MQA is Vaporware

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

This really an accurate description of what happened at all Chris.  In talking to Ken and Mike, they were frustrated that your slides were so one-sided and ignored the materials that they had sent you that addressed the points you were making.  And as my ignored response showed, there were valid counterpoints to almost every slide.

 

If you had been more objective and presented both sides, then said, "I believe this side, because..." then you would have been more credible, even if you chose the anti-MQA viewpoint.  Instead the slides (as I detail herein) did not address many of the counterpoints.

 

That frustrated Ken and Mike and understandably so. 

 

This is how a child justifies a temper tantrum Lee, “You made me do it!”

 

Have they at least publicly apologized yet? 

 

This is is a terrible argument to make. No matter how they felt then, by now they should have realized how badly they behaved. That is totally without reference to any issue surrounding MQA, only looking at their behavior. 

 

Also you are assuming a lot from the slides, and a lot of those assumptions are at least questionable. You have no idea at all what Chris might have said, or how he would have opened up the floor to, questions or comments. If they had behaved like civilized people instead of barbarians at the gate, they might have been able to salvage far more respect and interest. 

 

Please reconsider your thinking on this one aspect. It is like making excuses for a spoiled child who misbehaved in public. 

 

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

This is an analogy that is too simple and misleading.  You cannot look at this solely on an individual consumer's experience and make the claim when the whole thing is about distributing music at scale.

 

Running a streaming service requires lots of bandwidth and lots of storage.  While individually both are cheap, there are many issues that these services face at the vast scales they work in.  Look at amazon or netflix.  Many times the video will stutter at night when bandwidth is heaviest. As for downloads, Qobuz hangs up on me all the time although I have fiber-optic speed.  24/192 I think requires around 9 mbps download speeds.  It's provable that many areas in the country don't have that.

 

As long as these problems persist, you cannot argue that file size compression is an idea whose time "has come and gone."

 

Umm, with respect, this is not how it works any longer. Apple has pretty vast resources, but the newer streaming services? 

 

Nope.

 

They use Amazon or IBM or other similar services - essentially they  pay for what they use, and nothing more. And even that will be at a very steeply discounted rate.  

 

It is a very effective economic model. It also means that compression is much more effective at the storage level, since that is the constant cost. And that compression absolutely must be lossless. The reasons that is true are fairly obvious. In point of fact, most transmissions are already compressed, being decompressed at the terminal end. 

 

Without getting into a lot of technical verbiage, I am afraid to convince anyone that MQA compression is valuable, technical verbiage is exactly what is needed. Okay, by that I mean more detail on how they are storing information and then retrieving it. Mmm...

 

Ask them to explain more how they have convolved the data and are avoiding/handling the traditional issues involved with a homomorphic system when they deconvolve it to retrieve the data. The point is, there are a *lot* of problems in even a simple system to do that, and it explains why their filters are shaped the way they are. It also explains why they may have came up with something that works in a novel or useful manner. They will have to explain that though. 

 

Perhaps it would be useful to be more specific here, if in a very basic sort of way. Traditionally and conventionally, they would use a homomorphic transform to convolve the audio signal with an impulse response of a delta func and a shifted and scaled delta func. That would normally be a Fourier transform followed by a logarithm.  Then linear filtering is or can be used to separate the data back and reverse the homomorphic transform. This is nothing new nor proprietary, though implementations of it can be. You can probably find it in any DSP textbook or reference. 

 

What is interesting in this case (though I am not claiming it to be the situation with MQA) is that in the linear filter, the frequency domain is processed the way one would normally process the time domain. In a FFT, for instance, the spectra being multiplied would be the time domain. “Deblurring” anyone? 

 

Anyway, I horribly simplified that, and I am sure others will probably correct it, but I do think some discussion on the technical level is needed from MQA. They are plenty smart enough to explain what they are doing in a way to pass the Feynman test and yet not give away their technical secrets, whatever those are. None of this stuff is anything a sophomore would blink an eye at.  They should talk about it at that level. 

