MQA is Vaporware

[Currawong]

 

22 hours ago, OldHardwareTech said:

According to Audirvana it's receiving the file at 24/192, I noticed it because it usually shows receiving at 24/48 or 16/44. Regardless of the input format it decodes almost everything to 24/96 but it decodes some things at 24/88, The Styx album The Mission is an example of 24/88.

 

The original file, on Qobuz, will be 24/192. What happens on TIDAL is that the file is down-sampled (in effect) to 24/94, then "folded" using the MQA scheme, after some form of usually automated DSP processing (which, to me, sounds like the effects of a 3D plug-in, depending on the music type). However, the file is reported as being 24/192 by TIDAL, even though it is no longer. Depending on the DAC you use, it or Audirvana does the "first unfold" back to 24/96, then, if your DAC can "render" MQA, it up-samples it back to 24/192 using a form of minimum phase filter. 

[Currawong]

On 8/21/2021 at 11:40 PM, John_Atkinson said:

I thought it obvious that my comments were based on the sound quality of the demonstrations I experienced, and my views haven't changed as result of the further comparisons that I have performed. I recently arranged a blind comparison of one of my own recordings in original 24/88.2k form and the MQA-encoded version for a visiting engineer. His preference for the MQA version was the same as I had originally reported in 2016: that there was less ambiguity in the spatial relationships between the performers and the surrounding acoustic with the MQA version (See https://www.stereophile.com/content/listening-mqa.)

 

John, recently I've had the opportunity to spend some time with a Chord DAVE and MScaler, a set-up that, if I recall correctly, you've experienced as well. What was apparent to me was that the effect of the MScaler was the opposite of what I had expected in that, instead of the instruments becoming more separate and individual in the acoustic space, you ended up with more of a sense of the actual space and how the sounds of instruments bounce off their surroundings, including the other instruments!

 

I have observed, like you, that MQA'ed versions of classical music tended to lower the amount of noise and bring clarity to the individual instruments. However, unlike you, I realise that this is actually unnatural and does not represent the reality of the acoustics of the venue. If anything, this processing -- a kind of sharpening of the acoustic image -- can seem impressive at first, but is no more real than applying sharpening to an actual image -- it more so alters it to be more like what you imagine is, or was, there.

 

However, the main issue with MQA processing is not so much what you, and other audio writers experienced when MQA was demonstrated to you, but how it compares to what is going on with the batch processing at TIDAL. How do you know that the average TIDAL user who listens to an MQA-processed album, is experiencing the same processing as you had done to the files you offered MQA?  The answer is: You don't.  In fact, it is clear from listening to a variety of processed music that the effect applied to different albums can change radically, and not for the better.

 

What is more, your "birth of a new world" comment has issue in that not only is the processing that MQA is doing to music likely to be nothing a great deal more than some clever DSP work (for which, there is no issue if declared as such) but the technical aspects they have claimed at various stages have are any of a: impossible, b: contradict other claims, or c: flat out untrue.  Is this "new world" one where the truth is whatever one imagines it to be, regardless of the reality?

[Currawong]

 

On 8/25/2021 at 4:38 PM, fas42 said:

 

Have a read of this article, https://www.stereophile.com/content/listening-mqa ... from there,

 

 

This improvement in the listening experience is exactly what is obtained when - without changing whatsoever the nature of the recording, or the normal technical capabilities of the equipment - the integrity of the playback chain is increased.  IOW, the MQA processing is moderating the tendency of below optimum replay to provoke more subjectively disturbing anomalies, in at least some types of recordings - the subjective perception of distortion in the sound is reduced. Won't happen for all setups - which is why some listeners say it makes the SQ worse ... any workaround which tries to compensate for a deficiency somewhere usually ends up making some users happy; and annoys others - because it's not actually correcting the root causes.

 

Bold emphasis mine, but I observed that it seems to be DSP processing for the sake of enhancing instrument notes while sacrificing low-level atmospheric sounds. Depending on the music, it's rather like a kind of compression. This isn't bad for The Beatles, but screws up concert-hall classical. The atmosphere is part of the music, after all.

