MQA is Vaporware

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

I think they did but if MQA tried to stop them  it would be a hard convince a US District Court in Oregon that MQA was actually something new. Auralic has an Oregon office. 

They could also be sued for breach of whatever contract terms (which I'm certain included "no reverse engineering") they initially agreed to. That's hard to enforce in China, but a US presence can change the picture.

[mansr]

1 hour ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

In Mike Jbra's infomercial at AXPONA I believe he said that the encoders are now out in the wild to mastering engineers. 

 

If this were true, it should be pretty simple to get a mastering engineer to encode a test signal.

Brian Lucey says he hasn't heard of anything like that.

[mansr]

Just now, AMR/iFi audio said:

Folks, MQA over network via Tidal on our Pro iDSD machine. Perhaps one or two of good people here will find it useful 

Please do not post advertising outside your sponsored section.

[AMR/iFi audio]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

Please do not post advertising outside your sponsored section.

 

Naah, don't worry, someone might find it useful as we wrote. Worst case scenario, admin will remove it 

[Rt66indierock]

6 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

Naah, don't worry, someone might find it useful as we wrote. Worst case scenario, admin will remove it 

 

Convince me anyone cares about Tidal first. then anyone cares about the hifi tier, then try to make an argument that the small number of MQA matters when a big percentage have never been anything but 16/44.1.

 

 

[Samuel T Cogley]

5 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

Naah, don't worry, someone might find it useful as we wrote. Worst case scenario, admin will remove it 

 

With all due respect, it's precisely this attitude that stopped me from buying any additional iFi products.  I have several of your DACs and a few other items (iGalvanic3.0, etc.).  But you went to the MQA dark side, and I purchased a Benchmark DAC3 B instead of the iDSD Pro.

[The Computer Audiophile]

37 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

Folks, MQA over network via Tidal on our Pro iDSD machine. Perhaps one or two of good people here will find it useful 

 

 

Advertising must stay within your sponsored forum. 

[AMR/iFi audio]

32 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

With all due respect, it's precisely this attitude that stopped me from buying any additional iFi products.  I have several of your DACs and a few other items (iGalvanic3.0, etc.).  But you went to the MQA dark side, and I purchased a Benchmark DAC3 B instead of the iDSD Pro.

 

You being happy with your purchase is the most important thing regardless of whether it's our product or not. Thanks for buying our items! But neither we don't see how MQA pushed us to 'the dark side' (nice phrase btw.), nor we think attitude has anything to do with it. MQA is just another way to listen to music, some people like it, some don't and that's fine. But we as a company have always been all about providing people with options. Since MQA is one and we could include it with no drawbacks to anything else, we did   

[daverich4]

57 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Convince me anyone cares about Tidal first. then anyone cares about the hifi tier, then try to make an argument that the small number of MQA matters when a big percentage have never been anything but 16/44.1.

 

 

 

I do. I use the hifi tier of Tidal every day..

[Rt66indierock]

7 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

You being happy with your purchase is the most important thing regardless of whether it's our product or not. Thanks for buying our items! But neither we don't see how MQA pushed us to 'the dark side' (nice phrase btw.), nor we think attitude has anything to do with it. MQA is just another way to listen to music, some people like it, some don't and that's fine. But we as a company have always been all about providing people with options. Since MQA is one and we could include it with no drawbacks to anything else, we did   

 

Where is MQA an option? 7digital is struggling to survive, Napster is doing nothing but hurting the parent Realnetworks, Tidal is only a going concern because of Sprint money. 

[Rt66indierock]

Just now, daverich4 said:

 

I do. I use the hifi tier of Tidal every day..

 

Enjoy it while you can. 

[AMR/iFi audio]

7 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

Where is MQA an option?

 

It always is an option to simply not listen to it if you don't like it. But if you really want to be MQA-immune, we provide firmware with it disabled. 

[daverich4]

8 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Enjoy it while you can. 

 

Thanks, I will. 

[Samuel T Cogley]

9 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

It always is an option to simply not listen to it if you don't like it. But if you really want to be MQA-immune, we provide firmware with it disabled. 