 

Hell, if I can think of it and see the parallels with very common DSP, it is a sure bet other people already have, probably thought deeper and with more rigor.     The marketing speak about this kind of stuff not withstanding, only solid information is going to save their case.

 

This is also why even a couple years ago, people (myself included) expressed concern about DRM.  Surely you can see that the technical MQA secrets will be exposed or duplicated without too much delay. They are almost certainly based upon very well known  prior art. Once people know something has been done, it is inevitable other people will duplicate it. History is replete with examples of near simultaneous inventions. That is true even if my suppositions went down a wrong path. I expect my thinking is pretty close to the facts here, but it is pretty conventional thinking. 

 

Okay, off my soapbox now. 

 

MQA should be working hard to engage with people like Chris to help disseminate accurate knowledge and advance their cause, rather than pushing them away with the effing bad behavior and bullshit they demonstrate now.

 

Man, they should be ashamed. 

 

- Paul

 

I looked for typos, but they will be in there. This stupid iPad insists on correcting words like convolve to something else for example. 

[Paul R]

27 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

On the contrary, I saw the plot from the almost very beginning.  Your the one who took convincing.  

 

The "abrasive" turn off is not calling a spade a spade, but endless technical and non-technical "debate" with astroturfers and trade publication writers who have no intention of acknowledging the truth or anything else but their own interests.  

 

 

Talk to the technical people instead of the execs, who are repeating what they think they understand.  The streaming companies are not directly dealing with scale. They are dealing with not wanting to pay for what they use. A completely different kind of problem.

 

 

 

[Paul R]

6 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

This is the issue that MQA is trying to solve which is, "how do we get better sound if only a very small number are interested in high resolution digital?"

 

Agree or not, MQA's answer is to create a distribution approach that piggybacks it on popular streaming services.  If you give the customer easier access to hirez, you may get more fans of it.  And in the process you provide a way for the studios and labels to offer hirez and get more dollars for the artist by offering a premium tier. 

 

Eh? MQA is addressing how to better monetize streaming audio, similar to how You Tube faced the issue of how to monetize their services.  Everything else, every benefit, is addressed towards that. 

 

Streaming audio, even hi-res audio, is so much less strain on bandwidth than video that savings in bandwidth are minuscule.  AWS probably would tier the service anyway so that it makes zero impact whether you stream CD or Hi-res. Apple or Spotify would laugh themselves silly at the idea any bandwidth saved by MQA would actually even pay for the cost of MQA licensing. 

 

What on earth makes you think otherwise friend? Aren’t you in the IT business as your day job? 

[Paul R]

2 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

The only "temper tantrum" Paul was Derek pounding on the desk and Chris getting flustered and leaving.  Mike and Ken were pretty civil and stuck around to answer questions after Chris left and also after the seminar ended with Steve.

 

You really shouldn't make assumptions about the event if you were not there.

 

Bullshit.  Are you saying the video is doctored?  Or are you just being defensive and condescending for some reason?

 

And you purposely twisted what I said there. *Your* justification for their bad behavior was *exactly* what a young child uses to justify a temper tantrum. Fine to disagree, but be accurate and actually address what was said.

 

 

 

[Paul R]

56 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

 

As for what the MQA team should do, they did share a lot of information with Chris from Day 1 including the lengthy Q&A from Bob Stuart.  But they feel there is not a fair debate to be had on this forum so they are ignoring it.

 

Had to think about that. I would not want to discuss it here either, were I them. 

 

Have them post it on their own forum, publish a white paper, present at the next RMAF, or ask Chris for a moderated forum. They have plenty of options, but they do not have plenty of time. 

 

 

[Paul R]

55 minutes ago, firedog said:

 

It is still worth something in cost savings to the streaming companies (and their part owners, the record labels, who also partly own MQA Ltd.). So it's easy to see why that upset the MQA people: smaller file size and "one format for all" is a benefit to the corporations involved - not really to the consumer. That's part of the ecosystem that Lee Scoggins talks about, and why Jim Austin is in favor of MQA - they are all about "the industry" and mistakenly think "what's good for the industry is good for the consumer". Unfortunately the opposite is often true, and they want consumers  to think they are getting something when actually they are paying for a benefit to the corporations involved. 

