MQA is Vaporware

[Currawong]

8 hours ago, loop7 said:

More and more albums in my TIDAL collection and playlists which were MQA for years are now appearing as CD. 

 

It's mostly Universal which covers DG and Decca.

 

We are only weeks away from TIDAL's high resolution introduction, correct?

Are they watermarked though? Last I checked, many albums were messed up this way regardless.

[Currawong]

11 hours ago, Archimago said:

Lavorgna is still not acknowledging that MQA was always a lossy scam...

I can only conclude that they are in denial that someone whom I imagine has been a friend of theirs for decades has not only deceived them, but revealed their own level of ignorance.  Unlike myself, where I'm happy to admit that there is much I don't know, and I can be wrong (and am happy to post corrections to mistakes I make), these types of reviewers don't seem to be capable of that. 

[Currawong]

11 hours ago, Spike Kasperak said:

Even as of a few days ago, the shamless Stereohile editors post this "review":

https://www.stereophile.com/content/ifi-audio-neo-stream-streaming-da-processor

 

This piece of rubbish writing stood out:

"I think I am developing a sweet tooth. Something just felt "right," to pick one simplistic word, about the sonic product MQA achieves. Played back via Tidal Connect, the sound on Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster (24/96 MQA, Verve/Tidal) was startlingly fine."

 

It's a poor review, not because of the MQA, but because the DAC in the Neo Stream is basically the one in their very cheapest products, and really isn't that great. That's before the author's complete lack of understanding of the product -- though it is a painfully difficult product to review, due to the combinations of things that can be done with it, and combinations that don't work.

 

The simple reality is: Stereophile is a lifestyle magazine.  Given the type of subscriber base, they aren't going to publish a lurid expose of MQA.  If anything, MQA fulfilled the role of being amazing new technology that would magically make everyone's music more wonderful.  They don't want to burst that bubble, especially if it exists among their staff.

[Currawong]

12 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Understood.

 

Why is there content above 20 kHz in your file? Your unnamed microphone likely has a maximum frequency of 20 kHz. 

All that above 50 kHz is sigma/delta noise from the ADC.

[Currawong]

I know what "time smearing" is. It's very audible when you switch filters on some DACs, as the position of the instruments on a good stereo recording shifts. The MQA short filters, and ones like it (iFi) bring all the instruments forward, even ones that should be behind the speakers. Our brain requires that the arrival of sounds to our ears be correct to be able to accurately locate the origin and distance of sounds. 

 

The only DACs I've heard which reconstruct this correctly are from Chord. The whole idea that MQA's system corrected the timing errors is not possible given how MQA works. It's a flat out lie from them. But then, almost everything they claimed has been proven to be false. 

[Currawong]

29 minutes ago, Fx Studio said:

 

Nope, I have been talking about it since I discovered it back more than 2 years ago and started asking about it. Its all documented on Golden Sound and Amir's YT channel in the comments section.

 

In more technical terms - Alcons PA ribbons produce what known as an all-natural cylindrical (Isophasic) wavefront) the sound is everywhere as can be heard in the LR24 test I posted above. That's the big difference that allows the MQA time smearing correction to be easily heard. 

 

I certainly believe that you're hearing a difference, but you're wrong about it being from "time smearing correction". We know now for a fact that MQA does, if anything the opposite.

[Currawong]

5 hours ago, KeenObserver said:

Is someone trying to revive MQA?

MQA is in an advanced stage of de-comp.

They should have been shoveling dirt over MQA years ago.

Naa, it's someone tricked by the added compression etc. thinking they are hearing "time smearing correction".

 

It has relieved the boredom a bit. 

[Currawong]

It sounds different because... the channels were switched. That's pretty funny. 

 

MQA making it sound like the players are in the same room... on outdoor PA speakers. That's even funnier. 

[Currawong]

7 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

I have debunked the so called "debunkers" - by showing that MQA is the better format if played on PA ribbons. 

Where is your evidence - Golden Sound with his totally flawed so called test that certainly wasn't any kind of a test? - because that's the only thing I've seen so far.

