MQA is Vaporware

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 hours ago, Archimago said:

Hmmm, interesting, I never noticed the ASR links not working!

Looooooooong story, but I had to implement it because people were purposely coming here to bash AS and link to ASR. I put science in quotes because I believe it’s deserved. 

[firedog]

11 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

Not shy. Everything I have had to say on MQA since 2014 is available on Stereophile's website, at www.stereophile.com/category/mqa . I also examined the band-splitting and buried data channel aspects of MQA in a series of posts on Audio Science Review earlier this year. See, for example, https://www.audio “science” review/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/page-72#post-760938

https://www.audio “science” review/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/page-72#post-760969

and https://www.audio “science” review/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/page-79#post-762223

 

Other than the reduced need to keep streamed file sizes small, I haven't seen or read anything on this site or others that leads me to change my mind about the format's technical elegance.

 

On the commercial aspects of MQA, which are monopolistic, I commissioned and published an article on this in early 2018: https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-benefits-and-costs

 

To quote from that article: "Once securely in place in the industry, MQA would be very difficult to dislodge, and its very dominance would deter the development of newer, possibly better formats—or even discourage the retaining of such current alternatives as WAV, FLAC, etc., as viable choices in the marketplace."

 

John Atkinson

Technical Editor, Stereophile

 

A little too clever a response, I'm afraid:

1. "Elegant": So What! Who cares? That's only of interest to geeks/engineers and means zip in terms of what's important - SQ and Monopoly/dictating formats/hiding the real masters.

 

2. "Other than the reduced need to keep streamed file sizes small": funny, as that was (and still is) trumpeted as a major reason for MQA and why we should accept it "for the good of the industry", as it were. But Amazon, Qobuz and others have now shown that there is no "reduced need" - there's no need.

 

3. DEBLURRING: We still don't know what the invented MQA term "deblurring" means and if it actually exists - b/c MQA won't let it be tested. 

 

4. "discourage the retaining of such current alternatives as WAV, FLAC, etc., as viable choices in the marketplace" - that alone is a reason for it to die. We've already seen thousands of standard PCM versions of albums disappear at Tidal in favor "MQA" or the falsely named "MQA CD". This is exactly the scenario many feared, and that was denied as a possibility by MQA. Just one more of their lies. 

If you believe that quote to have validity, then you should be opposed to MQA. 

[firedog]

Double post

[Currawong]

13 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

Other than the reduced need to keep streamed file sizes small, I haven't seen or read anything on this site or others that leads me to change my mind about the format's technical elegance.

 

On the commercial aspects of MQA, which are monopolistic, I commissioned and published an article on this in early 2018: https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-benefits-and-costs

 

Yet you've ignored the mountain of other information presented about false claims, technical aspects that contradict each other and the issues that have come up with batch processing, which likely isn't the same as what was done to your files.   Have you even forgotten how you proved yourself that the output of an MQA DAC is distorted? Do you consider that to be "technically elegant"?

[MikeyFresh]

4 hours ago, firedog said:

"Elegant": So What! Who cares?

Almost nobody ever cared about this so-called "elegance" at all.

 

4 hours ago, firedog said:

Amazon, Qobuz and others have now shown that there is no "reduced need" - there's no need.

Exactly, and the crowd listening on mobile devices over a cellular connection isn't that gravely concerned with sound quality, and always had the option of using lossy streams to control their data use.

 

4 hours ago, firedog said:

DEBLURRING: We still don't know what the invented MQA term "deblurring" means and if it actually exists - b/c MQA won't let it be tested. 

Translation: it does not exist.

 

4 hours ago, firedog said:

We've already seen thousands of standard PCM versions of albums disappear at Tidal in favor "MQA" or the falsely named "MQA CD". This is exactly the scenario many feared, and that was denied as a possibility by MQA.

Also denied vehemently by mQa's many influencers, right here in these pages. A solid reason to never subscribe to TIDAL, even if there were no other choices available.

[MikeyFresh]

On 8/25/2021 at 6:29 PM, John_Atkinson said:

I know you are "cracking wise" but dCS has always offered a very short antialiaslng fliter on its A/D converters to reduce the otherwise inevitable sinc-function ringing on transients.

Is that what you use and have always used in the making of your own recordings?

[lucretius]

3 hours ago, Currawong said:

 

Yet you've ignored the mountain of other information presented about false claims, technical aspects that contradict each other and the issues that have come up with batch processing, which likely isn't the same as what was done to your files.   Have you even forgotten how you proved yourself that the output of an MQA DAC is distorted? Do you consider that to be "technically elegant"?

