MQA is Vaporware

[shtf]

28 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Jim Austin was chosen for his experience as an editor at Science. And he needed a full-time job. Actually I'm documenting Stereophile isn't about the music.  If it was about the music John Atkinson would treat Bob Stuart the same way he treats Gary Dews of BorderPatrol. Not give him the time of day. And you would never have heard of MQA.

 

 

You done just blown my whole image of Stereophile.  You mean MQA is still around?  I coulda' swore Atkinson retired? 

 

BTW, Austin still needs a full-time job.

[Jud]

23 minutes ago, garrardguy60 said:

output transistors not included

 

 

[John_Atkinson]

1 hour ago, garrardguy60 said:

I would think that it was Paul Miller who picked Jim, or at the very least had the final say. [I say this with all due respect to John Atkinson; my comments are not meant to be in any way critical of him. It's more the case that it's been my observation that bosses/owners make these kinds of decision, rather than [even high-level] employees.]

 

Art Dudley and I independently thought of Jim and we approached him to see if he was interested. But yes, course it was Paul Miller's ultimate decision to hire Jim, with input from us.

 

1 hour ago, garrardguy60 said:

I was pleasantly shocked a few weeks back when Stereophile reviewed the Klipsch RP-600M bookshelf speakers [$549]. Here, I am hoping that this is also Mr. Miller's influence . . .

 

I have huge respect for Paul, but he has had zero influence on Stereophile's content during my tenure at Stereophile, just as with all the previous bosses I  have had in the past 33 years as Stereophile's editor. I understand that that will continue to be the case now that Jim is taking over from me.

 

John Atkinson

Editor (for 6 more hours), Stereophile

[Archimago]

3 hours ago, shtf said:

 

Yes, there is Archimago who is invaluable from a technical perspective but as you say, he's not former Stereophile.  Nor is Archimago exactly known for his keen listening skills.  At least not that I'm aware of.

 

3 hours ago, mansr said:

All the writers' wives. From the kitchen.

 

🤣

 

Somewhat off topic from MQA of course, but important to discuss. "Listening skills" is a tough one to determine isn't it? And yet for purely subjective reviewers the idea that one possesses "Golden Ears" is the basis of presumably why one's opinion has value...

 

As far as I am aware, there is no formal "Minimum Audio Reviewer Test" (MART?) for listening acuity.

 

At least back in 2014, Philips had their Golden Ears Challenge which I did attain the "Golden Ears" level:

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2014/02/musings-golden-earism-philips-golden.html

 

@John_Atkinson , is there some level of minimum listening/hearing competence that must be achieved to be an audio reviewer for Stereophile? Or say regular hearing test results at the very least submitted as "accreditation"?

 

The truth is that one could have been a jack hammer operator for years, can hear up to 5kHz at best, have severe inter-aural imbalance and still talk about the "air around instruments", "natural tonality of the singer", how "fast and jitter-free", and the greatness of the "soundstage" while showing beautiful pictures of the US$15,000 dCS Bartok. At least that's one thought that runs through my mind when I see pictures of aging audiophile reviewers...

[The Computer Audiophile]

14 minutes ago, Archimago said:

 

 

🤣

 

Somewhat off topic from MQA of course, but important to discuss. "Listening skills" is a tough one to determine isn't it? And yet for purely subjective reviewers the idea that one possesses "Golden Ears" is the basis of presumably why one's opinion has value...

 

As far as I am aware, there is no formal "Minimum Audio Reviewer Test" (MART?) for listening acuity.

 

At least back in 2014, Philips had their Golden Ears Challenge which I did attain the "Golden Ears" level:

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2014/02/musings-golden-earism-philips-golden.html

 

@John_Atkinson , is there some level of minimum listening/hearing competence that must be achieved to be an audio reviewer for Stereophile? Or say regular hearing test results at the very least submitted as "accreditation"?

 

The truth is that one could have been a jack hammer operator for years, can hear up to 5kHz at best, have severe inter-aural imbalance and still talk about the "air around instruments", "natural tonality of the singer", how "fast and jitter-free", and the greatness of the "soundstage" while showing beautiful pictures of the US$15,000 dCS Bartok. At least that's one thought that runs through my mind when I see pictures of aging audiophile reviewers...

Come on archimago, sandyk admits to major hearing damage yet still hears differences between bit perfect MD5 identical rips 😄

[Rt66indierock]

30 minutes ago, Archimago said:

 

 

🤣

 

Somewhat off topic from MQA of course, but important to discuss. "Listening skills" is a tough one to determine isn't it? And yet for purely subjective reviewers the idea that one possesses "Golden Ears" is the basis of presumably why one's opinion has value...

