing upper HF response to give a   little added " focus".

 This also applies to Video such as .mp4 where the bit rate used for encoding is a little too low.

[fas42]

6 minutes ago, Racerxnet said:

 

Sounds like 2 weaknesses are a step forward in your example. 

 

MAK

 

Weaknesses have different levels of subjective significance, and it varies per individual. First CD players came out, and person A said, "Thank God I can't hear pops and crackles!"; person B say, "It's terrible what that playback is doing to the treble - give me back my LP TT!".

 

The software world deals in this all the time - a bug may be so severe that it completely cripples the usefulness of the program for some people; another bug may be very subtle, but everybody comes across it now and again - which weakness is the "more important one"?

 

The real world is never "perfect" - everything we use is compromised in some areas, but we get used to the downsides, and they "become invisible" - "character" is the great word to use here ... .

 

The reality is that we all dance on beds of weaknesses - being aware of such can help to lower the level of vitriole; it ain't a Black and White world, even though many would love it to be so.

 

 

[fas42]

13 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

 MQA is incapable of improving the subjective quality of their rigs,  provided that they are already capable of doing justice to the original high resolution music files, unless the originals have suffered badly from greatly excessive compression, and they also  took the opportunity to remaster the file when making the MQA release.

 

 

Alex, a lot of people say that MQA makes their rigs sound better - I would suggest there are multiple factors at work here; there won't be just one clearcut reason for why they hear the benefit.

[fas42]

14 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 

Sometimes this may be achieved by the simple expediency of slightly increasing upper HF response to give a   little added " focus".

 This also applies to Video such as .mp4 where the bit rate used for encoding is a little too low.

 

IME when a rig "snaps into focus", the actual FR of the playback chain doesn't matter. This won't 'work' for everyone, I'm sure of that - but I have experimented with this area multiple times, on multiple setups; and it's consistent for me: the better the playback integrity, the less the measurable FR is relevant, subjectively.

 

Why this occurs appears to be because of that mighty DSP engine inside one's skull - if the sound meets the right standards in other areas, then the brain does all the filtering to adjust the characteristics to meet one's expectations - it just "sounds right"; irrespective of what an instrumentation microphone tells one in the analytical sense.

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

 

l'opinion , not l'avis. 

 

Yep, I know exactly what I mean.  Just as your funny post is your opinion.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, Paul R said:

l'opinion , not l'avis. 

 

Yep, I know exactly what I mean.  Just as your funny post is your opinion.

 

[Rt66indierock]

2 hours ago, fas42 said:

 

As a side note ... the goal is all important - "whatever it takes!" is the mantra. Sometimes, you find taking one step back allows two or more steps forward - later in the journey one can finesse, refine every aspect of the system, to fully optimise and make 'perfect' every part - when one fully understands.

 

This has nothing to do with saying that MQA is part of a solution to something - just, that one may need to 'compromise', or do something silly to make the bigger picture happen, at that moment.

 

I've heard similar things on golf sites for years. This is my response.

 

[asdf1000]

@The Computer Audiophile an interesting chat here with Roon's Rob Darling...

 

Listen from 45mins... he says all the streaming services will have a high quality streaming tier and "it will end up being up being MQA..."

 

https://www.audiostream.com/content/rob-darling-roon-labs-audiostream-podcast-no6

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

4 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

@The Computer Audiophile an interesting chat here with Roon's Rob Darling...

 

Listen from 45mins... he says all the streaming services will have a high quality streaming tier and "it will end up being up being MQA..."

 

https://www.audiostream.com/content/rob-darling-roon-labs-audiostream-podcast-no6

 

 

It could happen. The labels own the content. If they want us to have MQA, we’ll have MQA. 

[Ralf11]

8 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Actually I do.  I have been building predictive models since 1996 and I have won two competitions for machine learning applications, one with gated neural networks and one with cluster weighted modeling from MIT.  It's literally my job but now I have the luxury of leading data engineers and data scientists and finding more problems to solve.

 

What journal was your research on gated neural networks published in? 

I'd like to get the citation and read about it.  Thank you.

[Ralf11]

If they want us to have MQA, we’ll have used CDs.

[sandyk]

29 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

IME when a rig "snaps into focus", the actual FR of the playback chain doesn't matter. This won't 'work' for everyone, I'm sure of that - but I have experimented with this area multiple times, on multiple setups; and it's consistent for me: the better the playback integrity, the less the measurable FR is relevant, subjectively.

 

Why this occurs appears to be because of that mighty DSP engine inside one's skull - if the sound meets the right standards in other areas, then the brain does all the filtering to adjust the characteristics to meet one's expectations - it just "sounds right"; irrespective of what an instrumentation microphone tells one in the analytical sense.

 Frank

 What you have just said has absolutely nothing to with what I am talking about ,and is irrelevant in this thread..

Alex

[asdf1000]

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

It could happen. The labels own the content. If they want us to have MQA, we’ll have MQA. 

 

Sure we know that, but the way he says it with such certainty:  "it will end up being MQA..."... given his studios and record labels contacts (discussed earlier in the podcast)...

 

Then again, @Rt66indierock is still hatching a master plan to galvanise the youth on buying HiRes.

 

Will be interesting to see where this all is, 3 years from now.

 

Disclaimer: I would love MQA to go away..

[sandyk]

44 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Alex, a lot of people say that MQA makes their rigs sound better -

 

 There seems to be very little of this evident in MQA subjective tests and discussions in this forum !!!