 

JA received the white glove treatment.  Unfortunately, this is not representative of 99% of the MQA albums found on Tidal.

[Archimago]

3 hours ago, MikeyFresh said:

Is that what you use and have always used in the making of your own recordings?

 

And to take that 1 step further, does @John_Atkinson think the "otherwise inevitable sinc-function ringing on transients" in ADC recordings is a problem that needs to be fixed especially with a hi-res recording!?

[garrardguy60]

10 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Looooooooong story, but I had to implement it because people were purposely coming here to bash AS and link to ASR. I put science in quotes because I believe it’s deserved. 

Is that still the case (people trying to post links to ASR)? I ask because it seems to me that since Amir revealed himself (the MQA fracas at ASR a few months back), a lot of us (the people who left when you created the objective forum) have come back. (I admit I'm universalizing from my own behavior here; you will know whether I'm on the right track or just imagining since you have the analytics.)

 

Anyway, so the upshot is that you can't have a forum/community if only one person is allowed to have an opinion (or, if his opinion is the only "correct" opinion), which is what they have over there. I still have my gripes with AS, but I think I now understand the boundaries (e.g., don't upset the feng shui orange audio fuse people who are still hankering to give their money away to a guy in scotland) and I will try hard to stay within the lines! (I hope I'm not damning AS with faint praise here; this is meant to be a positive comment about Chris and AS.)

 

[MarkusBarkus]

3 hours ago, lucretius said:

the white glove treatment.

...actually I think we're all getting that now.

[Iving]

18 minutes ago, garrardguy60 said:

Is that still the case (people trying to post links to ASR)?

 

Can happen just for conversation's sake ... reference to a parallel fyi or exchange there. Probably fair to say any recent links to ASR are uncontroversial (in the "old" sense anyway).

[Archimago]

1 hour ago, garrardguy60 said:

...

 

Anyway, so the upshot is that you can't have a forum/community if only one person is allowed to have an opinion (or, if his opinion is the only "correct" opinion), which is what they have over there. I still have my gripes with AS, but I think I now understand the boundaries (e.g., don't upset the feng shui orange audio fuse people who are still hankering to give their money away to a guy in scotland) and I will try hard to stay within the lines! (I hope I'm not damning AS with faint praise here; this is meant to be a positive comment about Chris and AS.)

 

 

Well said @garrardguy60. I think wherever we visit places online there will be a certain "culture" we'll find built upon the intent and "chief" who runs the place. Whether openly stated or not-so-openly implied, we obviously need to maintain within the limits of what is considered "civil" as defined there. Obviously if it's a bridge too far to cross, best to leave.

 

Not hard to see where the limits are on places like Steve Hoffman Forum when you see the threads getting closed, or the idiosyncrasies on ASR, or even here, right @The Computer Audiophile 😉? (Of course, I happily admit to my own biases as well and say what I have to say at my place...)

 

For the most part, all in good fun. No human sacrifices needed to appease the Audiophile Gods. Just mQa.

[mfsoa]

When someone tells me something that seems absolutely impossible while providing no supporting evidence, my reaction is to question what I am told. Maybe that's just the analytical chemist in me...

 

Yet the Stereophile stance is that until such claims are proven to be false, they stand as-is.

Therefore as MQA does not allow their claims to be proven false, they are by definition accepted as fact. Wow that's some serious hard-hittin' journalism there.

 

There is a pink elephant behind my couch. I have no pictures, only my word. Does anyone really believe there is a pink elephant behind my couch?

 

Is Stereophile convinced of the elegance of the claims made by MQA or the elegance of the reality?

 

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

19 minutes ago, mfsoa said:

When someone tells me something that seems absolutely impossible while providing no supporting evidence, my reaction is to question what I am told. Maybe that's just the analytical chemist in me...

 

Yet the Stereophile stance is that until such claims are proven to be false, they stand as-is.

Therefore as MQA does not allow their claims to be proven false, they are by definition accepted as fact. Wow that's some serious hard-hittin' journalism there.

 

There is a pink elephant behind my couch. I have no pictures, only my word. Does anyone really believe there is a pink elephant behind my couch?

 

Is Stereophile convinced of the elegance of the claims made by MQA or the elegance of the reality?

 

 

You could also throw in all the surrounding evidence from others, that points to MQA’s false statements, with measurements to prove them as false. 
 