 

As far as I am aware, there is no formal "Minimum Audio Reviewer Test" (MART?) for listening acuity.

 

At least back in 2014, Philips had their Golden Ears Challenge which I did attain the "Golden Ears" level:

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2014/02/musings-golden-earism-philips-golden.html

 

@John_Atkinson , is there some level of minimum listening/hearing competence that must be achieved to be an audio reviewer for Stereophile? Or say regular hearing test results at the very least submitted as "accreditation"?

 

The truth is that one could have been a jack hammer operator for years, can hear up to 5kHz at best, have severe inter-aural imbalance and still talk about the "air around instruments", "natural tonality of the singer", how "fast and jitter-free", and the greatness of the "soundstage" while showing beautiful pictures of the US$15,000 dCS Bartok. At least that's one thought that runs through my mind when I see pictures of aging audiophile reviewers...

 

I've always said you could make this stuff up so why would listening skills matter? After all doesn't having golden ears mean the person is in their golden years? 

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

I've always said you could make this stuff up so why would listening skills matter? After all doesn't having golden ears mean the person is in their golden years? 

What about golden retrievers?

[Rt66indierock]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

What about golden retrievers?

Their ears are pinkish, I've cleaned enough of them over the years.

[Currawong]

10 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Who cares about CD for the best quality -- just get 24bit at least 48k sample rate -- no need for recording obfuscation? 

 

Myself, and others, have been saying this for years. I think this is where much of the problem lies. If the baseline quality had been this to begin with, I reckon most of the arguments over digital wouldn't have come about in the first place.

 

8 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

CW:

 

I just read that DAC review by Reichert. I am not sure where he "pissed" on MQA....

 

Reviewing nice affordable digital  products from small manufacturers, like let's say, a ladder DAC, and wanting to recommend it puts Stereophile writers in a pickle because they have to figure out how to handle the MQA thing. based on their editorial obsession with marketing it. Here Reichert choses the strategy to down play it. Interestingly he chooses to really spotlight DSD. 

 

This was not the case when he reviewed several MyTek DACs and fell in love with MQA to the point that the Schiit DAC, (very similar to the Kitsune) that was his "reference" was kicked to the curb because if did not decode MQA.

 

They simply cannot have it both ways, 

 

"According to legendary musician and record producer Don Was, now president of Blue Note Records, "what record producers and artists intend for the audience to hear is the first commercially released issue—not some hypothetical master tape or enhanced later version. By that sensible measure, every remastering, reissue, or change in format—whether from 78 to 331?3rpm, mono to stereo, LP to CD, CD to hi-rez, or hi-rez to MQA—is simply a lower-fidelity interpretation of the original. That's why I've never felt comfortable with remasterings."

 

To his arguable discredit, he does make everything he reviews sound like the second coming, and does write in the favour of whatever he is reviewing.  I haven't read his Mytek review, but I am more inclined to think, since I'm a reviewer, they are more afraid of alienating subscribers who DO think MQA is wonderful and complain if they aren't catered to.  If they were really so in bed with manufacturers, they surely wouldn't measure products, especially given that they reveal how "fundamentally broken" NOS DACs are.

 

Maybe their mistake was to take BS at his word (bad pun intended), and now it's like the man who buys a pristine-looking second-hand car, assured by the  supposedly trustworthy salesman that it is in perfect condition, has a crash, and all the bog filler falls out from where the previous owner had done the same thing....

[Hugo9000]

One would think professional reviewers would actually have pictures of the equipment under review set up in their own rooms, rather than just including promo shots provided by the manufacturers.  If I want to see those pics, I'll just look on the manufacturer's website, where the photos will generally be of higher resolution and/or zoomable.  In the days before the internet, it was perhaps more acceptable, as there wasn't much choice when it came to seeing what the gear even looked like.  You saw it in person if you had a dealer nearby, or you wrote to the manufacturer and requested their literature/product brochures, or you accepted that manufacturer photo in a magazine.  lol  We get endless flowery prose that attempts to describe what the reviewer claims to hear, and yet we can't even see the gear in his room.  In a print format.  smh

 

Can you imagine if Car and Driver and all the other hobbyist publications through the years tried to get away with that?  "Here's a stock photo of this Lamborghini from the manufacturer."  lmao  Even the cheapie 'women's magazines' like Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle had their own photographers or paid freelancers for original pics.