 

I have not seen a cost benefit analysis in three years that came out in favor of cutting down streaming size by trading additional processing costs. At least not in normal environments. Space rated communication busses, yes. The U.S., Canada, most of Europe, and even the Middle East? Nope.

 

Do you know of any you can reference? Just curious by the way, not challenging. 

[Paul R]

16 minutes ago, Dr Tone said:

 

 

Oooh that’s what they should have called it: MVA “Magic Voodoo Audio”!

 

 friend of mine who is a pseudo-audiophile, but mostly just a county ag agent, just read some of this and asked me:

 

” Missing Quite Alot, aren’t they?”  (Capitals are mine. PR)

 

Not it sure if he intended it or not, but it was just so dang .... whatever

[Paul R]

40 minutes ago, mcgillroy said:

Not sure if this was discussed here already but a new patent application by Peter Craven and Bob Stuart was published late February:

 

DIGITAL ENCAPSULATION OF AUDIO SIGNALS - http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0057709.html

 

See also here: https://www.gearslutz.com/board/showpost.php?p=13859201&postcount=541

 

 

Oh my - just read a bit of it, but it sounds like they are trying patent the whole idea of digital audio, though even the few pages I read are full of mistakes. For example, the sampling theory is stated incorrectly. (*sigh*)  

 

I bet bet they run into interference. 🤪

[Paul R]

49 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Was thinking of something similar myself. A thread people can digest if they just want to see MQA for what it is. 

 

I think it would be a good idea, but it needs to be moderated fairly heavily.

 

Just saying that we don't need all the personal attacks and abrasiveness, calling people ignorant, and finger pointing. Not if it is intended to be a place to attract people for real information. 

 

 

-Paul

 

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, crenca said:

 At this point, anybody who maintains that there is a technical justification for any of MQA's aspects is either ignorant or a confidence man.  

 

 

2 minutes ago, MikeyFresh said:

 

Not only has that always been the case via the site's rules, but I'm at a loss to identify this supposed preponderance of attacks and the like. Who was called ignorant and when?

 

I must have missed something.

 

You certainly did. 

 

[Paul R]

4 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Well Paul R attacked me right of the audio journalists handbook.

 

And the farmer hauled yet another load away.

 

This is the kind of patented nonsense that is giving this place a bad reputation. 

 

Just saying, we don't need it. Not if you want a thread that may actually influence people to at least think about the facts and draw sane judgements. 

 

-Paul 

 

And, that is all I will say on the subject.  People do have the right to go to hell in whatever manner they choose. I am just sad to see this wonderful place dragged down with it. 

 

[Paul R]

58 minutes ago, mansr said:

Has anyone actually read Moby Dick?

 

How could anyone get through high school without reading it?  It actually turned out to be enjoyable, and you pick up these references all over the place.

Like chasing the white whale perhaps. 

 

Paul 

 

[Paul R]

And now, for a dose of reality - what the big boys are arguing over, and it ain’t MQA...

 

https://apple.news/AgsY32FXTTEOd8cAPZPkReg

 

 

-Paul

[Paul R]

22 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

I was going to ask whether on Apple's part or Spotify's, before realizing the answer is yes.

Now now, nothing particularly wrong with greed, it is a very effective force. Just when it gets out of control, it’s like a forest fire.

 

[Paul R]

3 hours ago, Shadders said:

Isn't it one of the deadly sins ?

 

Surely the word in itself indicates a bad characteristic or trait ?

 

In what circumstance is "greed" of a benefit ?  (serious question)

 

I would suggest greed is just like any other human emotion, it can be directed to good or bad ends. 

 

If someone wants to make a lot of money, the best way to satisfy that greed is to build or create something other people are willing to pay for.

 

Building well means you can charge a fair price and retain the profits. Building poorly means either it won't sell, or you will be involved in so much litigation that the profits will disappear. 