[Hugo9000]

Isn't Roon a spin-off from Meridian like MQA?  (Too lazy to look it up, sorry! haha!)

[Paul R]

3 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

 

Will be interesting to see where this all is, 3 years from now.

 

Never a truer word spoken written!

 

[asdf1000]

5 minutes ago, Hugo9000 said:

Isn't Roon a spin-off from Meridian like MQA?  (Too lazy to look it up, sorry! haha!)

 

Not a spin-off but it doesn't matter. Here is Roon's COO commenting about MQA:

 

"if MQA dominates the world of hi-res, then the fear is spot-on. A world in which all content higher resolution than 44.1/16 is encoded in MQA is bad for the future of audio. No company should have power like that."

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/mqa-and-digital-rights-management/63220/3

[Rt66indierock]

21 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

 

Sure we know that, but the way he says it with such certainty:  "it will end up being up being MQA..."... given his studios and record labels contacts (discussed earlier in the podcast)...

 

Then again, @Rt66indierock is still hatching a master plan to galvanise the youth on buying HiRes.

 

Will be interesting to see where this all ends up 3 years from now.

 

Not me I told representatives from Warner, Universal, Sony and the DEG that you will find high resolution audio is a very hard sell.  Talk all you want the only people interested in high resolution audio are people selling it and the audio press.

 

A market for high resolution streaming does not exist today. And there isn't a market for streaming CD quality either.  

[Racerxnet]

38 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Weaknesses have different levels of subjective significance, and it varies per individual. First CD players came out, and person A said, "Thank God I can't hear pops and crackles!"; person B say, "It's terrible what that playback is doing to the treble - give me back my LP TT!".

 

The software world deals in this all the time - a bug may be so severe that it completely cripples the usefulness of the program for some people; another bug may be very subtle, but everybody comes across it now and again - which weakness is the "more important one"?

 

The real world is never "perfect" - everything we use is compromised in some areas, but we get used to the downsides, and they "become invisible" - "character" is the great word to use here ... .

 

The reality is that we all dance on beds of weaknesses - being aware of such can help to lower the level of vitriole; it ain't a Black and White world, even though many would love it to be so.

 

 

 

You want to fix your weaknesses? Fix your room with treatments. You don’t like the sound of the overall system, fix it with new speakers that meet your preferences for sound quality. Run REW and look at the room response.  Provide adequate amplification that meets the demand of room size, speakers impeadance, and of course, the choice of SS or valves.. Those very few things have the most impact on the overall sound of any system. Preferences of vinyl or CD are irrelevant to room response. I’m not saying that other items do not make a difference, but that those few things listed are always going to have the greatest impact of sonic changes to the “system”. Go ahead and add maple blocks, tuning sound with cables, etc. I’ll take my dedicated room with the ideas as above and can skip tweak nirvana. 

 

Stick to the proven basics and people will usually get much further

 

MAK

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, Hugo9000 said:

Isn't Roon a spin-off from Meridian like MQA?  (Too lazy to look it up, sorry! haha!)

The Roon founders were previously at Meridian.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

The Roon founders were previously at Meridian.

The Roon founders were previously previously at Sooloos that was purchased by Meridian. 

[fas42]

 

7 minutes ago, sandyk said:

 Frank

 What you have just said has absolutely nothing to with what I am talking about ,and is irrelevant in this thread..

Alex

 

Alex, you said, " slightly increasing upper HF response to give a   little added " focus". This implies that fiddling with FR 'improves' the sound - IME, this is not the approach that gives the results I'm after - whether MQA does this in some fashion, altering aspects of FR, is another matter, yes.

[fas42]

Just now, Racerxnet said:

 

You want to fix your weaknesses? Fix your room with treatments. You don’t like the sound of the overall system, fix it with new speakers that meet your preferences for sound quality. Run REW and look at the room response.  Provide adequate amplification that meets the demand of room size, speakers impeadance, and of course, the choice of SS or valves.. Those very few things have the most impact on the overall sound of any system. Preferences of vinyl or CD are irrelevant to room response. I’m not saying that other items do not make a difference, but that those few things listed are always going to have the greatest impact of sonic changes to the “system”. Go ahead and add maple blocks, tuning sound with cables, etc. I’ll take my dedicated room with the ideas as above and can skip tweak nirvana. 

 

Stick to the proven basics and people will usually get much further

 

MAK

 

What I do is identify weaknesses in the sound - by listening to what comes out of the speakers - up close and personal! And silly shortcomings in the implementation of components, and how they are connected together, and the robustness in the face of electrical noise is a huge part of what offends, here.

 

MQA attempts to "nicefy" the sound using various techniques on the source material - not a smart move; akin to how they used perfume in the old days to disguise the fact that they hadn't had a bath  ... intelligent tweaking thoroughly scrubs the playback chain clean of smelly stuff - it one does this several times, then one realises that this subtle degradation of SQ is part and parcel of nearly all rigs - including my own if I haven't gone the yards - and that hearing the recording in its pristine state makes all the difference.

 

While people remain intent on perfuming the sound they hear - which is also done by MQA - they will remain distant from the true nature of the recordings they possess ... which is a shame.

[Sonicularity]

39 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

The Roon founders were previously previously at Sooloos that was purchased by Meridian. 

 

I don't think @crenca will allow Roon to get away with any bias toward MQA when both Tidal and Qobuz subscriptions are enabled.  Roon has already admitted to a problem that they are working on to resolve that favors MQA in some instances where there is no reason to consider that format to be superior in quality.