 

I let all of my magazine subscriptions lapse years ago due largely to these pet peeves regarding what seems like sheer laziness on the part of the writers and publishers in general.  Articles that often seem to regurgitate manufacturer blurbs or press releases, accompanied by stock photos from the manufacturer or distributor, failure to examine extraordinary manufacturer claims critically (HDCD, MQA, green pens, whatever it may be, whether legitimate or snake oil or just delusional/wishful thinking on the part of the manufacturer), all of these types of things are so lazy and beneath real journalism.  Even the amateurs on sites like Head-Fi and reddit take their readers seriously enough to provide their own photos.  I realize that many say that the real customer is the advertiser and not the reader/subscriber, but if I were an advertiser, I'd still find it lazy that the magazines don't even try to disguise this.  The publishers seem far more cynical than the few readers who complain, if you ask me.  MQA is vaporware, you say?  Perhaps the concept of audio 'journalism' itself is vaporware.

 

Well, just the ramblings of an anonymous 'groupthink' nobody on the internet.  I've heard there are a couple of European magazines that don't fit the lazy mold in my above rant, but I've never seen one myself.  And there are a couple of writers that I respect, even if their work would be better served in a publication like Gramophone rather than the hobbyist magazines with lazy publishers or wherever they have to earn their living.  Maybe most reviewers have appallingly messy rooms and hideous 1970s decor.  Whatever.  Everyone carry on as you were...

 

 

[Jud]

19 minutes ago, Hugo9000 said:

One would think professional reviewers would actually have pictures of the equipment under review set up in their own rooms, rather than just including promo shots provided by the manufacturers. 

 

Really? Photos?

 

Unless they're photos of the insides with commentary about how the item works, why would I object to professionally taken photos, rather than some guy who may or may not know anything about photography, in a room that we may or may not especially want to see?

[John_Atkinson]

1 hour ago, Archimago said:

@John_Atkinson , is there some level of minimum listening/hearing competence that must be achieved to be an audio reviewer for Stereophile? Or say regular hearing test results at the very least submitted as "accreditation"?

 

Stereophile writers have to satisfy me that their finding are repeatable and transportable: See my "As We See It" in the forthcoming May issue of Stereophile. And regarding your more general point, see Martin Colloms' text that I quoted at https://www.stereophile.com/content/book-review-high-performance-loudspeakers-seventh-edition

"There is no examination or qualification for audio critics. The bar frequently is set by the editors of audio magazines who may be still less qualified for this task than the intending critic. Regarding web publications, it is perhaps unfortunate that almost anyone can set themselves up as an expert reviewer, this including the audio field."
 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

 

[Hugo9000]

@Jud

If it's a professional magazine, it should have professional photos that aren't just stock photos.  If they know nothing about photography, and can't hire someone who does, perhaps print media is the wrong field of endeavor or format?

 

A lot of the appeal in high-end gear or goods is the eye-candy aspect of it.  Vogue doesn't just publish the designers' own photos, you know.  How or why is another luxury-aimed publication special?  Stock photos are fine for a student's report or an amateur underground 'zine, I expect more from professional magazines.

[Ralf11]

58 minutes ago, mansr said:

What about golden retrievers?

 

mine have all had excellent hearing

 

 

 

[Jud]

3 minutes ago, Hugo9000 said:

@Jud

If it's a professional magazine, it should have professional photos that aren't just stock photos.  If they know nothing about photography, and can't hire someone who does, perhaps print media is the wrong field of endeavor or format?

 

A lot of the appeal in high-end gear is the eye-candy aspect of it.  Vogue doesn't just publish the designers' own photos, you know.  How or why is another luxury-aimed publication special?  Stock photos are fine for a student's report or an amateur underground 'zine, I expect more from professional magazines.

 

I'm guessing Vogue has a rather larger circulation and budget.

[John Dyson]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Come on archimago, sandyk admits to major hearing damage yet still hears differences between bit perfect MD5 identical rips 😄

Ask sandyk how well I passed his evil test :-).  It was tricky, but apparently I did pretty well.   (The difference was something like what I deal with on the DA decoder, so I just happened to be tuned to the sort of difference that was in the test.)

 

[John Dyson]

43 minutes ago, Currawong said:

 

Myself, and others, have been saying this for years. I think this is where much of the problem lies. If the baseline quality had been this to begin with, I reckon most of the arguments over digital wouldn't have come about in the first place.