 

 

[Paul R]

3 hours ago, fung0 said:

 

Like fire, greed is an inherently destructive force. It can't be eradicated from existence, but it is dangerous and must be tightly controlled at all times.

 

Human systems are not fundamentally driven by greed, but by cooperation. Humans have risen to dominate this planet by virtue of their unrivaled ability to band together in vast, highly complex cooperative endeavors.

 

What's more, most individual people are not driven by greed. For the vast majority of us, enough really is enough. All of us have ambitions, but the few who preach 'greed is good' are parasitic outliers, who ask us to accept the gospel that would justify their own pathological craving for dominance.

 

It's worrisome that so many people have bought into this con. Gullibility is an unfortunate consequence of our innate need to cooperate, and is a primary mechanism exploited by those cancerous individuals who really are motivated by greed. Reason and communication are parts of the immune system that have been broken down of late, and must be rebuilt.

 

I was being a little cheekey with the comment you replied to. 

 

But greed in its simplest form, is simply wanting more than you need. Who defines exactly how much someone needs? Society? Government? Church? Bible/Koran/Tao? A televangelist? 

 

It is a very slipperly slope, and the "Sin of Greed" was indisputably used to control and pacify the poorer classes over and over historically.

"You have enough slop to eat that you are not starving! Be grateful to [God||King||Government||etc]!!"

 

I think we all want more than we need, and work to get that. In that sense, greed is nothing more than another motivation to work hard and succeed. 

 

-Paul 

 

 

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, John Dyson said:

This is a slight deviation off the subject, and NOT, NEVER meant to be disrespectful to anyone...  However, in the rock-hard professional audio/recording community (I am on the periphery only), there is a disrespectful term sometimes used when chortling about some of the misguided audio lovers who REALLY want to do the right thing, but have been misled in a very  very cruel way -- 'audiofool'.  Now, DO NOT take offense, because I had been an audiophile in the past -- but as a technically knowledgeable person, seldom (never) ventured into the insanely esoteric realm -- just the technically best that I could afford.

 

However, there is a big group (I don't know how large) of people who *love* audio, and want their experience to be as good as possible given their limitations.  It is sometimes best to have 'financial lmitations', common sense, and a bit of ACCURATE technical knowledge. There ARE profit mongers who are so much in love of taking advantage of the (affluent) audio lovers, that it is sickening. (This is similar to the MQA issue, and advocacy that is either misguided (term intended kindly by me) or misleading (intended unkindly by me.)

 

MQA seems to be a media/software variant on the general l$100K CD player theme:  How can we 'soak' people for their money?

 

These snake oil people are not stupid (usually), but seem to be willing to claim half-truths to vulnerable people.  I don't care if someone has lots of money to waste, but PLEASE I hope that those with the ability to waste spend their money in a way that it benefits more than their egos.  Get the reasonbly technical best equipment that you can, really DO THAT!!!  Get the best, not 'better' than the best!!!

 

If someone is planning to purchase something that is 'better than the best', or somehow 'elite' -- please tell them caveat emptor in the kindest way possible.  I truly feel bad for people who misspend their money, or the similar idea about schemes like MQA -- it is for the purpose of control and/or money -- it is not intended to benefit either the customer or the artist!!!

 

My two cents -- again...  And I did NOT mean to disrepect anyone, but rather to make a kind and supportive wakeup call.  I could make stronger emotional complaints about MQA, but I now suspect that the knowledgeable person, who doesn't have a specific financial/political interest has already been dissuaded (by others cogent comments and explanation.)  It (and other unnecessary complexities)  just aren't in the best interests of most people in the audio community.

 

John

(grin) 

 

A couple of my friends and myself sometimes refer to some of our audiophile friends as going through various stages, ranging from Newbie to Mature. It is not, of course, fully applicable to everyone, but it is amusing how well some folks fit into the 7 Stages of Audiophile Development.  

