MQA is Vaporware

[UkPhil]

@GoldenOne I see your efforts has got you added to  the wiki MQA page 

 

[KeenObserver]

3 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

This is exactly what Charlatans and Pseudo Experts do when exposed. They move the goal posts, speak out of both sides of their mouths, and the classic "Yes, but..." 

 

Both Amir and Atkinson are the useful idiots MQA hoped to recruit, and they got what they wanted. And in turn all of them are the laughing stock and have no credibility.

 

Harley and Atkinson have no choice but to continue on the path that they went down. If MQA fails for being the miserable scheme that it has been  shown to be, that will be their legacy. They promoted it and pronounced it the greatest achievement in audio, akin to the discoveries of Copernicus.

Their legacies live or die with MQA.

MQA is a horrible scheme that should have been stillborn.

The fact that Bob Stuart still tries to push this scheme leads me to totally despise him. No Engineering Society award will wipe the stink off.

[The Computer Audiophile]

21 minutes ago, KeenObserver said:

The fact that Bob Stuart still tries to push this scheme

He has to. He told me, “We’ve spent millions of dollars on this.” As if I should just go with it because his investors have lost a lot of money so far. 

[botrytis]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

He has to. He told me, “We’ve spent millions of dollars on this.” As if I should just go with it because his investors have lost a lot of money so far. 

 

This is all I can think of...

 

[botrytis]

And just remember :D

 

 

ha - a chemist joke.

[botrytis]

[Josh Mound]

5 hours ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

 

Ok, so let me see if I'm following this logic:

 

• Amir literally makes a name for himself by...... using test signals to test DAC performance.  Not music, TEST SIGNALS
• But test signals are suddenly not suitable to evaluate the performance of an audio CODEC

 

I call shenanigans!!!  We know a lot about the performance of CODECs such as MP3 and AAC because..... TEST SIGNALS!!!

 

 

This has always been the infuriating part of his defense of MQA. What’s the point of seeking ever-greater SINAD scores or sharp attenuation filters on a DAC if you’re going to feed it MQA?
 

Amir has said he decided to start ASR because he was so upset with the “poor” measurements of the original Schiit Modi. But based on what Golden’s tests show, if fed lossless PCM the original Modi surely would sound better than a “state of the art” measuring DAC fed MQA!

[Currawong]

3 hours ago, JoshM said:

Amir has said he decided to start ASR because he was so upset with the “poor” measurements of the original Schiit Modi.

 

This is how hate-forums start: They pick a manufacturer they don't like, and then fanatically go on and on about how everything about that manufacturer's products are bad. Schiit just got around it by making products for people who only care about numbers (whom most often can't afford good hi-fi gear and like to project their self-hate on manufacturers that make expensive products) so Amir couldn't use that angle any more.

[Currawong]

15 hours ago, StephenJK said:

I always thought that John Atkinson was well respected from his days at Stereophile as Editor through many stormy seas with various ownership changes. 

 

And, he may still be - all those years of careful deliberation and quantitative measurements that build a reputation shouldn't be lost that easily.  

 

But I do recall some fuzziness way back when all this MQA talk started - he seemed to be on the supportive side initially, and it would seem may still be.  Hasn't he posted on this topic here a few times?  

 

What I believe, still, to be the case, is that JA and others were genuinely wowed by whatever the MQA group presented back then. I believe that, at the time, the MQA group were taking JA's recordings, and others, and using whatever actual process they had invented based on the AES paper. That processing may have, indeed, resulted in music that sounds wonderful. According to one, albeit university student who has analysed it, the maths in the paper is correct, even if I consider trying to de-blur an impulse response to be a load of BS.

 

Anyhow, very often Stereophile writers were handing over music directly to the MQA group for processing, and, in cases where it was analysed, receiving it back without it having gone through the origami compression, and thus still showing completely intact content when a spectrum was posted. If I'm wrong, @John_Atkinson can correct me.

 

However, after spending millions in developing this system, MQA realised that if they just started with new recordings, it'd be forever before they got a return on their investment. So, they decided to make an "MQA Lite" of sorts to batch process pre-MQA music. Since they must have been aware that the compression system alone wouldn't make enough of an audible difference to end users, they must have decided to deliberately process old music in a way that would make the average person think it sounded better. Thus, the bass-boost-EQ'ing of older music, and consequent loss of detail.  That leaves them a huge catalog of what they can call 'MQA' and get the name out there, even if it essentially junks the music and the result contradicts the original claims about the format.

