MQA is Vaporware

[lucretius]

3 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.

 

The spectral energy fall-off is Bob Stuart’s justification for stuffing the ultrasonic frequencies up to sampling rates of 96kHz (anything over this is simply thrown away) into a mere 8 bits (technically making it lossy). However, you cannot hear ultrasonic frequencies anyway, so it's entirely irrelevant.

 

Let's talk about burying anything beneath the noise floor and ensuring the 8 least significant bits resemble pseudo-random noise.  Before we get to the conversion to analog, the core  decoder must "unpack"/decode  the 8 least significant bits and combine these ultrasonic frequencies with the lower frequencies to produce a normal PCM stream, prior to D/A conversion -- i.e. nothing is hiding at this point.  So what is the point of making these 8 least significant bits "resemble" pseudo-random noise?  In reality, it's likely that some common noise shaping dither is applied, when reducing the the bit-rate for the lower frequencies to 15-bits. (It's also likely that only material subject to the "white glove treatment" is put through the special noise shaping routines, since a specific routine must be manually selected based on the spectral plot -- it's not one-size fits all.)

 

And what about sampling frequencies above 96kHz.  The MQA decoder throws this away.  So why does MQA Ltd. pretend to offer MQA 192, MQA 384, etc..  What's the point except to fool the consumer?

 

Lower down you say the benefit to the consumer is "debluring".  I believe this has been discussed ad nauseum.  There simply is no benefit and there is some harm (leaky filters).

 

What about 16-bit MQA?  What possible benefit could it be to consumers?

[MikeyFresh]

41 minutes ago, KeenObserver said:

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

Exactly, he just recycled their debunked BS all over again, same old story there.

 

34 minutes ago, Pierre LeMonf said:

It seems to me that you are clinging to your embrace of MQA simply because you refuse to admit you are wrong.

Thats right, he just octupled down on that whole story.

[MikeyFresh]

3 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

MQA offers benefits to both the record industry and the consumer. The former is no longer allowing free access to its unencrypted masters

They aren't? Can't I still hear the unencrypted master on Qobuz, or buy a download of it at HDtracks?

I think you meant they're in the process of disallowing that on TIDAL, no?

[lucretius]

4 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

MQA offers benefits to both the record industry and the consumer. The former is no longer allowing free access to its unencrypted masters

 

You can get a master of sorts after the core decoding and then capturing the bits (mind you this is lossy, so it can never be as good as the original master).  In fact, an MQA decoded and rendered track can never be as good as the master.

[John Dyson]

 

9 hours ago, lucretius said:

 

You can get a master of sorts after the core decoding and then capturing the bits (mind you this is lossy, so it can never be as good as the original master).  In fact, an MQA decoded and rendered track can never be as good as the master.

 

 

(Sorry about my ham handed use of the forum -- I am responding to @lucretius response to JA.  Simply do not know how to use the editing features -- I am a very technical programmer and have gotten tired of all of the user interface things -- guess I am a luddite in some ways 🙂.)

 

The above response about a comment from JA about 'no longer access to unencrypted masters' is misleading.   Anyone who has heard a recording mix KNOWS that we have almost never in recent years gotten  'unencrypted masters' (truly minimally modified copies of the mix -- not heinously processed materials.)   There is industry pushback on that idea that 'I didn't do the excessive processing', but indeed someone, somewhere has.

Either there is stealth processing going on after the mastering engineering work, the mastering engineers are doing the stealth processing, or the mastering is being done against damaged 'masters'.   I have heard some attempts at post-mastering of already damaged materials from MFSL, but that was probably in desperation where the mixdown (before post processing) wasn't available...

 

*  I am distingushing the 'mixdown' as what the original artists produced vs. the damaged materials commonly available.

 

It is so sad to read where  supposedly 'quality minded' information sources have been totally ignoring the algorithmic damage that was initially recognized as the 'digital sound' back in the middle 1980s.  It is just that the average consumer has learned to accomodate to it.  Now, people listen to the recordings with the 'digital sound' and have accomodated to the damage in the recordings.

The whole situation makes me sad when people talk about the 2bits of damage in MQA, yet there is so much  other damage already done.   It is that MQA is yet another layer of obfuscation is even more disgusting than what has already been foisted on the consumer...

 

When will it end?  Maybe when we have 2bits of precision in our recordings unless paying extra toll charges?   There are just too many (all?) reviewers who aren't disclosing the dirty little secret...

