MQA is Vaporware

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8 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

  He was using the forum like a tagger uses an urban wall.

 

 

Oh beautiful way to put it.  It describes what happened so very well. 

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2 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

If you volume match I agree with you and said so. If you don't remember how to fool John Darko (and others) earlier this year. You do it with different masters and the MQA version of The Nightfly is louder so he would would prefer it.

snip.....

 

 

The old louder file trick.  You would think eventually everyone could learn the importance of precise volume matching when comparing things.  It has to be step #1 when comparing things.  Without volume matching you have close to zero useful information.  Very close to zero.  This is true whether one is doing blind or sighted comparisons.  Even sighted many things you thought different suddenly vanish once volume is matched.  

 

Match Those Volumes when comparing. 

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1 hour ago, Don Hills said:

 

The tl;dr summary: "Ringing" happens when the filter has to cut off energy at or above its cutoff frequency.  Good luck trying to find a musical instrument that produces any significant energy above 96 KHz, and even more luck finding a microphone capable of recording it.

 

 

 

Yes excellent post. 

 

Only one thing to add to the above. 

 

Yet even more luck finding a human who can hear 96 khz ringing.  

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It is possible encryption and decryption could have been used to supply the data needed for subtractive dither.  It isn't the only solution.  Of course it appears from what others have found that subtractive dither was just a ruse, and isn't part of MQA.  Like deblurring, sparse sampling, end to end provenance the artist signs off on, and correction of deficiencies in the original recording ADC retroactively.   Subtractive dither can go on that list. 

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4 hours ago, Tony Lauck said:

Subtractive dither is more than a ruse, however. Compared to TPDF dither, subtractive dither provides higher audio quality (removing all correlation between signal and dither noise and not just first and second order correlation). In addition compared to TPDF dither it provides an approximate 6 dB gain in S/N ratio or, equivalently, saves approximately one bit.

 

I found that subtractive dither used to convert 96/24 audio to 96/8 audio sounded musical, albeit noisy like an old 4 track 7.5 ips pre-recorded tape.  At 96/12 the noise was similar to that on high quality analog tape.  In this regard, there is a difference between a streaming codec and a recording codec.  That's because a non-repetitive noise pattern (the streaming case) is different from a repetitive nose pattern (the non-streaming case, especially where a brief sound clip is used that is shorter than aural short-term memory).  I did all of this work ten years ago at a time when I could still hear up to 15 kHz.  Since then all of this work is irrelevant, first to me as I now can barely hear 12 kHz, and generally because bits have become vastly cheaper in the past ten years.

I am aware of the benefits of subtractive dither.  The ruse is MQA claim of using it when they don't.

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23 minutes ago, mcgillroy said:

 

Could you explain sparse sampling? Thx!

NO!

 

 

Not being a jerk.  I believe others would do a better job than I can because I am not qualified.  Here is a short description:

 

The current methods used to convert analogue signals into discrete-time sequences have been deeply influenced by the classical Shannon–Whittaker–Kotelnikov sampling theorem. This approach restricts the class of signals that can be sampled and perfectly reconstructed to bandlimited signals. During the last few years, a new framework has emerged that overcomes these limitations and extends sampling theory to a broader class of signals named signals with finite rate of innovation (FRI). Instead of characterising a signal by its frequency content, FRI theory describes it in terms of the innovation parameters per unit of time. Bandlimited signals are thus a subset of this more general definition.

 

Here is a paper with authors that Stuart refers to regarding sparse sampling. 

 

https://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/130351/files/blu0801.pdf

 

And a slideshow by those people.

http://www.commsp.ee.ic.ac.uk/~pld/talks/ICMS09.pdf

 

Sparse sampling and compressed sensing.  Roughly the idea is you are able to reconstruct signals beyond the limitation of twice the sampling rate if the higher frequency signal doesn't change too rapidly (finite rate of innovation).  If I have this wrong someone correct me please. 

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52 minutes ago, opus101 said:

 

FWIW, my customer service experience with them wasn't particularly positive.

That makes two of us.  I believe Bill would make three. 

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1 hour ago, SlimPickins said:

Following this thread over the holidays has been pure entertainment.

 

Until I have a chance a to spend time listening to MQA, i will consider it equal parts audio snake oil and P.T. Barnum.

 

Thumbs up to Knickerhawk. 