 

The new stuff... MQA music I've tried that went through the actual process sounds very weird through an Yggdrasil, and like it has been put through some kind of 3D plug-in on low settings. It'd be interesting for a highly experienced mastering engineer to analyse the before an after of actual albums and figure out if they are really doing what they claim in the AES paper or not.

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

4 hours ago, Currawong said:

 

What I believe, still, to be the case, is that JA and others were genuinely wowed by whatever the MQA group presented back then. I believe that, at the time, the MQA group were taking JA's recordings, and others, and using whatever actual process they had invented based on the AES paper. That processing may have, indeed, resulted in music that sounds wonderful. According to one, albeit university student who has analysed it, the maths in the paper is correct, even if I consider trying to de-blur an impulse response to be a load of BS.

 

Anyhow, very often Stereophile writers were handing over music directly to the MQA group for processing, and, in cases where it was analysed, receiving it back without it having gone through the origami compression, and thus still showing completely intact content when a spectrum was posted. If I'm wrong, @John_Atkinson can correct me.

 

However, after spending millions in developing this system, MQA realised that if they just started with new recordings, it'd be forever before they got a return on their investment. So, they decided to make an "MQA Lite" of sorts to batch process pre-MQA music. Since they must have been aware that the compression system alone wouldn't make enough of an audible difference to end users, they must have decided to deliberately process old music in a way that would make the average person think it sounded better. Thus, the bass-boost-EQ'ing of older music, and consequent loss of detail.  That leaves them a huge catalog of what they can call 'MQA' and get the name out there, even if it essentially junks the music and the result contradicts the original claims about the format.

 

The new stuff... MQA music I've tried that went through the actual process sounds very weird through an Yggdrasil, and like it has been put through some kind of 3D plug-in on low settings. It'd be interesting for a highly experienced mastering engineer to analyse the before an after of actual albums and figure out if they are really doing what they claim in the AES paper or not.

The facts, and JA's own words point to the scenario that they through "journalism" out the window, and provided zero critical thinking to the snake oil that was being peddled. It also clearly showed that Atkinson and his cohorts had their interests aligned with the industry, and not the consumer.

 

Let's re-examine a few beauties....if we may..  Many more can be found.

 

"I believe that this time-domain behavior is responsible for the superb sound quality I heard at the Meridian dem. As I wrote, I have sent Bob some of my own hi-rez files for MQA mastering, so that I will be able to compare the sound of the MQA version both with the original files and with the "Red Book" baseband version on a non-MQA DAC."

 

"As MQA needs to be applied at the mastering stage in a recording's production, it doesn't improve the sound quality of your existing CD collection. It is really only relevant to downloads."

 

"...the impulse response of the complete system, from ADC to DAC, had been adjusted to be of the order of the sensitivity of the human ear-brain"

 

He DID get one thing right!!

 

This is conjecture on my part but there is a huge commercial benefit for the record industry with MQA that is not true about FLAC etc: the record company will no longer be selling a duplicate of their master.."

 

All above from the comments section of his infamous post where he heard "the birth of a new world".

 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/ive-heard-future-streaming-meridians-mqa

 

 

 

 

[danadam]

On 4/20/2021 at 7:33 PM, GoldenOne said:

The fact that amir has suddenly 180'd from his usual stance that gear can be evaluated solely using steady state signals and ideal test conditions, to now saying that this testing is invalid because it doesn't represent music, is rather odd.....

Did you infer that, for some reason, from what he said about testing lossy codecs? Or did he actually said this about testing gear? Got any links to that?

 

On 4/20/2021 at 8:51 PM, Dr Tone said:

He's been an MQA fanboy for a while.  He sells a few high dollar MQA pieces through his business, bashing MQA wouldn't be good for that business.

Is it still the same "fanboyism" that charlesphoto was talking about:

 

Or does not bashing equal being a fanboy nowadays?

 

On 4/20/2021 at 11:04 PM, Samuel T Cogley said:

I call shenanigans!!!  We know a lot about the performance of CODECs such as MP3 and AAC because..... TEST SIGNALS!!!

Do you have any examples? All I'm aware of are only listening tests on hydrogenaud.io but they use music samples.

 

Apparently there are some AES papers about testing codecs, but they also use music samples:

https://www.audiosciencereview_AUDIOPHILESTYLE_IS_CHILDISH.com/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/post-753835

Unfortunately it is amirm's post, so it probably doesn't count on this forum.

 

18 hours ago, Currawong said:

This is how hate-forums start: They pick a manufacturer they don't like, and then fanatically go on and on about how everything about that manufacturer's products are bad.

It's funny that you wrote that in this thread in particular :)

[The Computer Audiophile]

20 minutes ago, danadam said:

AUDIOPHILESTYLE_IS_CHILDISH

If you don’t like AS, you are free to leave at anytime. 