 

It's funny that you say "do your own research" because there are dozens of posts in this thread, posted over years, done by multiple people, based upon research. 

Here are a select few, plus some links. I'm posting this before breakfast, so apologies for it being a bit messy and maybe not in perfect order. GoldenSound's videos about MQA was based on much this actual research and information. 

 

MQA smears in the time domain, as it uses leaky minimum phase filters. You know what a minimum phase filter is, don't you? If you don't understand, see how the minimum phase filter in the middle shifts the music in the time domain (the original signal is red. 

 

From an industry expert: 

 

Quote

“As for MQA compression, it has a tendency to time-shift transients to the nearest sample instead of rendering these transients with the proper timing. The effect is audible, and I do not like it. From a streaming bandwidth standpoint, MQA offers no advantages. There are lossless schemes that can achieve the same bit rate."

MQA's claims of multiple unfolds are false. There is only one unfold, then the filters with a poor time-domain response are used to up-sample the music. Here's an image of the output from a DXD master from 2L's test bench, showing the original, MQA, and unfolded MQA. Note that above 48 kHz, all you get is distortion -- actually high-frequency aliasing caused by the poor digital filter. The content above 92 kHz can be ignored, as 2L's ADC just produced high-frequency sigma/delta noise above that. Funnily enough, that shows that encoding the music as DXD on that particular ADC in the first place is pointless, but that's another matter.

 

About the above image:

On 3/9/2019 at 4:35 PM, FredericV said:

(1) look at the severe frequency errors starting at around 35 ~ 40k - and remember MQA can't encode any analog signals above 48 Khz, or in case of DXD, above 44.1 Khz, as it can the encode the equivalent 17/88.2, so it starts to make mistakes already below 44.1 Khz

 

And see also: 

 

Even MQA's own materials effectively show that it would require 32-bit files to do more than the first unfold: 
 

From: 

 

Here's another view of how MQA's leaky filters clearly distort the audio, in this case a -60db signal. This was verified soon after by John Atkinson a couple of pages later in the thread: 

 

 

 

MQA vs FLAC comparison: 

Quote

From the filter roll-off we can see that there's quite a bit less than 24-bit worth of information, amounting slightly less than 18-bit. Meaning about 108 dB SNR. Quite a lot of low level information visible.

 

Bruno Putzeys, in a 2017 FB post, on how from the start MQA's arguments contradicted themselves:

Quote

Bruno Putzeys

This isn't a prelude to suddenly becoming active on FB but I felt I had to share this.

Yesterday there was an AES session on mastering for high resolution (whatever that is) whose highlight was a talk about the state of the loudness war, why we're still fighting it and what the final arrival of on-by-default loudness normalisation on streaming services means for mastering. It also contained a two-pronged campaign piece for MQA. During it, every classical misconception and canard about digital audio was trotted out in an amazingly short time. Interaural timing resolution, check. Pictures showing staircase waveforms, check. That old chestnut about the ear beating the Fourier uncertainty (the acoustical equivalent of saying that human observers are able to beat Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), right there.

At the end of the talk I got up to ask a scathing question and spectacularly fumbled my attack*. So for those who were wondering what I was on about, here goes. A filtering operation is a convolution of two waveforms. One is the impulse response of the filter (aka the "kernel"), the other is the signal.

A word that high res proponents of any stripe love is "blurring". The convolution point of view shows that as the "kernel" blurs the signal, so the signal blurs the kernel. As Stuart's spectral plots showed, an audio signal is a much smoother waveform than the kernel so in reality guess who's really blurring whom. And if there's no spectral energy left above the noise floor at the frequency where the filter has ring tails, the ring tails are below the noise floor too.