 

1. Baby Audiophile - buys lower cost gear, gets hooked on audiophile sound
    
2. Toddler Audiophile - buys more and higher level gear, usually with some suspicious and critical thinking
    
3. Pre-Adolescent Audiophile - buys some really expensive gear, starts to wonder if it makes sense, because does not really hear that much of a difference. Defends purchases with vigor because it cost an arm and a leg, looses all critical thinking
    
4. Adolescent Audiophile - Rebels, goes and buys pro gear …
    
5. Young adult Audiofile - Realizes the music is probably about as important as the gear, or that they are never going to be absolutely satisfied. Regains ability to think critically about audio gear
    
6. Adult Audiophile - Specializes in one area, computer audio, streaming, portable, vinyl, etc. Passionate, but also critical, keeps a hold of his wallet. 
    
7. Old Fart Audiophile - spends as little as possible, gleefully uses pro gear where appropriate, enjoys a lot of audiophile grade listening, snears at super expensive cables and secretly uses 12g lamp cord for his speakers. 

*This is purely a work of fiction, no resemblence to any person, living or dead is intended. Of course, some people fall way outside this scale.

 

-Paul

 

 

 

[Paul R]

3 hours ago, fung0 said:

 

As you point out, your definition requires an omniscient judgment of 'need.' It is therefore prejudicial and tailor-made to be abused. Are Yemeni's being 'greedy' if they want more food than they need to stave off malnutrition? Waste the word 'greed' on that, and you leave yourself no label for the real thing.

 

What I call 'greed' is wanting more than you've got without regard for how much is available to share among all those with needs. That's the 'motivation' that leads inexorably to the mess Earth is in right now.

 

That is an excellent post, and you ask a really good question. 

 

If I remember correctly, Yemin is still in a rather vicious civil war between Hadi's government and the Houthi movement? None of the armed forces seem to be going short of rations, on either side, and a ton of food aid is shipped there by dozens of organizations. Even a very brief search reveals there is much corruption, and food aid theft is at least one of the reasons why anyone there will go hungry.  ( This is from memory, I have not been following the developing events over there. )

 

To me, that suggest that the people do not have enough security, opportunity, and just plain peace to even accumulate enough of what they need. So wanting more of what they actually need is probably not greed. Not to my way of thinking at least. Yemen was a fairly rich country at one time, was it not?  What is the reason that is no longer true?

 

It seems to me that the two conflicting political / religious groups have a strong need for power over other people, and to be thought "right." They obviously do not have enough of what they want either, but I would call their attempts to gain it an expression of greed. An expression of the worst kind of greed in fact. 

 

I do not think any of this is really simple, and certainly you make some very good points. The problem I have is that the opposite of that definition lands smack dab in socialism. Being told how much I am worth, how much my contribution to society must be, and so on. This is the very antithesis of freedom and free will to me. 

 

-Paul

[Paul R]

Just had had an amusing experience - received an "anonymous" email threatening me with havoc if I continued to "shill" for MQA, and that someone would totally ruin my online reputation.  

 

Then I log on here and see that someone named ""maxijazz is running through all my posts and disagreeing with them. Not that it particularly matters, or even that I care if someone disagrees with me. I am very liberatarian about that.  But it's funny!!  MQA will be taking over the world!!!  To Arms To Arms!!!!

 

 

Speaking of which, has anyone compared the 2L samples of "Innocence"  against the MQA file? Dang if the MQA file isn't smaller and sounds better too. It says it unfolds to this. I have not captured the output and ran it through an analyzer. Would someone please suggest what I will find when I do? 

 

Not challenging, but the correctness of any theory is the validity and accuracy of its predictions.  I think I know what I will see. 

 

-Paul 

 

 

 

[Paul R]

24 minutes ago, Jud said:

 

Not tonight 'cause it's late, but I want to suggest what may be a better way to listen and compare MQA and original files using @pkane2001's Delta Wave software.

That's a good idea. But tomorrow perhaps, as it is getting late. 

 

-Paul 

 

[Paul R]

4 hours ago, mansr said:

That is unacceptable, no way around it.