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

46 minutes ago, danadam said:

Did you infer that, for some reason, from what he said about testing lossy codecs? Or did he actually said this about testing gear? Got any links to that?

 

Is it still the same "fanboyism" that charlesphoto was talking about:

 

Or does not bashing equal being a fanboy nowadays?

 

Do you have any examples? All I'm aware of are only listening tests on hydrogenaud.io but they use music samples.

 

Apparently there are some AES papers about testing codecs, but they also use music samples:

https://www.audiosciencereview_AUDIOPHILESTYLE_IS_CHILDISH.com/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/post-753835

Unfortunately it is amirm's post, so it probably doesn't count on this forum.

 

It's funny that you wrote that in this thread in particular :)

 

What color are your ASR knee pads? Do they have the ASR logo on them?😅

[Josh Mound]

9 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

The facts, and JA's own words point to the scenario that they through "journalism" out the window, and provided zero critical thinking to the snake oil that was being peddled. It also clearly showed that Atkinson and his cohorts had their interests aligned with the industry, and not the consumer.

 

Let's re-examine a few beauties....if we may..  Many more can be found.

 

"I believe that this time-domain behavior is responsible for the superb sound quality I heard at the Meridian dem. As I wrote, I have sent Bob some of my own hi-rez files for MQA mastering, so that I will be able to compare the sound of the MQA version both with the original files and with the "Red Book" baseband version on a non-MQA DAC."

 

"As MQA needs to be applied at the mastering stage in a recording's production, it doesn't improve the sound quality of your existing CD collection. It is really only relevant to downloads."

 

"...the impulse response of the complete system, from ADC to DAC, had been adjusted to be of the order of the sensitivity of the human ear-brain"

 

He DID get one thing right!!

 

This is conjecture on my part but there is a huge commercial benefit for the record industry with MQA that is not true about FLAC etc: the record company will no longer be selling a duplicate of their master.."

 

All above from the comments section of his infamous post where he heard "the birth of a new world".

 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/ive-heard-future-streaming-meridians-mqa

 

 

 

 

Did JA ever get the files back? Was that comparison ever written up?

 

I’m still just struggling to understand how anyone believed processing existing PCM into MQA was going to create something better than the input file. 

[Josh Mound]

51 minutes ago, danadam said:

Did you infer that, for some reason, from what he said about testing lossy codecs? Or did he actually said this about testing gear? Got any links to that?

 

Is it still the same "fanboyism" that charlesphoto was talking about:

 

Or does not bashing equal being a fanboy nowadays?

 

Do you have any examples? All I'm aware of are only listening tests on hydrogenaud.io but they use music samples.

 

Apparently there are some AES papers about testing codecs, but they also use music samples:

https://www.audiosciencereview_AUDIOPHILESTYLE_IS_CHILDISH.com/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/post-753835

Unfortunately it is amirm's post, so it probably doesn't count on this forum.

 

It's funny that you wrote that in this thread in particular :)

I don’t think we need to read to deeply into why Amir has a soft spot for DRM schemes.  From the DOJ’s antitrust case against Microsoft:

 

[Ishmael Slapowitz]

13 minutes ago, JoshM said:

Did JA ever get the files back? Was that comparison ever written up?

 

I’m still just struggling to understand how anyone believed processing existing PCM into MQA was going to create something better than the input file. 

He sure did. Bob Stuart made sure his Useful Idiot got his files post haste..

 

"I had sent MQA's Bob Stuart the 24/88.2 masters of some of my recordings, for him to produce MQA versions."

 

"Amazing Grace: The first of two recordings of mine I used for my comparisons and for which Bob Stuart had prepared MQA versions, this arrangement by Eriks Esenvalds opens and closes with solo soprano, set against a choral vocalise. I've always been happy with the sound of the original 24/88.2 WAV file, but with the MQA version, Genna McAllister's angelic vocal line stands a little more forward from the choral halo, which itself sounds a little farther back than I'm used to. Overall, there was simply less ambiguity in the spatial relationships between the singers and the surrounding acoustic with the MQA version."

 

"Water Night: The scoring of this choral work by contemporary composer Eric Whitacre is complex and occasionally dense. But with the MQA version, the inner voices were better differentiated. And as with "Amazing Grace," the relationships of each of the singers to each other and the surrounding space seemed better defined. The reverberation tails in the warmly supportive acoustic of St. Stephen's Catholic Church, in Portland, Oregon, faded cleanly into the room tone in both cases, but at one place in the recording the MQA version just sounded more real: About two seconds before the singers start, there is a very quiet noise toward the back of the choir. It sounds somewhat like a generic tick on the original WAV file, more like a sound made by a human being in a real space in the MQA version."