 

 

"According to legendary musician and record producer Don Was, now president of Blue Note Records, "what record producers and artists intend for the audience to hear is the first commercially released issue—not some hypothetical master tape or enhanced later version. By that sensible measure, every remastering, reissue, or change in format—whether from 78 to 331?3rpm, mono to stereo, LP to CD, CD to hi-rez, or hi-rez to MQA—is simply a lower-fidelity interpretation of the original. That's why I've never felt comfortable with remasterings."

 

T

When I test my decoder with ABBA, I use original vinyl rips for a reference.  (The DHNRDS still sounds much better without vinyl processing -  but I try to make sure that it sounds plausibly the same.)  I agree with trying to sound like the original release.  (Direct DolbyA decodes don't always sound like something that you'd want to release to a consumer, however.)

 

[Hugo9000]

6 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

I'm guessing Vogue has a rather larger circulation and budget.

Did you actually read my earlier post that you mocked, where I mentioned that amateurs at Head-Fi and reddit quite often take the time to provide some original photos?

 

Thank you for applying your criticism to this random amateur nobody on the internet rather than publications that aspire to be taken seriously and as being journalistic and professional.  * sigh *

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

53 minutes ago, Currawong said:

 

Myself, and others, have been saying this for years. I think this is where much of the problem lies. If the baseline quality had been this to begin with, I reckon most of the arguments over digital wouldn't have come about in the first place.

 

 

"According to legendary musician and record producer Don Was, now president of Blue Note Records, "what record producers and artists intend for the audience to hear is the first commercially released issue—not some hypothetical master tape or enhanced later version. By that sensible measure, every remastering, reissue, or change in format—whether from 78 to 331?3rpm, mono to stereo, LP to CD, CD to hi-rez, or hi-rez to MQA—is simply a lower-fidelity interpretation of the original. That's why I've never felt comfortable with remasterings."

 

To his arguable discredit, he does make everything he reviews sound like the second coming, and does write in the favour of whatever he is reviewing.  I haven't read his Mytek review, but I am more inclined to think, since I'm a reviewer, they are more afraid of alienating subscribers who DO think MQA is wonderful and complain if they aren't catered to.  If they were really so in bed with manufacturers, they surely wouldn't measure products, especially given that they reveal how "fundamentally broken" NOS DACs are.

 

Maybe their mistake was to take BS at his word (bad pun intended), and now it's like the man who buys a pristine-looking second-hand car, assured by the  supposedly trustworthy salesman that it is in perfect condition, has a crash, and all the bog filler falls out from where the previous owner had done the same thing....

Thanks for that except. I don't really see that as a ding against MQA>

 

And quite honestly that quote from Don Was is total bullshit. i went to school with two musicians who ended up getting signed to major labels. They were thrilled with the final mixes of their work, and were utterly horrified when they heard the mastering done by a big time mastering engineer. They had no recourse as the contracts gave the labels final say in the "first commercially released issue."

 

And the band Maroon 5 complained bitterly about their second album which they claim did not reflect the intention of their mix and against got hosed by the contract. And by the way the producers in all 3 cases also hated the "first commercially available issue".

 

So in fact, there IS a" hypothetical master tape" the artist approved.

[Jud]

1 minute ago, Hugo9000 said:

Did you actually read my earlier post that you mocked, where I mentioned that amateurs at Head-Fi and reddit quite often take the time to provide some original photos?

 

Thank you for applying your criticism to this random amateur nobody on the internet rather than publications that aspire to be taken seriously and as being journalistic and professional.  * sigh *

 

I didn't mock, I disagreed. And it was in fact the types of photos you mention that I wouldn't want to see in glossy mags. I think very few of them are good. You might disagree, which is fine.

[John Dyson]

50 minutes ago, Currawong said:

 

Myself, and others, have been saying this for years. I think this is where much of the problem lies. If the baseline quality had been this to begin with, I reckon most of the arguments over digital wouldn't have come about in the first place.

 

That is partially true, but honestly -- a lot of material is released without DolbyA decoding.  Ask sandyk about some examples that I demoed.  He didn't like all of them, but I think that anyone (incl him) would say that there was a rather substantial improvement.  The biggest problem when demoing, is that playing through the DolbyA with raw material is NOT all of what mastering needs to do.

 

Undecoded stuff, with a little EQ is sold as consumer material (retch!!) (Compressed highs, flat spatial relationships -- sound famiilar?)

 

Take the HDtracks Carpenters album, do a bit of EQ (to recover original material), and do a DolbyA decode -- sounds really nice.  (I think that album needs +3dB@3kHz/Q=0.707...  I don't remember, it might be +5dB instead.