 

Is that track among the free samples they offer? As for your question, the MQA stream will first be decompressed to 88.2 kHz. The result will be close to whatever went into the compression stage of the encoder. If you have an MQA capable DAC, this will be further upsampled to some higher rate its chip can accept. This might be 352.8 kHz or something else. The number displayed by Roon is the sample rate of the original master. The decoding/rendering process is not required to produce this rate at any stage, and if it does, anything beyond 88.2 kHz is merely the result of upsampling. Any actual content above 44.1 kHz has been discarded by the encoder.

 

Yes, I was just playing around this afternoon, and setup a blind  A/B rotation on it for 4 plays each, skipping to the next track after 40 seconds. Surprised that 4 out of 4 times, I liked the MQA version better. I do not think it is better though. 

 

I captured the playback both in analog form to have a look, and will do a digital capture to see if I can figure it out. 

 

-Paul 

 

[Paul R]

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

 

Very much off-topic... the answers are not hard to find.

 

It was your example, not mine. The answers are indeed easy to find, you just do not like them and so, invent reasons you like better. 

 

People  like to think problems the political civil war in Yemen have easy answers where nobody gets hurt.  It does not work that way in the real world. It is messy, and bloody, and a real real horror. People are killing babies over there, and there is not one damn thing we or anyone else can do about it without killing a lot of people. And even then, nothing will change without a vast social change first. 

 

Just look at Israel if you want to see an example of an oppressed people standing up for themselves. I do not agree with everything Israel does, but they do not hide from the cost of continuing to exist on their own terms. 

 

That is what you are comparing to MQA. Off topic? You bet. MQA is utterly meaningless beside any of that. 

 

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

 

 

None of this is even remotely 'socialism.'

 

Seriously? 

 

 

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

That's an even bigger topic... but, as it happens, not entirely irrelevant to the issue of MQA. Because it is our current monopoly-capitalist 'free market' that allows a handful of giant corporations to decide that consumers WILL have MQA, regardless of logic, science or the will of the majority.

 

Yet, nobody is holding a gun to anyone’s head and saying you must buy music. You disregard or ignore the facts that a large library of non-DRM material already exists, and that there are and always will be non-MQA venues to enjoy even audiophile grade music without MQA. When and if MQA has the power to prevent a live concert from happening, or someone from distributing their music without MQA, then... maybe. That is one big assed if too. 

 

 

 

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

This is the very antithesis of freedom and free will to me.

 

And it is why we must resist MQA by every means at our disposal. Not just because it's a horrible idea technically, or because it threatens to reduce our listening options. But, more importantly, because it represents the front line in our battle against growing corporate domination of our lives.

 

While a future dominated by evil corporations is indeed a scary thing, there is an enormous way to go before that will get to a point where a corporation can literally put a gun to your head and force you to buy music. It is simply scare tactics to assume otherwise. Or to conflate resisting MQA with say, the situation in Yemen. 

 

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

Sony, for example, previously imposed its corporate will on our buying choices in video. Technology and logic favored the HD DVD standard - a rather benign extrapolation of the previous DVD spec. But Sony wanted more control. So it built a Blu-ray drive into its PlayStation 3 and sold that games system at a tremendous loss. This deep-pockets ploy seeded enough Blu-ray drives into homes that Sony was able to claim market victory over HD DVD. (Even though the vast majority of those Blu-ray drives were used solely to load games, not HD video content.) Content producers acquiesced, and consumers were saddled with a far more cumbersome, far more proprietary, and more heavily DRM-ed distribution format. (Blu-ray had stronger region coding than DVD, for example, while HD DVD had none at all.)

 

Okay, and what happened when streaming became a viable option for almost everyone? What was the impact on blu-Ray sales? 

 

And most importantly, Blu-Ray did offer significant improvement in video and sound over DVD. DVDs were a vast improvement over VHS and Laserdisc. 

 

Streaming offers significant improvement over Blu-Ray by the way, if you consider 4K an improvement. Certainly, a vast increase of video material is now available to almost anyone, anytime. Same is true in music. 