The old guard is starting to look like the jury and mQa like OJ Simpson. Sure there was blood in his car, on his clothes, one glove at the scene while the other was at his house, a cut on his hand, bloody Bruno Magli foot prints in his size, a long history of abuse, but because the jury wasn’t present at the scene at the time of the murder to see it, he must be not guilty. 

[lucretius]

 

39 minutes ago, mfsoa said:

There is a pink elephant behind my couch. I have no pictures, only my word. Does anyone really believe there is a pink elephant behind my couch?

 

If you had said Invisible Pink Unicorn, then I might believe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[labjr]

MQA is about nothing but revenue for the entire industry. End of story. Period!

[John_Atkinson]

On 8/28/2021 at 7:58 PM, lucretius said:

 

Which one of MQA Ltd's claims has stood up to scrutiny, that would cause you to continue believing in the format's technical elegance?

 

I still think how MQA works is indeed elegant. It recognizes that with real-world music, the spectral energy falls off with increasing frequency and that the recording's analog noisefloor is higher than the 24-bit floor. (With my choral recordings, which have very low acoustic and electronic noise - see attached room tone spectrum -  the noisefloor can be accurately encoded with an 18-bit word length.) The former means that the energy above 1Fs can be quantized with a small number of bits and the latter means that those ultrasonic data can be encrypted to resemble pseudo-random noise and buried in a hidden data channel in bits 19-24 beneath the analog noisefloor. There is a slight noise penalty but it is a fraction of a dB. And as noise is noise, you can't detect the buried data channel by ear.

 

This buried data technique is called steganography and is widely used in telecommunications and video technology - however, because the bottom bits now contain information, the data's entropy is higher and FLAC can't compress an MQA-encoded file as much as it can a straight 24-bit audio file.

 

As Jon Iverson wrote in the article I referred to in my earlier posting, MQA offers benefits to both the record industry and the consumer. The former is no longer allowing free access to its unencrypted masters; the latter gets an improvement in sound quality. (The saving in bandwidth is no longer relevant, except for people who don't have unlimited data plans and want to stream hi-rez audio to their phones.) The benefit to the consumer is the "deblurring" that I discussed in a 2018 article: www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion. The post-Shannon sampling - see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/843002 - allows the ADC/DAC chain to be optimized to preserve transient information. Again, this is not new; Post-Shannon sampling is used in video when you don't want image edges to be burred, as in cartoons and anime.

 

The price to be paid for the deblurring is the introduction of a small amount of aliased image energy. When you consider the spectral distribution of real-word music, this aliased energy will lie below the recording's original noisefloor and is therefore inconsequential.

 

Unlike Apple/Dolby Atmos, MQA has not done a good job of selling the benefit to the consumer, which is why everyone complains about losing open access. (Audio has been the only medium where there haven't been proprietary closed formats - no-one complains about Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Atmos, DVD, Blu-ray etc, etc, where there are large license fees involved for manufacturers wanting to offer those formats.)

 

John Atkinson

Technical Editor, Stereophile
 

[kumakuma]

17 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

As Jon Iverson wrote in the article I referred to in my earlier posting, MQA offers benefits to both the record industry and the consumer.

 

And yet the conclusion that he reached in that article is that MQA is not a good deal for the consumer:

 

Quote

Which brings us back to sound quality. A possible format monopoly is all the more reason we should be absolutely sure that MQA is a format whose sound quality we can accept for the long term. But without the ability to even evaluate the format's compression scheme separate from its deblurring component, I don't believe that, over the long term, MQA is in the best interests of audiophiles. I just hope it's not too late. 

 

[firedog]

1 hour ago, John_Atkinson said:

The benefit to the consumer is the "deblurring" that I discussed in a 2018 article: www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion. The post-Shannon sampling - see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/843002 - allows the ADC/DAC chain to be optimized to preserve transient information. Again, this is not new; Post-Shannon sampling is used in video when you don't want image edges to be burred, as in cartoons and anime.

 

That advantage exists in theory but in reality isn't available on 99.9% of MQA releases. Only special "white glove" releases have it. The rest is batch processed and there is no actual optimization of the chain-just alteration of the recording.

And again, their "elegance" claims you seem to be infatuated with haven't been subjected to scruitiny to show they are true - you are accepting their claims at face value. Since we already know them to be liars - why accept at face value anything they say? The opposite should be true - they should be challenged to prove their claims.

1 hour ago, John_Atkinson said:

The former is no longer allowing free access to its unencrypted masters; the latter gets an improvement in sound quality.