 

On 8/26/2021 at 7:29 AM, John_Atkinson said:

 

I know you are "cracking wise" but dCS has always offered a very short antialiaslng fliter on its A/D converters to reduce the otherwise inevitable sinc-function ringing on transients. And the late Charley Hansen of Ayre was also concerned about optimizing time-domain behavior. He used a "moving averages" filter for the Ayre QA-9 A/D converter that I found produced a perfect impulse response, at the expense of allowing some low-level aliasing energy. At a sample rate of 192kHz this was inconsequential.

 

 

Musical transients don't "ring" unless there is out-of-band frequencies that haven't been filtered out, which means the filter is leaky or insufficient in some other respect. As well "perfect impulse response" (assuming here you're talking about a single-sample pulse) is useless, as it doesn't exist in music. If it were, we'd all be listening with NOS DACs, and we know that they have horrendous distortion (even if they are enjoyable to listen with). I'm confused why you seem to have this backwards, still. More aliasing on an impulse response (a single-sample signal, so clearly out-of-band) = the filter is doing its job better and will do a better job with in-band frequencies.

 

If I'm wrong on this, I'm happy to be corrected, but I can clearly hear the mutilation of the musical image between speakers when short filters are used. They push the instruments forward, towards the listener, which can be enjoyable, but the soundstage is not at all real.

 

On 8/26/2021 at 10:11 PM, John_Atkinson said:

I wanted to borrow an A/D converter fitted with the MQA encoder in order to examine its behavior in the time domain, as I had done for Charley Hansen's transient-perfect antialiasing filter. However, in order to be able to do so I would have been required to sign an NDA, which would have defeated the purpose.

 

I'm sure with your connections you could borrow one from someone whom already owns one. 

 

On 8/27/2021 at 2:04 AM, labjr said:

Meanwhile, Chinese companies are churning out $100 DACs that measure better than virtually everything ever reviewed by the major publications. But apparently there's no interest in revewing them to see if they sound better. Or maybe they have listened and can't reveal the truth?

 

They also churn out headphone amps the same, which may be fine with a 1kHz sine wave, but as soon as you plug a headphone load with varying impedance in to them, the distortion goes shooting up. 

 

On 8/27/2021 at 10:25 AM, Archimago said:

Yeah, IMO if you don't care about brand name, luxury and not too worried about service, focusing only on sound quality, then the Chinese DACs even at <$200 will easily satisfy. Don't waste money on the mQa Tax of course. 

 

Other than features, there's not much to differentiate DAC sound these days anyway. 

 

I had a Chord DAVE here for a month, after which, those "$200 will easily satisfy" DACs, as well as quite a bit more decent ones, sounded like mud. So, maybe not in the low-end of things so much, or even around the $400-700 mark, but after spending some time with considerably better gear, even if I haven't listened to music for a few days, I can still clearly notice I'm not getting the level of reproduction with the cheaper gear. I can't un-hear it now. 

 

On 8/27/2021 at 5:50 PM, firedog said:

But Charley also didn't like the sound. Note the early praise by several reviewers of the MQA version of  The Doors' "Riders on the Storm (M. Lavorgna and others). Charlie specifically pointed out that what they were describing as sounding superior was actually a version that hid some of the detail available in non-MQA listening. That came across to them as somehow better. 

 

More of the same as what I said in my first reply above. Thanks for finding that. It's rather the audio equivalent of the "unsharp mask" filter in Photoshop which enhances the edges of things in photos.

[Currawong]

13 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

Other than the reduced need to keep streamed file sizes small, I haven't seen or read anything on this site or others that leads me to change my mind about the format's technical elegance.

 

On the commercial aspects of MQA, which are monopolistic, I commissioned and published an article on this in early 2018: https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-benefits-and-costs

 

Yet you've ignored the mountain of other information presented about false claims, technical aspects that contradict each other and the issues that have come up with batch processing, which likely isn't the same as what was done to your files.   Have you even forgotten how you proved yourself that the output of an MQA DAC is distorted? Do you consider that to be "technically elegant"?