A second question, which I didn't even get to ask, was about the impulse response of MQA's decimation and upsampling chain as it is shown in the slide presentation. MQA's take on those filters famously allows for aliasing, so how does one even define "the" impulse response of that signal chain when its actual shape depends on when exactly it happens relative to the sampling clock (it's not time invariant). I mentioned this to my friend Bob Katz who countered "but what if there isn't any aliasing" (meaning what if no signal is present in the region that folds down). Well yes, that's the saving grace. The signal filters the kernel rather than vice versa and the shape of the transition band doesn't matter if it is in a region where there is no signal.

These folk are trying to have their cake and eat it. Either aliasing doesn't matter because there is no signal in the transition band and then the precise shape of the transition band doesn't matter either (ie the ring tails have no conceivable manifestation) or the absence of ring tails is critical because there is signal in that region and then the aliasing will result in audible components that fly in the face of MQA's transparency claims.

Doesn't that just sound like the arguments DSD folks used to make? The requirement for 100kHz bandwidth was made based on the assumption that content above 20k had an audible impact whereas the supersonic noise was excused on the grounds that it wasn't audible. What gives?

Meanwhile I'm happy to do speakers. You wouldn't believe how much impact speakers have on replay fidelity.

________

* Oh hang on, actually I started by asking if besides speculations about neuroscience and physics they had actual controlled listening trials to back their story up. Bob Stuart replied that all listening tests so far were working experiences with engineers in their studios but that no scientific listening tests have been done so far. That doesn't surprise any of us cynics but it is an astonishing admission from the man himself. Mhm, I can just see the headlines. "No Scientific Tests Were Done, Says MQA Founder".

 

Jud summarised this well here: 

 

How can MQA correct for music which contains samples, often at lower resolution, that came through multiple ADCs? Answer: It's not possible. The idea that the processor was "detecting" the ADC used is BS.

 

As some musical instruments have high frequency spectra out to 100 kHz, the destruction of this during MQA encoding (since MQA cannot encode anything beyond 48 kHz) shows that it absolutely CANNOT reproduce music accurately, and that's before the time shifting is even taken into account. 

 

Quote

The fourth excerpt shows that by 55 kHz, the harmonics are vanishing. Note that, as seen in Figure 1(a), the trumpet is still 12 to 15 dB above the background at this frequency; so the energy seen at 55 kHz, though non-harmonic, is still trumpet sound.

 

Quote

Each musical instrument family — strings, winds, brass and percussion — has at least one member which produces energy to 40 kHz or above. Some of the spectra reach this work's measurement limit of 102.4 kHz.
       Harmonics of French horn can extend to above 90 kHz; trumpet, to above 80; violin and oboe, to above 40; and a cymbal crash shows no sign of running out of energy at 100 kHz. Also shown in this paper are samples from sibilant speech, claves, a drum rimshot, triangle, jangling keys, and piano.
       The proportion of energy above 20 kilohertz is low for most instruments; but for one trumpet sample it is 2%; for another, 0.5%; for claves, 3.8%; for a speech sibilant, 1.7%; and for the cymbal crash, 40%. The cymbal's energy shows no sign of stopping at the measurement limit, so its percentage may be much higher.

 

Artist approval was also BS. TIDAL and the labels certainly did NOT contact thousands of artists before encoding their tracks through a batch-process system. 

 

Bob Stuart wanted to censor the information in this forum.
From someone who is a friend of Bob Staurt: "The reality is MQA is a business venture bent on maximizing a financial return and not an audio enhancement technology."
FredericV's research into band splitting and compressing ultrasonics, which show the limitations, and impossibility of MQA's claims about compression. 
Spectral analysis of Patricia Barber's Clique album in different formats.


Stealing @crenca's summary for this: 

 

Quote

A summary of the debunked (that is to say, untrue) assertions of Bob Stuart and MQA Ltd. around MQA:

1. It is not lossless.
2. It actually doesn’t have the full dynamics of CD.
3. It has leaky filters that allow aliasing and imaging.
4. The provenance, authentication, etc. is simply a con job – dead artists rising to authenticate, massive batch processing of music, etc.
5. They claim to retroactively determine what gear was used to compensate for it when they do nothing of the sort.
6. The way that the high sample rates are a con completely past 96 khz and mostly even at 96 khz.
7. That it isn’t great at saving bandwidth as in fact 20 bit Flac could be smaller and of higher fidelity.
8. It is effectively DRM, specifically the “freemium” model of software Management of end user Digital Rights.
9. Bob Stuart even makes the bold claim that it is a “green” encoding!