 

It is heartbreaking that some amount of this digital hatred comes from non-mastering (playout of master tape with EQ is a lot cheaper than doing a DolbyA decode.)

 

John

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

I would offer the observation that this is not the thread to  bas reviewers here in general. They should be raked over the coals for their MQA Marketing, but if folks just want to crucify them, it is a bit gratuitous. Just my two shekels. 

[ARQuint]

1 hour ago, Hugo9000 said:

One would think professional reviewers would actually have pictures of the equipment under review set up in their own rooms, rather than just including promo shots provided by the manufacturers.  If I want to see those pics, I'll just look on the manufacturer's website, where the photos will generally be of higher resolution and/or zoomable.  In the days before the internet, it was perhaps more acceptable, as there wasn't much choice when it came to seeing what the gear even looked like.  You saw it in person if you had a dealer nearby, or you wrote to the manufacturer and requested their literature/product brochures, or you accepted that manufacturer photo in a magazine.  lol  We get endless flowery prose that attempts to describe what the reviewer claims to hear, and yet we can't even see the gear in his room.  In a print format.  smh

 

Can you imagine if Car and Driver and all the other hobbyist publications through the years tried to get away with that?  "Here's a stock photo of this Lamborghini from the manufacturer."  lmao  Even the cheapie 'women's magazines' like Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle had their own photographers or paid freelancers for original pics.

 

I let all of my magazine subscriptions lapse years ago due largely to these pet peeves regarding what seems like sheer laziness on the part of the writers and publishers in general.  Articles that often seem to regurgitate manufacturer blurbs or press releases, accompanied by stock photos from the manufacturer or distributor, failure to examine extraordinary manufacturer claims critically (HDCD, MQA, green pens, whatever it may be, whether legitimate or snake oil or just delusional/wishful thinking on the part of the manufacturer), all of these types of things are so lazy and beneath real journalism.  Even the amateurs on sites like Head-Fi and reddit take their readers seriously enough to provide their own photos.  I realize that many say that the real customer is the advertiser and not the reader/subscriber, but if I were an advertiser, I'd still find it lazy that the magazines don't even try to disguise this.  The publishers seem far more cynical than the few readers who complain, if you ask me.  MQA is vaporware, you say?  Perhaps the concept of audio 'journalism' itself is vaporware.

 

Well, just the ramblings of an anonymous 'groupthink' nobody on the internet.  I've heard there are a couple of European magazines that don't fit the lazy mold in my above rant, but I've never seen one myself.  And there are a couple of writers that I respect, even if their work would be better served in a publication like Gramophone rather than the hobbyist magazines with lazy publishers or wherever they have to earn their living.  Maybe most reviewers have appallingly messy rooms and hideous 1970s decor.  Whatever.  Everyone carry on as you were...

 

 

The component that's the TAS "cover story" is photographed, professionally, in Austin, at a session supervised by NextScreen's creative director, Torquil Dewar. Take a look at the current (April) issue. (Oops, I guess you can't. Everyone with dismissive opinions of the print magazines on this thread claims to have let their subscriptions lapse....) Well, if you did you'd see a sexy photo of the T+A Talius S 300 loudspeaker and there are another seven shots of the speaker with the review itself. T+A shipped a second pair of speakers from Germany—in addition to the set I had—to Texas to be photographed. With routine reviews, sometimes it's stock  photos and sometimes it isn't. For my usual reviews, I have a friend who's recently retired as the photography professor at St. Joseph's University come over to shoot the equipment. To my wife's chagrin, we keep all the necessary lights, reflectors, backdrops, etc in a spare bedroom for this purpose. Some of the other writers happen to be quite good photographers—Steven Stone for example.

 

Andrew Quint

The Absolute Sound

 

 

[sandyk]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Come on archimago, sandyk admits to major hearing damage yet still hears differences between bit perfect MD5 identical rips 😄

So have another couple of members in the last 7 days, one of whom is highly experienced and posts in this thread too !

[Jud]

My point about "Really? Photos?" is that I'm much less concerned about appearance than about reviewers having some minimal amount of technical chops, or the writing undergoing a technical review before publication.  There's a dearth, at least in what I've seen on newsstands, of any discussion of MQA at the technical level on occasion seen in this forum, and that's a pity.

 

And that's of course what I (agreeing with @John Dyson and others) think is where this thread and others do their best work, when we're given technical info lacking in the magazines. Sniping I can find anywhere; I'm here to learn.