He moved the thread further in one post than Samuel T. Cogley, Fair Hedon, Dr. Tone and kumakuma have in the last 20+ pages.

Between Star Trek and Dungeons & Dragons, I think you guys have most of the names covered.

Before reading this thread, I assumed most of the CA posters were grown men.

 

Unlike the keyboard warriors listed above, at least Lee has the stones to post under his real name and photo.

 

Maybe some of you guys should spend more time on the People magazine forums.

Drama, finger pointing and snitching carry more weight over there.

 

Carry on.  I have more popcorn in the kettle.

Is that you Mr. Shillingsworth?

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2 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

Part of the tax may get paid by mastering costs going down too.

And how does MQA reduce mastering costs?

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34 minutes ago, MetalNuts said:

I am surely not as persistent as he is, if I were him I would have given up longtime ago from the response of the members here and I should have realized that I do not have any substantial facts to back up the MQA claim save and except one's personal subjective feeling and the hearsay from those claiming to know MQA better.

I've spent many hours "doing my job" even when it was unpleasant.  That is what you are paid to do.  

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5 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

It's become a bit distracting jumping between forums on this subject, so I am posting mostly on Hoffman for now.

 

 

Yes a good place to post.  People who might post facts about MQA or real data contrary to the narrative will get banned.  So definitely a safe MQA haven. 

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3 minutes ago, Fair Hedon said:

He has gone crazy. He is literally tell one lie after another there now.  Complete fabrications. He must really be at end game.

That is the problem with Hoffman forums.  They allow, well let me rephrase it, they encourage that sort of thing.  They do not allow any facts to deter whatever fantasy they are on about.  The fantasy just needs to be positive. 

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3 hours ago, Thuaveta said:

For those who'd like a slightly lateral take on whether bandwidth savings matter to the experience of even mobile users going forward, there's an interesting piece on Qualcomm (the guys who make the radio chips in cellphones) right here. It's a bit starry-eyed, but contrast this to the utility claims MQA is making :

 

 

I remember hearing this about 4G LTE.  It took a decade to become semi-ubiquitous.  I don't think this will go any better.  Also, good 4G if supplied with enough signal is no slouch for bandwidth itself.   If the bandwidth is available by the provider you can get 100 mbps. And when it is the price of it in the USA makes it too expensive to use to its capacity.  So now we might get the bandwidth to blow an entire monthly data allowance in seconds.  Gee wonderful.  Unless pricing of that data plummets off a steep cliff it won't be used that way.  

 

I also note the super high frequencies are going to have trouble penetrating indoors.  In the USA which is different from some denser areas, the companies working on the lower frequency bands are the ones giving you the best service.  T-Mobile and Sprint which only work in the higher bands don't have as wide a service area and/or have lousy service indoors.   T-mobile has been expanding their coverage in the lower band for this reason. 

 

So when 4G on 900 mhz and 2.5 ghz get replaced by 15 ghz 5G that looks like a big problem to me.  15 ghz gets negatively effected by rain and leaves.  

 

My guess is 5G gets used for something like backhaul or in dense city centers or even partly replaces fiber in far flung places.  I don't see how it gets to be all that big an improvement for hand held cellular.  Now if it gets distributed in high density virtually everywhere anyone might be it could work, and I don't doubt in the future that is the likely result.  I don't think we'll see anything like that in the USA for 20 years.  

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11 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

Don't you think Audiogon is worse?

I don't know.  I have spent very little time on A-gon forums in the last 10 years.  Very, very little.  I think the Audio Asylum is appropriately named.  Oddly AVR forums are more balanced on audio than many audio only forums.  

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5 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

 

sure, but once you deconvolute it, there are billions and billions...

You think MQA albums unfold into additional albums or is that a feature not yet utilized??

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2 hours ago, FredericV said:

 

It's in the Munich interview by Jaap Veenstra:
 

This video interview from Jaap Veenstra is very interesting:

1. in the first minutes Bob Stuart already laughs at 24 bit and 32 bit (he did the same years ago in the era of SACD and DVD-A, where he debunked the need for highres, and that exquisite cd playback was his goal).

2. when Jaap asks the question if MQA throws away everything above 48 Khz nyquist (96 Khz sampling), Bob evades the question and tries to convince us not all countries have fast broadband like the Netherlands, and that it is a tradeoff.