 

[Currawong]

On 9/2/2023 at 3:41 PM, FredericV said:

Wasting any more time on this troll is pointless. The shelf life of MQA has expired.

A friend of mine, an expert in a particular field, has run discussion groups for what amounts now to about a couple of decades. As the field is controversial, he gets a lot of ignorant people trying to prove him wrong. Instead of getting angry, he just uses their arguments as an excuse to write detailed, comprehensive rebuttals to their arguments, which then adds to his body of writings. His writings are now so extensive, and his reputation so well known, that people pretty much have stopped arguing with him. 

What I learned from that is, if you know what you're talking about, what may seem like troublesome people can be a blessing in disguise.  

[Currawong]

5 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

Its been possible to download MQA files from streamers like Tidal, as FLAC container MQA files, and store and play them from memory on an MQA device independently since about Aug 2021. So that's why its never going away because there are literally millions of downloaded MQA tracks purchased and otherwise residing on peoples computers and devices.

 

And they are all junk, as the unadulterated (non-batch processed) originals can be downloaded instead, and don't require special equipment to "unfold".

 

20 hours ago, MarkHH said:

Some well-informed readers will read that headline (“Is the end near for MQA?”) and laugh out loud—especially members of the vocal minority that has rooted against MQA from the start. Of course the end is near for MQA, a broad sampling of blog and social media posts suggests. Those posts may well be correct, but based on information available in early August, there may still be some hope.

 

(NB: The above quote is from Jim Austin, and this forum software doesn't allow me to fix the quote attribution easily.)
Jim's "from the start" is a flat-out lie. At the start, people asked for more information about how MQA works. The more that was revealed, the more the claims started to fall apart. That is when people turned against it.

A vocal minority has been rooting for MQA from the start, despite a majority of players in the industry who looked into it and realised how flawed it is, even those who implemented it (and in some cases had to trick MQA into approving their products, despite playback issues). More so, this minority were rooting for a company that, of all their claims, all but one were total lies. 

[Currawong]

8 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

I am only talking about recently made level 3 tracks (not-batch processed) those can be played as FLAC on any device - but additionally can be unfolded for the full MQA sound using a player (with a MQA DAC) running an application like Uapp with the MQA extension. Then the sound is quite different with deeper bass and time smearing correction of the vocals.

See my previous, long post with all the "evidence" you said we didn't have. The 2nd and 3rd unfolds would require a 32-bit file according to MQA's own description. They don't exist. Any fold after the first was up-sampling. 

The "deeper bass" is simply more bass. And, again, see how minimum phase filters destroy the timing of the music. What you're hearing is worse, not better. You're just deceiving yourself now. 

[Currawong]

2 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

I have just done another test using a FLAC Hi-Res and MQA of the same track - Dreams (feat Lanie Gardner) 2020.

The bass is cleaner, tighter and a bit more detailed on the FLAC, but weak on the 21" sub.

The FLAC vocals are detailed but definitely emanating from each speaker with the sound very centered - which I guess in a small room wouldn't be noticeable.

The MQA sound is everywhere in comparison, just hanging in the air more like a natural sound and much more pleasant to listen to on a big PA system in my studio.

 

But I get that If I had a smaller HiFi system in a small room then the FLAC with the greater detail would be the better choice.

 

It just depends what system people have, what space they are playing it in, and possibly their ability to perceive time domain information which may have a genetic component.

 

 

That track is mostly digital, and and the vocals are very heavily processed. There's nothing remotely "natural" about anything on it. You don't seem to understand that the result of genuinely time corrections are audible primarily on recordings of acoustic instruments in a single space, where you get the genuine soundstage of the event -- correct depth and width, as you'd actually hear it if you had been present. In a well set-up system, the speakers disappear and the instruments appear in their actual space as they were. There's nothing to correct with the kind of music you are listening to, if it's all like what you just mentioned, as it's all electronically generated, aside from the voice.