[Currawong]

15 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

I still think how MQA works is indeed elegant. It recognizes that with real-world music, the spectral energy falls off with increasing frequency and that the recording's analog noisefloor is higher than the 24-bit floor. (With my choral recordings, which have very low acoustic and electronic noise - see attached room tone spectrum -  the noisefloor can be accurately encoded with an 18-bit word length.) The former means that the energy above 1Fs can be quantized with a small number of bits and the latter means that those ultrasonic data can be encrypted to resemble pseudo-random noise and buried in a hidden data channel in bits 19-24 beneath the analog noisefloor. There is a slight noise penalty but it is a fraction of a dB. And as noise is noise, you can't detect the buried data channel by ear.

 

This buried data technique is called steganography and is widely used in telecommunications and video technology - however, because the bottom bits now contain information, the data's entropy is higher and FLAC can't compress an MQA-encoded file as much as it can a straight 24-bit audio file.

 

As Jon Iverson wrote in the article I referred to in my earlier posting, MQA offers benefits to both the record industry and the consumer. The former is no longer allowing free access to its unencrypted masters; the latter gets an improvement in sound quality. (The saving in bandwidth is no longer relevant, except for people who don't have unlimited data plans and want to stream hi-rez audio to their phones.) The benefit to the consumer is the "deblurring" that I discussed in a 2018 article: www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion. The post-Shannon sampling - see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/843002 - allows the ADC/DAC chain to be optimized to preserve transient information. Again, this is not new; Post-Shannon sampling is used in video when you don't want image edges to be burred, as in cartoons and anime.

 

The price to be paid for the deblurring is the introduction of a small amount of aliased image energy. When you consider the spectral distribution of real-word music, this aliased energy will lie below the recording's original noisefloor and is therefore inconsequential.

 

Unlike Apple/Dolby Atmos, MQA has not done a good job of selling the benefit to the consumer, which is why everyone complains about losing open access. (Audio has been the only medium where there haven't been proprietary closed formats - no-one complains about Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Atmos, DVD, Blu-ray etc, etc, where there are large license fees involved for manufacturers wanting to offer those formats.)

 

1. Even if your recordings can be MQA encoded because of the noise floor, recordings such as those done by 2L cannot, as they have a large amount of SD noise above ~50kHz. This is the case with many SD ADCs, as Dan Lavry pointed out what must be a decade or more ago. So, what you write is mostly moot for the majority of recorded music.

 

Even so, if, as you say, 18 bits is enough to encode even your recording, then, as Archimago showed, you could just encoding music as 18/176.2 and you wouldn't need MQA at all to get the now-admitted useless bandwidth savings. The 3D-ish effect applied (to more recent titles) can by done inside headphones these days.

2. That MQA can't be compressed as much as a regular music file into a FLAC container is one of the reasons that MQA's claims about smaller-size high-res files is false, wouldn't you agree? That, along with the fact that the original reported resolution is false, for reasons in #1 above.

 

3. Maybe you felt that there was a sound improvement with your files, but as I've pointed out time and time again, and you've ignored, the batch processing of older music clearly degrades the sound quality. FFS please go and listen to Miles Davis Doo Bop and hear how the bass has been bloated and the resolution reduced. It's shockingly bad. Other classics such as Getz & Gilberto are just as bad.  

 

4. I don't know where to begin with "deblurring", but at this stage you're no different to someone telling me that the Earth is flat, given all the technical and other analysis done that shows that it's a load of BS.

 

5. You can't sell a benefit when there isn't any. Heck, to make it worse, a lot of the music is watermarked, so it has been corrupted regardless.  Now that would be a good complaint to file against TIDAL in the countries it is active in, that they can't claim their music is lossless, as the watermarks applied to a lot of it renders it otherwise.

 

Lastly, what JA said about the original music in his latest article, but switch Apple Music for MQA. 

[Currawong]

5 hours ago, Fast and Bulbous said:

Well, well well... Never thought I would see this...

 

What HiFi - UK magazine that has been very positive about MQA, some would say suspiciously so, has just published an article about tech that is likely to become obsolete. Includes BluRay, CD, wired IEMs, music downloads. 