3. MQA is 17 bits at best:

An interesting figure he mentioned is that MQA audio is "typically 15.85 bits" and "up to 17 bits" of resolution (31:05). He still claims that undecoded MQA is better sounding than CD because "de-blur" has been done to a certain extent already (30:18).

Bob also lies about the encryption part, and denies that MQA uses encryption.

So what does Lee have to say now that Bob has said up to 17 bits of resolution?

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2 minutes ago, adamdea said:

As I understand it the energy which is or might be redistributed in time (I am not going down the road of using the word dispersion) is in the transition band of the filter. Of course, for a sensible anti alias or anti imaging filter  it is therefore energy at inaudible frequencies and that energy can only arise in the first place to the extent that it is in the signal. It is therefore grossly exaggerated by a notional dirac input 

That is my understanding of what MQA is claiming as much as one can understand their tales mixing real with fantasy.  That long steep filters disperse energy in the transition band over time more than shallow short filters.  Then you make up the tale about air.  Air is absorbing frequencies, but if you graph the amplitude it can look like a filter dispersing energy.  

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1 minute ago, Dr Tone said:

 

On the Hoffman forums he believes 17 bits is taken out of context because Stereophile said 23 bits in some past article.

Well the good thing is saying something so foolish will not cause his credibility to take a hit.  There isn't any left.  

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39 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

That is not what I said. I said, "In other articles I have read like in Stereophile, Bob claims it is around 23 bits so I think I need to see if there is a way to reconcile and that we are not taking him out of context."

 

So I am saying we need to investigate why the discrepancy exists and make sure it is not taken out of context.  I am clearly open to the possibility that Stuart meant it on the 17 bits comment.

I have run completely out of patience with Stuart answering questions.  He has let sites like this one post questions, and he has answered them.  But he has been evasive and not at all forthcoming on most of the common questions.  Done so repeatedly and it has definitely been intentional.  He clearly has no intent of being transparent about MQA or answering those questions.  He is the fellow who could easily have cleared up most of the same questions at the very beginning and he did not wish to do so. 

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9 minutes ago, adamdea said:

 

The amusing point is that I can discern no difference in the enthusiam expressed for  hi rez recordings with payload in the range that might  make a difference from recordings with nothing there (most old recordings); same with sighted filter preferences. What does that tell us?

That any quality difference is in all the other aspects of good recording/mastering practice which doesn't require hirez.  And/or the idea of there being more in hirez makes people hear more regardless of whether there even is more there.  Like old recordings released in hirez that are sourced from 40-50 year old reel tape.  

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1 hour ago, mansr said:

Alias is the correct word for this. Image is not.

+1 on this.

 

If you use the same word for two different phenomena you are confusing. 

 

If you use two words for two different phenomena you are communicating. 

 

While you can have context dependent meanings of one word for different things it is best to avoid that especially with technical matters.  

 

So while in context of describing DA conversion  using aliasing most may understand you really mean imaging. Things are much nicer to use the correct term.  Eliminates confusion. 

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Oops double post. 

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1 hour ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

I honestly don’t know what happened. I dropped off around 9pm last night to watch a movie, then this morning could not find the thread.  I saw some comments from Agitater that people had hurled some personal epithets at me.  I am bummed because they gorts usually just remove the offensive posts and give a public warning.  Now we don’t have access to the articles, etc.

 

Very common practice.  They disappear threads if they get controversial, if they primarily express opinions the gorts or Hoffman don't agree with or if they win an argument Hoffman is on the other side of.  No warning just disappeared. 

 

This is a really horrid way to run a forum.  

 

I was banned there because too many threads I participated in they decided to disappear.  I never violated any of their TOS.  Never was personally insulting or vindictive.  I simply expressed personal opinions at odds with what they wanted promoted.  I provided technical reasons for them (which is when they would decide to disappear threads).  

 

Someone there would also filter PM's from other members.  If someone started asking or explaining something to you related to a thread they didn't like, suddenly neither of you got PMs thru to each other anymore.  Really pathetic forum. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

I don't know about you, but there are many who consider being banned from Hoffman to be a badge of honor. 

Well yes a badge of some kind.  A level of experience, understanding and integrity beyond those not banned there.  

 

Maybe there should be a logo or something. 

 

 

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Oops 2nd double post today.