[Currawong]

I'm going to speculate that MQA assumed that they'd start earning serious money, enough that they could employ and train people to do the mastering of the albums for them, which were prepared using the DAW/VST plug-in. 

The strong skeptic in me thinks that they were going to do this to hide the simplicity of what actual mastering was going on -- ie: it was nothing that needs the MQA encoding to work. Given how, say, The Beatles' White Album sounds in MQA, with quieter sounds being slightly louder, I really think it wasn't a heck of a lot more than carefully managed compression to enhance the quieter sounds. I do recall a post by someone who quoted an unknown recording engineer who had listened to MQA masters, and speculated from experience what had actually been done to create them. 

Back to the MQA group, they were losing money hand-over-fist and had to earn something quick, so went with batch encoding on TIDAL to try and get some traction. 
The only purpose of the remastering, really, was so that MQA files sounded different to the originals, as if they hadn't, the audiophiles who were attracted to the format would have just called BS on it as almost everyone in the professional world did. The re-mastering didn't require the MQA encoding, and the MQA encoding didn't require the mastering. 
 

[Currawong]

8 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

the time smearing correction

...doesn't exist. 

It never existed.

It's not physically possible for it to be done.

What is more, that you suggest it works on electronic-based music, shows that you don't understand what the idea of time domain accuracy in music actually means, and what problems time domain inaccuracy causes in music production. It has nothing to do with PA system set-up.

[Currawong]

19 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

I said that the MQA's are the best quality when output using the MQA Plugin direct of the DAW - which electronic music uses exclusively. Not that there was something special about electronic music persae. 

 

PA system project over greater distances and that's what shows up the difference in time domain info - there are graphs on MQA's website explaining it.

You posted an example of music available in MQA that is electronic when discussing time-domain information. That shows that you don't understand what it is. 

Near everything on MQA's site is bullshit, or contradicts their own claims. 

Heck, a pair of Airpods Pro does a better job of time domain correction than anything MQA wasn't ever capable of. Put a pair in and switch them to transparent mode. You can hear where everything around you is as if you only had a bit of cotton wool in your ears. 

[Currawong]

18 hours ago, Shadorne said:

Arch & AS Vaporwarers did well to avoid this one scam. It took quite a concerted effort. Well done! It is a victory for audio science and truth.

 

With that major achievement, another obvious area of concern, and the far bigger elephant in the room, are all the claimed audible magical properties of cables.
 

I believe that elephant to be unstoppable, as there is such a large community of vested monetary interests in the gravy train of selling these accessories for good profit. Cables are a much larger community than had any indirect or direct financial interests in MQA.
 

Slay that dragon and Arch & AS Vaporwarers would be remembered perhaps forever?

I'll keep my fancy audio cables thankyouverymuch! 😀

 

Humour aside, what won out was looking into the details, and learning to understand the nuances of the science behind digital audio creation and reconstruction.  Just when you think that something is a given, you can very well find something more to learn. Sometimes what you learn goes against common beliefs. But then, if something is a "belief", then it's fallible. We are always limited by ourselves. Learning more and overcoming our limitations is more valuable than whether we are remembered or not. Memories are not permanent.

[Currawong]

I posted this in reply to the Stereophile article. Either something glitched on my end, or it has been moderated in some way, as I can't see it. With some further thought, the days of trying to take over the music industry with MQA tech are over.  Though I guess the days of reviewers and magazines burning their reputation with MQA are not.

 

Quote

"Lenbrook's position is that anyone doing work to advance audio processing and sound reproduction is positively contributing to the vibrancy of the industry."

And thus, anyone trying to regress the industry, such as MQA did, trying to intercede between music production and listening, producing lossy, fake masters which include DRM and a new purchase to decode, is contributing negatively.