 

The former (along with added rents in the recording/distribution chain) is the real reason the format exists; the latter is at best of debateable existence.

 

Again, subjective/sighted listening opinion on MQA varies from highly negative to highly positive to indifferent. No proper blind testing has been done. MQA doesn't allow it. 

If that improvement in SQ that you claim as a consumer benefit actually existed in any significant amount - the vast majority of listeners would hear it. That so many don't (or hear it as worse) belies your claim. 

 

In short, MQA is about the record companies preventing listeners access to the actual "Authenticated Masters" and a way for "the industry" to charge consumers more for the privilege of losing that access. 

 

There is no meaningful benefit to the consumer.

 

If MQA disappeared tomorrow would anyone outside "the industry" care or feel a loss? 

 

Apparently you are a captive of "the industry" and are so blinded by your love of the supposed "elegance"  of the format that you can't, or refuse,  to  see  that simple truth.

[The Computer Audiophile]

But, the benefit to consumers is something better than the real master. Remember that one? That’s like taking $100 out of the ATM but telling the store that it’s worth $120 when you go to spend it. So dumb. Not even Steve Jobs with his famous reality distortion field would’ve accepted mQa. 
 

I anxiously await the mQa perpetual motion machine. 

[KeenObserver]

And the cycle of MQA BS starts all over again.

 

MQA has spent seven years making grandiose claims that have been shown to be BS.

 

In seven years MQA has proven nothing!  They just recycle the MQA BS.

[KeenObserver]

It is pretty clear that JA and Stereophile are not looking out for the consumer's best interests.

[Pierre LeMonf]

2 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

I still think how MQA works is indeed elegant. It recognizes that with real-world music, the spectral energy falls off with increasing frequency and that the recording's analog noisefloor is higher than the 24-bit floor. (With my choral recordings, which have very low acoustic and electronic noise - see attached room tone spectrum -  the noisefloor can be accurately encoded with an 18-bit word length.) The former means that the energy above 1Fs can be quantized with a small number of bits and the latter means that those ultrasonic data can be encrypted to resemble pseudo-random noise and buried in a hidden data channel in bits 19-24 beneath the analog noisefloor. There is a slight noise penalty but it is a fraction of a dB. And as noise is noise, you can't detect the buried data channel by ear.

 

This buried data technique is called steganography and is widely used in telecommunications and video technology - however, because the bottom bits now contain information, the data's entropy is higher and FLAC can't compress an MQA-encoded file as much as it can a straight 24-bit audio file.

 

As Jon Iverson wrote in the article I referred to in my earlier posting, MQA offers benefits to both the record industry and the consumer. The former is no longer allowing free access to its unencrypted masters; the latter gets an improvement in sound quality. (The saving in bandwidth is no longer relevant, except for people who don't have unlimited data plans and want to stream hi-rez audio to their phones.) The benefit to the consumer is the "deblurring" that I discussed in a 2018 article: www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion. The post-Shannon sampling - see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/843002 - allows the ADC/DAC chain to be optimized to preserve transient information. Again, this is not new; Post-Shannon sampling is used in video when you don't want image edges to be burred, as in cartoons and anime.

 

The price to be paid for the deblurring is the introduction of a small amount of aliased image energy. When you consider the spectral distribution of real-word music, this aliased energy will lie below the recording's original noisefloor and is therefore inconsequential.

 

Unlike Apple/Dolby Atmos, MQA has not done a good job of selling the benefit to the consumer, which is why everyone complains about losing open access. (Audio has been the only medium where there haven't been proprietary closed formats - no-one complains about Dolby Digital, DTS, Dolby Atmos, DVD, Blu-ray etc, etc, where there are large license fees involved for manufacturers wanting to offer those formats.)

 

John Atkinson

Technical Editor, Stereophile
 

Dear Sir:

 

It seems to me that you are clinging to your embrace of MQA simply because you refuse to admit you are wrong. I compare you to the disgraced French professor Didier Raoult who promoted hydroxychloroquine as a "cure" for Covid-19, with a junk science study that was not peer reviewed or controlled in any way. And MQA surely is junk. As with Raoult, C'est pas un charlatan. It is very sad.

 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2020/07/19/hydroxychloroquine-europe-turns-away-from-doctor-who-championed-drug-with-irresponsible-study/?sh=76ddb577f912

[KeenObserver]

Using abundant verbiage to minimize the ill effects of a process to justify the unproven and disproven benefits is beyond the pale.

[KeenObserver]

When the whole gets too deep, you should stop shoveling.