 

Bollocks, as they say in the land of warm beer.

 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/listening-mqa

 

[KeenObserver]

3 hours ago, danadam said:

It's funny that you wrote that in this thread in particular :)

 

It's terrible that this thread tells the truth about MQA.

[Norton]

6 hours ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

What color are your ASR knee pads? Do they have the ASR logo on them?😅

What a coincidence that you and banned member Brinkman Ship should share such a distinctive turn of phrase...

[John_Atkinson]

22 hours ago, Currawong said:

Very often Stereophile writers were handing over music directly to the MQA group for processing, and, in cases where it was analysed, receiving it back without it having gone through the origami compression, and thus still showing completely intact content when a spectrum was posted. If I'm wrong, @John_Atkinson can correct me.

That's not correct. The MQA-encoded files were all 24/44.1k.

 

John Atkinson

Technical Editor, Stereophile

[KeenObserver]

3 hours ago, Norton said:

What a coincidence that you and banned member Brinkman Ship should share such a distinctive turn of phrase...

 

Seems like if anyone touches a nerve and comes too close to the truth about MQA it is implied that they are banned member Brinkmanship.

Mr. Quint implied that I was Brinkmanship.

[The Computer Audiophile]

It would be a great experiment if someone without any digital audio bonafides created a marketing scheme that said he'd just invented MP6. It's twice as good as MP3, perceptually lossless, and is inside a FLAC container. However, it was really just MQA files in the FLAC container. 

 

Does anyone think

1. The product would even get considered by the old guard or

2. It would be hailed as the birth of a new digital world? 

 

MQA is essentially MP6. A lossy perceptual encoding scheme packed inside a lossless container. 

[Temporal_Dissident]

https://hackaday.com/2021/04/21/mythbusting-tidals-mqa-format-how-does-it-measure-up/

 

 

[JoeWhip]

2 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

That's not correct. The MQA-encoded files were all 24/44.1k.

 

John Atkinson

Technical Editor, Stereophile

John, do you not think that the differences you heard could be created in settings in playback software? That is one of my beefs with MQA. I want to hear the original file. If I want something that sounds better to my ears, I can do that with software or even a graphic equalizer or something like the Schiit Loki. 

[GoldenOne]

It may be of interest, but I had a conversation with someone in the industry recently who shared a little insight.

 

Bob Stuart apparently created a new format originally for what was the Ponoplayer.

Bob then later began marketing it standalone as MQA after Neil refused to incorporate it into the PonoPlayer.

 

Additionally, and I'm intentionally leaving details out for now until a few things are confirmed but, it might actually be the case that MQA doesn't have the full intellectual property rights to their product and the way they are currently operating may not be legal.
GPL is an interesting area....

This is from Neil Young's book "To Feel the Music" (Thank you Rusty Shackleford for posting):

“Stuart had been attending our monthly development meetings at Neil’s ranch as the team’s audio expert. But as we progressed with the development of the player, it was Gallatin who designed the player’s electronics, while Stuart provided suggestions and comments along the way. Stuart’s main contribution was to be his software.

In these meetings Stuart would describe his software in general terms with little specificity. He explained it as something very complex that involved encoding and decoding using both software and hardware. But he was always reluctant to provide specific details about when we’d see it.

I could sense that Neil was becoming frustrated and impatient, because that software was critical to completing and testing the player. It was not only Neil; the entire development team had begun to wonder whether we’d ever see anything. It made us all very nervous.”

“To signify that a file was authentic, Bob Stuart came up with the idea to put a blue light on the Pono player that would go on when a Pono recording was being played, letting the user know that the recording was Pono: the highest resolution, a pure, unaltered file.”

“Finally, in our November monthly meeting, Stuart said he was ready to discuss the terms for Pono using the software. Hamm flew to the UK to meet with him and the investors in Meridian: the Richemont Group, a Switzerland-based company that owns a number of European luxury fashion brands.

The terms they proposed to Hamm included monthly payments, royalties for each player sold, more stock, and no exclusivity. The terms were much more onerous than Pono could afford and made no business sense based on normal industry standards. Not only would the software not be exclusive to Pono, but it also restricted what Pono could do with it. For example, if Pono was sold or licensed its player to be built or sold by another company, then his technology could not be included.

During these negotiations, Hamm explained our economics and tried to negotiate a more favorable arrangement. Discussions and negotiations continued for several months and included Hamm, Elliot, Neil, Cohen, and Stuart and his investors, but they never were able to come to an agreement.