 

Quote

"The vitriol directed towards innovations like MQA and what it means to those creating, delivering, and listening to better sounding music has always disappointed us when the technology and the patents that underpin it are so novel."

Fake innovation, existing only to make money, based on dishonest and false ideals will generate vitriol amongst consumers when it is revealed. The MQA group LIED about near everything their technology did, and can do. 

 

Quote

"We prefer instead to build off the fact that many influential content creators and reviewers absolutely understood that MQA was not really about 1s and 0s. We also believe that differing opinions is what makes this industry healthy—for example, we do not believe in one way to design a speaker and carefully approach product development in ways that offer differentiation and respect for individual listening preferences. A specialty hi-fi industry where there is no debate or new ideas would be commoditized far too quickly."

Nobody has an issues with different ideas or opinions. It's when a company attempts to hijack ALL music production with technology that both technically, and audibly degrades music, based upon falsehoods, that it stops becoming about just opinions.

 

Quote

"Lenbrook affirms that MQA "was born of a vision that a group of like-minded musicians and audio engineers had to give musicians the tools they needed to capture their works in high resolution . . . We have listened extensively to MQA content and believe in the results of what we actually hear."

Such as all the batch-processed TIDAL files that, in many cases, degraded classical and jazz music? A lot of people listened too, but not just to "white glove"-treated music which was rigged to impress people at carefully controlled listening sessions.

 

Quote

"The affirmation of MQA as a vital, high-resolution codec that honors the intent of artists and engineers was echoed by prominent Grammy winning producers and engineers. "

Like the artists and engineers that never commissioned their music to be processed by MQA, yet found MQA versions on TIDAL, basically insulting the extensive efforts they'd made to create their music? 

 

How about all the manufacturers that, in some cases publicly, strongly reject MQA? 

 

Quote

"The press release noted that record labels, artists, and producers continue to encode and upload new music in MQA to Tidal daily. "We also support consumer choice, and [Tidal's] current 'Max' labelling does not allow consumers to search for content in their preferred format easily and that is where our reservations about it come in." Recent changes to the Tidal app blurred this distinction, but Tidal appears to be stepping back this change."

MQA didn't support consumer choice when TIDAL removed all non-MQA versions of their music in their catalog in the past! However, TIDAL is a bit player in the music industry. It doesn't even register as even existing amongst heavyweights such as Apple, Spotify, or  Deezer.   If "consumer choice" was really the goal, then why not open source the MQA software so that anyone can create MQA music with it?

[Currawong]

7 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

in theory no music information is lost

This is the crux of it. Where does "music information" start and stop? 

[Currawong]

21 minutes ago, Fx Studio said:

Lets list all the myths the MQA anti-fans got wrong so far:

 

1) MQA is dead and buried as a format = just been bought by a major player in the audio industry.

 

2) MQA will be removed from DAC chips = No industry mention of it, or sign of ever happening.

 

3) MQA music will be unavailable after Tidal swaps them for FLAC = Millions downloaded already so never going away.

 

4) MQA DAW plugin there is no evidence that it exists = On the Way Back Machine and detailed in 2016 on MQA's website.

 

5) MQA's Time Smearing correction doesn't exist or doesn't work = Lenbrook Corp will be putting that one to bed soon as well...!

 

Is there anything you guys have got right about MQA  ??    :-)

1. A minor player.

2. Irrelevant. How many DAC chips actually have any MQA processing? A single one last I checked, which I haven't seen appear in a new device for some time. 

3. Pirated music, from Russia.  I'm sure that'll be popular.

4. A web site quote is not evidence. Show me the studios using it! Where are they? Oh wait, it hasn't been updated, so it doesn't work, so nobody is using it.

5. Time smearing correction is not physically possible. Remember, this is the thing that Bob Stuart couldn't explain, but said was "intuitive" despite claiming to have software to fix it. Then, his explanation for how linear phase filters damage the music in this manner is the opposite of the known, actual science behind digital audio reconstruction. The minimum phase filters that MQA use, as has already been repeatedly both shown to you, both with actual images, and from descriptions from industry experts, cause time smearing. The only thing you've replied is that you supposedly can hear it.   I've heard it with multiple DACs -- the filters screw up the soundstage of live recordings.