 

 

1 hour ago, fung0 said:

We don't need to argue the relative merits of HD DVD and Blu-ray, to see the clear precedent for what is being done with MQA. This cumbersome and unnecessary new audio format is being quietly seeded into every distribution system, and into increasing numbers of hardware devices. Very soon, the big music publishers, including Sony, will be able to claim that MQA is a de facto standard. Even though consumers never asked for it, will derive less benefit from it than from any of the alternatives (e.g. FLAC), and will have no choice but to foot the bill.

 

Good luck getting rid of it after that.

 

Won’t need luck. In the unlikely event your dystopian audio future does happen, we are only one technological jump away from obsoleting it.

 

The question is merely are there enough audiophiles with enough economic resources to make selling them non MQA music profitable? If the answer is yes, then they will continue to sell non-DRMed high res music at a premium. If not, they won’t. Simple as that. 

 

That’s assuming of course, a MQA distribution lock ever really happens, and that is a big assumption. 

 

 

 

[Paul R]

2 hours ago, firedog said:

 

Sorry for flogging the same dead horse once again, but I will point out that if your ifi DAC has been updated to the MQA capable firmware, then it is playing all files with the MQA filters - even non MQA ones - once the MQA filter kicks in during any listening session. It can't switch back and forth between the filters and corresponding file type. This gives a slanted result to the playback that favors MQA.

 

It is indeed using the same set of filters, but... there does not seem to be an easy way around that. 

 

[Paul R]

3 hours ago, Shadders said:

Hi,

I do not know why you wrote this. I assume you are attempting to inflame the discussion ?

 

I am am not of course. I do think that Opposing MQA is important, but MQA will never ever have the impact of a civil war (except among audiophiles perhaps) and it is also very important to remember that. No matter what, nobody is going to be killed over whether or not they support or do not support MQA.

 

And making ridiculous comparisons is only going to hurt any efforts to moderate or stop MQA. 

 

 

Quote

 

If MQA becomes the only format, then it forces EVERY person who builds a product such as a DAC or digital audio device, into the same situation - they MUST pay MQA Ltd the licence costs etc., per product sold.

 

If you do NOT pay the licence fees, then your product is automatically inferior, by virtue that you could only ever play the degraded MQA file (13bit to 15bit PCM + NOISE).

 

Why should an entertainment source such as music, suddenly become proprietary format only, where the format offers inferior sound ?

 

Regards,

Shadders.

 

You can certainly create video today and stream it using no cost protocols, even hi res video. You can also create music to go along with that video and distribute it. You can even put what you create on disc and have a proprietary blu ray players play it back, without paying for copy protection, though the video industry froths vilely at that capability. 

 

Somehow, the music will survive. Even if all the opposition to MQA fails, which it certainly won’t. 

 

Unless it gets off into silly silly rants and personal attacks. 

 

4 hours ago, John Dyson said:

At one time, Google wasn't the only real player, and always had the motto rougly said 'do good things' or something like that.  What do we have now? -- a singular major search engine -- lots of money -- lots of tentacles...  I knew one of the YAHOO guys -- they were reasonably big, but there was also Alta Vista, and others.  Google got a leg-up with some very good proprietary algorithms -- and blew everyone else away.  Now -- we certainly cannot say that MQA is anything like the leg-up that Google had... However, it is very possible that Google would have become the monster that it is -- whether or not they had the super technology.

 

What REALLY GOOD search engines do you have now?  We don't allow flac on any players that can use MQA -- sound like typical big corporation?  You got the idea?

 

DRM represents a 'control' over peoples choices IF THEY WANT MUSIC.  For example, my DolbyA thing -- imagine all of the music, left undecoded, in MQA format -- how can you REALLY recover the recording then?  Do you purchase the $1000 MQA DolbyA decoder -- because of the licensing, or purchase a reasonable cost decoder MAYBE $300 or so (like the DHNRDS) sometime in the future?

 

MQA represents an attempt at monopoly - simple as that.

 

John

 

Just a matter of scale John. Google took over because they offered the service at no-cost to the entire internet, and made a point to “do no evil.”  Alta-Vista died more as a result of DEC being bought by Compaq than anything else. Wolfram-Alpha is out there, as are Bing and Ali-Baba. There is competition. 

 

I see your point, of course. Even agree with it.