When I interviewed Stuart for this book, he thought that Pono management had been unreasonable by not accepting his terms, because of the value his software would provide. Stuart felt its value was much greater than what Pono believed it to be. Stuart’s software eventually became the basis for a proprietary compression technology called MQA.”

“Charley dismissed Stuart’s technology as solving a problem that didn’t exist and therefore no longer needed solving. We had no reason to shrink the files at all, since memory and file size were not the issues they had been years earlier. Like Neil, he was opposed to a new proprietary music format that added new restrictions to the music files and was controlled by for-profit companies.”

“Bob Stuart contacted our lawyer, Rick Cohen, and said we were disclosing confidential information on our Kickstarter website. He was referring to an image of the inside of the Pono player that showed the prototype circuit board, including the programmable memory chip that was to store his software—the software that hadn’t arrived.

I thought his complaint was unfounded because there was nothing that was proprietary in the image that would indicate anything related to his technology, and nothing that he designed. In fact, his backing out of our arrangement required us to design around the chip in order to get our early prototypes to work. The chips simply just sat on the boards unused.”

[The Computer Audiophile]

15 minutes ago, GoldenOne said:

It may be of interest, but I had a conversation with someone in the industry recently who shared a little insight.

 

Bob Stuart apparently created a new format originally for what was the Ponoplayer.

Bob then later began marketing it standalone as MQA after Neil refused to incorporate it into the PonoPlayer.

 

Additionally, and I'm intentionally leaving details out for now until a few things are confirmed but, it might actually be the case that MQA doesn't have the full intellectual property rights to their product and the way they are currently operating may not be legal.
GPL is an interesting area....

This is from Neil Young's book "To Feel the Music" (Thank you Rusty Shackleford for posting):

“Stuart had been attending our monthly development meetings at Neil’s ranch as the team’s audio expert. But as we progressed with the development of the player, it was Gallatin who designed the player’s electronics, while Stuart provided suggestions and comments along the way. Stuart’s main contribution was to be his software.

In these meetings Stuart would describe his software in general terms with little specificity. He explained it as something very complex that involved encoding and decoding using both software and hardware. But he was always reluctant to provide specific details about when we’d see it.

I could sense that Neil was becoming frustrated and impatient, because that software was critical to completing and testing the player. It was not only Neil; the entire development team had begun to wonder whether we’d ever see anything. It made us all very nervous.”

“To signify that a file was authentic, Bob Stuart came up with the idea to put a blue light on the Pono player that would go on when a Pono recording was being played, letting the user know that the recording was Pono: the highest resolution, a pure, unaltered file.”

“Finally, in our November monthly meeting, Stuart said he was ready to discuss the terms for Pono using the software. Hamm flew to the UK to meet with him and the investors in Meridian: the Richemont Group, a Switzerland-based company that owns a number of European luxury fashion brands.

The terms they proposed to Hamm included monthly payments, royalties for each player sold, more stock, and no exclusivity. The terms were much more onerous than Pono could afford and made no business sense based on normal industry standards. Not only would the software not be exclusive to Pono, but it also restricted what Pono could do with it. For example, if Pono was sold or licensed its player to be built or sold by another company, then his technology could not be included.

During these negotiations, Hamm explained our economics and tried to negotiate a more favorable arrangement. Discussions and negotiations continued for several months and included Hamm, Elliot, Neil, Cohen, and Stuart and his investors, but they never were able to come to an agreement.

When I interviewed Stuart for this book, he thought that Pono management had been unreasonable by not accepting his terms, because of the value his software would provide. Stuart felt its value was much greater than what Pono believed it to be. Stuart’s software eventually became the basis for a proprietary compression technology called MQA.”

“Charley dismissed Stuart’s technology as solving a problem that didn’t exist and therefore no longer needed solving. We had no reason to shrink the files at all, since memory and file size were not the issues they had been years earlier. Like Neil, he was opposed to a new proprietary music format that added new restrictions to the music files and was controlled by for-profit companies.”

“Bob Stuart contacted our lawyer, Rick Cohen, and said we were disclosing confidential information on our Kickstarter website. He was referring to an image of the inside of the Pono player that showed the prototype circuit board, including the programmable memory chip that was to store his software—the software that hadn’t arrived.

I thought his complaint was unfounded because there was nothing that was proprietary in the image that would indicate anything related to his technology, and nothing that he designed. In fact, his backing out of our arrangement required us to design around the chip in order to get our early prototypes to work. The chips simply just sat on the boards unused.”

 

I touched on this here, a little bit - https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/book-review-neil-youngs-to-feel-the-music-a-songwriters-mission-to-save-high-quality-audio-r834/