And..

MQA. Yep, really. Good news as far as I am concerned. May give others in the audio / music press the courage to tell it like it is. Well, you never know...

 

Here is the (very long) URL:

 

https://www.whathifi.com/features/the-tech-endangered-list-are-these-devices-and-formats-the-next-to-go?utm_source=SmartBrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=E632F623-34B1-4EBE-B56C-3D5896DC5E2A&utm_content=F859157B-285F-47A8-BD65-02C2F2721B68&utm_term=c4187c4a-d498-48ef-ae6a-f2d854d1917c

 

Oh, I don't subscribe to What HiFi - I just get emails from them. Honest. No, really. 

 

How to remove the tracking crap from URLs:

 

Basically, everything separated by a "/" is part of a url. It used to refer to physical directory structure on a web server, but is generated virtually now, for the most part. After that, if data info is included in a url, it is indicated by a "?" and variables chained together with "&". So, the actual url is: 

https://www.whathifi.com/features/the-tech-endangered-list-are-these-devices-and-formats-the-next-to-go and everything else is just stuff showing that it came from an email campaign and the details so the site can see how effective their email lists are.

[Currawong]

On 9/8/2021 at 12:31 AM, UkPhil said:

All eyes on China, more from Bob on 9/9/21 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/music-ally-china-digital-summit-in-association-with-mqa-tickets-165239073517?fbclid=IwAR0KY-vDTzzXHrD_0x4AX9nPoZjxAYSAZGb37rmTFtE3AMqpUrwWxnfjYHk

Grab a pot of your best coffee 😁

 

 

Sorry for the double post, but a followup:

 

Likewise, the above URL came from facebook, and you can see the ?fbclid part which is the facebook tracking id. If you remove that and everything after it, the URL will still work and wont pass on FB tracking data.

 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/music-ally-china-digital-summit-in-association-with-mqa-tickets-165239073517

[Currawong]

On 10/23/2021 at 7:59 AM, MikeyFresh said:

My only real question there was why is The Wall at 24/96, when it seems the rest of the catalog was done at 24/192, and I'm not hearing that those are clearly just upsampled. Even if they were upsampled, the question would then be why they didn't also offer The Wall at an upsampled 24/192 as well.

It's somewhat of a moot point, as anything off tapes isn't going to have any meaningful high-res content, and regardless, many, if not most ADCs output a lot of noise above 48 khz, ie: the 96 kHz file limit. 

On 11/3/2021 at 7:55 AM, Archimago said:

 

Yeah, for sure, just reading how Veth responds in threads like this from earlier this year:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/comparison-of-pcm-and-mqa/149787/269

 

indicates this guy must be a company salesman. I mean, seriously, the way he talks about mQa and pulls out links to company papers, and speaks as if he's authoritatively in-the-know about the "3 folds and unfolds" I find hard to imagine to be comments coming out of the mouth of an independent audiophile!

 

Of course, he might just be highly delusional, but even delusional people are more believable ;-).

 

I'm thinking being an mQa salesman must be a rather lonely, meaningless, soul-destroying job these days. At least one can listen to music and watch videos "on the job", which is nice...

 

A quick search of LinkedIn shows that he is indeed, a sales manager.

[Currawong]

The benefit of high-res was that it reduced the often poor filtering built into many newer sigma-delta-based DACs. Since they seem to have improved quite a bit, the benefits of greater than 24/48 or 24/96 is null IMO, especially as many ADCs just generate noise above 48 kHz. Dan Lavry pointed this out I believe over a decade ago.

[Currawong]

23 hours ago, ARQuint said:

 Engineers who have anything good to say about MQA are either unqualified or shameless shills

 

Engineers (recording and mastering, rather than real engineers) who have anything good to say about it were given music that had had the "white glove" treatment, so don't realise that the majority of MQA music has been batch-processed and a lot of it, as a result, sounds noticeably worse than before. Neil Young figured that out pretty quick.