 

Prove me wrong! You can't!

[Currawong]

2 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

 

2. OMG you never check anything do you - the whole of the AKM 449x series and the ESS ES906X series of DAC chips.

 

No, the AKM chips don't have MQA decoding on board. The "single one" I was referring to though was indeed the ES906X.

 

1 hour ago, Fx Studio said:

Not according to the manufacturers who use these DAC chips they say there products are an "MQA Full Decoding."

 

The decoding in most devices (the ones excepting those that use the EX906 series) is not done on the DAC chip, or filter chip in the case of the new AKM DACs that require the 4191. It's usually done in another chip, such as the XMOS series that has MQA decoding built in. What is more, if you to AKM.COM there isn't a single mention of MQA anywhere on the entire site.

 

You really seem to have difficulty handling hard evidence, especially after some time back you asked for it, ignored it, and continue to ignore straight-up facts. 

[Currawong]

1 hour ago, Fx Studio said:

 

HELLO - seems like you ain't got any real proof that's the problem.

I provided you a whole post of evidence showing the evidence that the MQA process does not do what MQA said it does. You didn't address a single thing contained. That means that now you're just trolling. 

[Currawong]

6 hours ago, Iving said:

Many interesting and capable members have been banned or have left. Not all of them deserved severance.

 

Audiophile Style has become an echo chamber frequented by "comfortable" people with a view of enjoying music, enhanced by good gear, that is pretty significantly less than 360 degrees.

Being banned and choosing to leave are separate things. "Deserve" doesn't factor into it if they leave of their own accord.  What is more, if someone, no matter how capable in their field of expertise, decides to be repeatedly abusive, their expertise does not give them a free pass to abuse others.

I don't know about the "echo chamber" thing, unless your entire post has to do with the Objective-Fi forum and people like mansr who felt that they were "being rounded up and placed in special fenced-off pen". Unfortunately, many people whose subjective preference for objective data (that's what it is, really) insist that their perspective be the only one that can be discussed, with alternate ideas and experiences shut out. It ends up being more a religious objection (scientism) than a rational one, ultimately. Given that the scientific method is fundamentally based upon taking experiences and methodically analysing them to discover the reasons behind them, the common attempt by "objectivists" to shut down the discussion of "subjective" experiences is actually self-defeating. Likewise the reverse.

 

We see this hypocrisy in society daily, with people calling for freedom for their ideas, yet the same people objecting and trying to shut down criticism of anyone or anything that disagrees with them. I don't believe that Chris has done anything like this on the forum. It has always been, not just here, but elsewhere, the inability of people to be reasonable and discuss ideas that has necessitated changes.

 

Specific to this thread and the MQA discussion, nobody has any objection to liking the sound from an MQA set-up. I have tried it myself, and I get how it can sound seemingly more enjoyable. The objections have been to the proven false and contradictory claims, as well as the attempt by MQA to take over the hi-fi industry with a DRM scheme based upon those claims, that would force everyone to pay a fee to get access to what has been shown to be most often reduced-quality* high-res music. 

 

*Referring here to the majority of MQA music having been produced by poor-quality batch processing.

[Currawong]

2 hours ago, Fx Studio said:

There claims cross-match mine and many others experiences.

An experience you've had is not scientific evidence of anything. You're asking for evidence, provide some of your own, as we have.  For example, John Atkinson verified the distortion caused by a an MQA DAC's leaky filters in this very thread. I linked to it. The details of what was tested are in the discussion. 

[Currawong]

1 hour ago, Fx Studio said:

Its people on this forum who are making scientific claims then failing to back them up.

I linked to the details of everything mentioned in my long post, which contains evidence gathered from years of research here. You obviously didn't click on any of the links, let alone do any reading. You can't keeping saying that there's no evidence, or that people refuse to back up claims, when you refuse to read anything you're pointed to.