 

For the iDSD Pro? 🙂

[AMR/iFi audio]

3 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

For the iDSD Pro? 🙂

 

Yes. Our first Pro iDSD FW was without MQA and upon request we provide it.

[crenca]

51 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

You being happy with your purchase is the most important thing regardless of whether it's our product or not....

 

Ah shucks man, thanks!  I want everyone who reads this thread to understand that you're happiness is my number one concern... It's why I get out of bed every morning thinking about toilet paper.... are you happy with your toilet paper?  I hope so as it's my number one concern.... 😋

51 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

MQA is just another way to listen to music, some people like it, some don't and that's fine.

 

 

Have you heard of this little controversy around MQA?  There's a thread over at Audiophilestyle entitled "MQA is a Vaporware" you should check out.  Apparently MQA is not just another audio product or choice! Who would have thunk it.... 😉

[jabbr]

54 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

You being happy with your purchase is the most important thing regardless of whether it's our product or not. Thanks for buying our items! But neither we don't see how MQA pushed us to 'the dark side' (nice phrase btw.), nor we think attitude has anything to do with it.

 

I am not happy that your MQA firmware “upgrade” removes the capability to do DSD512 — that was IMHO a brain dead decision. 

 

Not happy customer.

[AMR/iFi audio]

2 minutes ago, jabbr said:

that was IMHO a brain dead decision. 

 

This is not factually correct, sorry. We explained rather clearly why this happened and XMOS math cap reached was the valid reason. And yet again, we provided FW options; for those who wanted MQA and for those after DSD512. So that's that.  

 

5 minutes ago, jabbr said:

Not happy customer.

 

Hey, we can't please everyone, but we still try though   

[mansr]

2 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

This is not factually correct, sorry. We explained rather clearly why this happened and XMOS math cap reached was the valid reason.

Have you oh-so-clever people never heard of an if statement?

[FredericV]

I was watching a docu and then this came up, and thinking about the MQA cassette jokes in this thread:

 

I first believed "Studio Master Cassette" was just some title they added to some random cassette, but if you google it, there's a youtube demo, which does not sound so bad at all:
 

 

[FredericV]

4 hours ago, mansr said:

Did they really manage to recreate a full decoder? If they did, it's odd that MQA didn't get import bans imposed on their products due to patent violations. That used to happen a lot with unlicensed MP3 players from China.

They use sox, which I have on record.

[jabbr]

22 minutes ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

This is not factually correct, sorry. We explained rather clearly why this happened and XMOS math cap reached was the valid reason. And yet again, we provided FW options; for those who wanted MQA and for those after DSD512. So that's that.  

 

Factually correct that your brain dead decision to adopt MQA resulted in your decision to drop DSD512 —- which firmware is loaded default?

[mansr]

17 minutes ago, FredericV said:

They use sox, which I have on record.

So not an MQA decoder.

[FredericV]

25 minutes ago, mansr said:

So not an MQA decoder.

 

Auralic seems to have written their own lightning player which relies on sox (as analyzed by myself while intercepting a firmware file during download when I launched an update of my Auralic device, and later confirmed to me by their CEO that they use the sox library), while they also had a dormant version of MPD in an old version which they later removed.

More evil is adding a closed source MQA decoder to open source software by means of a bidirectional pipe sharing intimate data structures between both. According to the GPL FAQ such (ab)use of a pipe is problematic. The now gone MPD mailing list had some fine examples of these violators ... at least I feel a little bit more enlightened after seeing those source as posted on the mpd-devel list.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

2 hours ago, AMR/iFi audio said:

 

Yes. Our first Pro iDSD FW was without MQA and upon request we provide it.

I would love to know what you top engineer Thorsten thanks of MQA. He was quite active on many forums, but unless I am mistaken he went dark, non pun intended, after you adopted MQA. 🤐

 

P.S. for virtually all of his posting time, he was strong in his opinion that anything beyond Redbook was a waste of time. 

 

EDIT: NEVER MIND. I see on Audio Asylum he drank the Kool Aid. Refused to believe it was lossy and cited the Stereophile articles as factual and definitive. Funny, for a guy who made fun of DSD for quite a long time.