 

20 hours ago, ARQuint said:

 

But the What Hi-Fi? award is to TIDAL, not to MQA. MQA Ldt touts TIDAL in their promotional material (as expected, as no other streaming service has taken them on.) What I see is that What Hi-Fi? is considered in the thread as worthy of scorn because they like TIDAL, and TIDAL is worthy of scorn because they offer MQA. It's all so tribal...

 

Andy

 

 

The award was given because, to quote the article, "Tidal's expansive, accessible and hi-res-inclusive catalogue remains the best option for streaming-savvy audiophiles." That mentions a "hi-res-inclusive catalog" which is based on MQA, which is, arguably, not really high-res as most people understand the term.

 

However, in your effort to jump on the criticism of the review, you completely ignored a valid counterpoint, which is that other reviews of the 2021 award winners are written by "What Hi-Fi" and don't have an author name.

[Currawong]

1 hour ago, Archimago said:

As for mQa and time domain, maybe they can just show us what a square wave looks like comparing say an original 10kHz 24/352.8 and that same waveform having gone through the mQa meat processor down to a 24/44.1 file, then reconstituted back up to 352.8kHz using one of their filters. I can simulate this, but would much prefer to see the "real deal". Let's just say this ain't likely gonna be exactly the same. ;-)

A square wave is an out-of-band signal, so it's not a good example.  The ADC 2L uses is useless for encoding frequencies above 48 kHz as it outputs only noise. So, any of their music encoded above 96k is a waste of space.

[Currawong]

On 12/23/2021 at 1:23 PM, Archimago said:

 

Curious @Currawong, what ADC is 2L using!? Obviously many mics will not have much hi-res bandwidth, but the ADC itself limited to 48kHz capture while running at 352.8?

 

The square wave idea is just as a response to Veth's assertion that it's "technically impossible to measure time smear".

http://www.lindberg.no/english/recording.htm

 

If you look at any of the plots of anything recorded by 2L, you'll see the noise rising above 48 khz. Basically, that is sigma delta noise from the ADC. Even if there was any musical info there, assuming that the mikes used can pick up something to begin with, it has been drowned out by that noise.  

 

It's another reason that there's no 2nd or 3rd unfold other than up-sampling: There's nothing to unfold except noise generated by the ADC.

 

The only benefit, IMO, to high sample rates is bypassing the filters in a DAC to varying degrees, to push the transition band thoroughly out of audible range.

[Currawong]

On 1/4/2022 at 5:24 AM, Revelation said:

I got Qobuz going on my NAD preamp and Focal Aria speakers. I found some songs sound better than Tidal,  Tidal sounding better Qobuz and some sound too similar to say which one is better.

 

1. The Beatles remixed Let it Be album. Get Back sound great on both. 

2. Rolling Stones Tatto you: Start me Up. Tidal sounded better. There was a slight edge on the snare drum on Qobuz. 

3. Donald Fagen Nightfly IGY. Tidal is warmer and louder. The CD is closer to Qobuz which sounds better than Tidal.

4. Rolling Stones.  A rock and a hard place. Qobuz is a very clean and slightly edgy. Tidal sounds better...though very similar, it just does not have that edge. 

5. The Eagles Hotel California from Hell Freezes over. I hear that same crystal slightly hard edge on Qobuz that I heard on A rock and a hard place. Tidal is slightly more easy on your ears.

 

I know converters and it sounds like Qobuz are using Mytek converters which have a very open detailed sound but slightly edgy on the top end.

 

Since the Beatles seem to have been MQA'd by hand, the sound is pretty good. Much of the modern pop I've heard sounds like it has been run through a 3D plug-in of sorts, making it sound more spacious. This is not such a bad thing -- I have the Audeze Mobius, and, even though their sound quality is OK normally, when you enable 3D mode, listening is much nicer. They are great for watching Youtube videos, but that's another discussion. 

 

But, my point is, if MQA had just simply offered to process new pop and the like albums, without all the marketing nonsense, I don't think there would have either been an issue with the quality of the result, nor the process. 

 

Where there definitely IS a problem comes when you listen to older music mastered onto tape. Take Miles Davis and the like -- it has had the bass boosted and the sound quality is distinctly degraded.  Classical, likewise, has been passed through some kind of noise reduction, and the atmospheric cues that our brain uses to interpret the space have been removed, so it sounds unnatural. 

 

I'm starting to believe that MQA is just another Theranos, and that, excepting the folding, their secret source is just a bunch of existing plug-ins. In other words the whole nonsense about b-splines and time domain stuff is just a smokescreen for some fancy mastering using existing software.

[Currawong]

On 4/27/2022 at 8:10 PM, Iving said:

Here JBara appeals surreptitiously to Gen-Z. Of course it's demand-hype in disguise. I don't like it. It's creepy. I don't believe mQa should be allowed to use hashtag. #Earth Day.

 

Since the reason we have fast internet is the result of the desire for p0rnography, which has long chewed up gigantic amounts of bandwidth, if he actually cared about the environment, he's is, by very far, targeting the wrong thing. 

[Currawong]

12 hours ago, tmtomh said:

if someone makes a subjective listening claim outside the objective-fi forum, I am free to comment on their claim, but I am not permitted to make an objectivist comment on their claim. So as a practical matter I am barred from participating in that discussion because forum rules do not permit me to write what I really think or believe in that thread

 

Bold emphasis mine. This really exemplifies the problem with a lot of militant objectivism in the audio forums online: It's really a subjective preference for some kind, even misleading science to be attached to audio discussion, so that people can satisfy a religious attitude towards science.

 

12 hours ago, tmtomh said:

As part of this, I was struck by the petty way Chris chose to treat another audio site whose culture and purpose are objectivist and science-based: the way he mocked its name, and if memory serves the way this forum set up some kind of auto-barrier to correctly displaying the name of that site or perhaps to linking to content there (apologies - I can't recall the details and I don't look in here often, so I am happy to be corrected if I am misstating the details of this particular bit or if something has changed in that regard).

 

It'd be fine if the other site practiced noteworthy science. But when the owner equates things such as a thermal stability requirement for a piece of audio gear to heating it up with a heat gun before measuring it, evaluates speakers by only listening to one (not the stereo pair) and any criticism of his methodologies result in a ban, it thoroughly deserves its alternate names.

 

With regards to this thread (and the other MQA threads) indeed speculation about peoples' motives and other nonsense considerably degraded discussion here. If I hadn't bookmarked a couple of handfuls of actually useful posts, buried in the near thousand pages, they'd be lost to me, and other people with whom I shared the links, who made good use of the content.

 

It's worth noting how people who claim objectivity can often lose it quickly and become abusive when their beliefs are confronted. Of course, that means that their "objectives" are only to reinforce beliefs. Compare that to science, the purpose of which is to discover and understand.

[Currawong]

On 5/15/2022 at 4:04 PM, Archimago said:

I heard a rumor that there may be a non-mQa version of the Topping D90SE (D90LE?) coming with otherwise similar specs... Will be interesting if we see this happen (ie. dumping licensing of mQa)  as manufacturers need to compete and keep costs down.

 

It already existed before the MQA version -- the regular D90.

 

On 5/1/2022 at 1:04 AM, pkane2001 said:

 

Just because ASR has some bad practices, doesn't make AS treatment of objectivists any more fair.

 

People love to have someone to attack, and here, it seems the site-approved target is ASR/Amir, with all the objectivists somehow loped into the same group of intolerant, antisocial, religious zealots who love to belittle and berate others. MQA is the backup target, when there are no objectivists around to attack :)

 

If Amir actually did good science, he wouldn't end up copping the abuse he does.  That's all it is. If there's a problem with audio "objectivism" it is all the loud, antisocial, religious zealots who ruin things. These people are not pro-science, they are just behaving like religious fanatics and don't genuinely have any understanding of what science is, assuming it is some arbiter of truth.   Some of that mindset infected this, and the other MQA threads, and, like I've said before, made it hard to find the actual, useful information. They ruined things for the people who actually had something usefully critical of MQA.

[Currawong]

On 5/27/2022 at 6:51 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

I’d say mQa is on its last legs. Its presence at the show was nearly meaningless. The company had a meeting room to discuss licensing with manufacturers. I was told by a manufacturer they needed to check the mQa box for some reason. They hated the technology. I armed her/him with some data going into the discussion by telling her/him some manufacturers paid absolutely nothing for mQa while others paid around $5. 

 

Talking to a manufacturer in Asia, there is a big fan base of it, and they gain sales of products that have MQA. They said that people like it because it sounds different.

[Currawong]

On 6/2/2022 at 12:07 AM, Archimago said:

 

Interesting... In Asia where are they getting mQa encoded content? Is it TIDAL (or other site) streaming or are we still talking about MQA-CDs?

 

 

On 6/2/2022 at 8:02 AM, Rt66indierock said:

 

Must be MQA CDs since Tidal is only available in Hong Kong and Singapore.  The total number of people who can stream MQA is so small it is hard to compute.

Most of the portable audiophiles are in HK and SG, so TIDAL I guess. I don't think the younger generation would bother with CDs. Also, the country restrictions certainly haven't stopped people signing up for TIDAL outside its official markets.

[Currawong]

I do wish that they'd started up MQA in Australia to begin with. They would have had their collective asses handed to them on a platter by various government agencies by now.

[Currawong]

On 6/10/2022 at 11:20 PM, Archimago said:

A conservative difference of less than 4.7TB streamed according to them = 5 return flights London/Berlin = 9 car journeys London/Manchester = 19 trees planted?

 

I easy stream terabytes of data throughout the year. If this were even remotely true, I would have been bankrupted by the electricity bill by now. 

[Currawong]

On 7/5/2022 at 5:14 PM, firedog said:

The simplest, most direct ways:

1)Tidal folds. It is still a tiny player, so it could fold or be taken over by a company not interested in MQA. 

2) Tidal sees that it's premium MQA tier isn't really making a financial difference for them and drops MQA for regular hi-res.

 

99% of MQA listening is via Tidal. No Tidal, no basis for MQA to exist. Without Tidal audio manufacturers will stop producing MQA playback HW/SW.

Isn't TIDAL now owned by Stripe?  They are fairly screwed now they've lost their Redbook originals on a lot of music. 

 

I speculate what may be sustaining MQA is that it's a big deal in Asia still. 

 

Probably the best thing that can be done now is to suppose Qobuz.  I heard rumours of their getting a "Qobuz Connect" happening, which, if so, will make them more appealing to a lot of manufacturers.

[Currawong]

On 7/10/2022 at 8:02 AM, Rt66indierock said:

I’d love hear how Bob raised the money necessary to keep MQA Ltd and Meridian Audio afloat.

I'd love to hear what Bob keeps telling the investors that they keep giving him money.

[Currawong]

I'd try and contact him and ask. 

 

If MQA was the source, then, if you bought both the MQA version and the 192, they would near bit-perfect, or at least have similar spectrums, as all the MQA processing would still be visible in the 192, such as a lack of anything above 48 kHz.

[Currawong]

On 9/11/2022 at 11:16 PM, skraggy said:

Apple and Amazon aren't known to give away money, I don't see them jumping on the MQA train and who's going to pressure these giants?

Apple has gone down the spacial audio route. Guess who is behind that? Dolby! I think someone from Dolby was on the mQa board at one stage too. Dolby are much better at getting their tech out as a "standard". Remember when every hi-fi cassette deck required a Dolby button on it?

On 8/31/2022 at 6:30 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

That has always blown my mind. People actually believe you can make something better than the original. 

It's worth considering that all music is mastered -- at least hand-processed, and the actual "original" music may not sound so great, unless it is recorded very carefully such that it doesn't need post-processing, supposedly like some DSD albums are. Also, as I understand things, there may be a number of different album masters for, say, CD, radio, and other formats, though I don't know if this is true with albums now. As for MQA, the "white glove" MQA seems to be good, such as the Beatles. If all else is removed, whoever is doing their white glove mastering I would say is very capable. If MQA were only selling their white glove mastering skills, it might have some worth.

[Currawong]

And so it goes...