 

Really kind of depressing...   It has motivated me to try to do some things, with limited success -- but IS proving that the damage is real by existence proof.

 

(Above message edited to be less inflammatory -- none of us is perfect, and in my passion, might have forgotten that.)

 

[FredericV]

Regarding the deliberate crippling by dithering / adding noise / band limiting the signal during the MQA encode step to 17/96 at best, I found an actual ground breaking article how such damage could potentially be undone:

https://petapixel.com/2021/08/30/googles-new-ai-photo-upscaling-tech-is-jaw-dropping/

Why is this tech interesting?  Their upscale tech is based on a trained model which has learned from the deliberate crippling of the signal by adding noise until only pure noise remains, and knows how to do the inverse:
 

Quote

“SR3 is a super-resolution diffusion model that takes as input a low-resolution image, and builds a corresponding high resolution image from pure noise,” Google writes. “The model is trained on an image corruption process in which noise is progressively added to a high-resolution image until only pure noise remains.

MQA encoding adds noise to the signal, and in testing and reported by many, subjective micro detail / low level ambience is lost after decoding compared to real good old PCM.

Unfortunately MQA cannot accomplish what google can, as MQA's renderer is merely a modified upsampler and lacks the processing power to undo the damage introduced by MQA's band limiting encoder.

If MQA becomes the only dominant 2ch audio distribution format and we have lost real PCM, someone with AI skills can probably undo some of MQA's damage, and sell such solution, therefore being a "problem - reaction - solution":

https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/07/high-fidelity-image-generation-using.html?m=1

First video demo in the google link is mind boggling.

 

[Currawong]

15 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.)

 

1. Even if your recordings can be MQA encoded because of the noise floor, recordings such as those done by 2L cannot, as they have a large amount of SD noise above ~50kHz. This is the case with many SD ADCs, as Dan Lavry pointed out what must be a decade or more ago. So, what you write is mostly moot for the majority of recorded music.

 

Even so, if, as you say, 18 bits is enough to encode even your recording, then, as Archimago showed, you could just encoding music as 18/176.2 and you wouldn't need MQA at all to get the now-admitted useless bandwidth savings. The 3D-ish effect applied (to more recent titles) can by done inside headphones these days.

2. That MQA can't be compressed as much as a regular music file into a FLAC container is one of the reasons that MQA's claims about smaller-size high-res files is false, wouldn't you agree? That, along with the fact that the original reported resolution is false, for reasons in #1 above.

 

3. Maybe you felt that there was a sound improvement with your files, but as I've pointed out time and time again, and you've ignored, the batch processing of older music clearly degrades the sound quality. FFS please go and listen to Miles Davis Doo Bop and hear how the bass has been bloated and the resolution reduced. It's shockingly bad. Other classics such as Getz & Gilberto are just as bad.  

 

4. I don't know where to begin with "deblurring", but at this stage you're no different to someone telling me that the Earth is flat, given all the technical and other analysis done that shows that it's a load of BS.

 

5. You can't sell a benefit when there isn't any. Heck, to make it worse, a lot of the music is watermarked, so it has been corrupted regardless.  Now that would be a good complaint to file against TIDAL in the countries it is active in, that they can't claim their music is lossless, as the watermarks applied to a lot of it renders it otherwise.

 

Lastly, what JA said about the original music in his latest article, but switch Apple Music for MQA. 

[R1200CL]

14 hours ago, lucretius said:

What about 16-bit MQA?  What possible benefit could it be to consumers?

@John_Atkinson

I would like to hear your point of view on 16 bit MQA. I’m struggling to see the logic behind red book being converted into MQA. 

[Dr Tone]

7 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

@John_Atkinson

I would like to hear your point of view on 16 bit MQA. I’m struggling to see the logic behind red book being converted into MQA. 

No difference than higher bit depth and sample rate content,  control and licensing $.

[wdw]

20 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

…….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
 

But this is the principal objection to mQA……a proprietary noose around all future music.   It was Charlie’s passionate objection to this very issue describing the death of innovation within the video world due to the chokehold on development and the slow bleeding of resources this is required to add all these licenses.  Surely you are not advocating for this eventuality and, if so,  you are a dangerous influence.

[Samuel T Cogley]

@John_Atkinson should elaborate on the white glove treatment that his sample files received vs. batch encodes done with no apparent regard to the ADC hardware used in the capture and/or production processes.  And also why mQa CDs are good for consumers.

[wdw]

1 hour ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

@John_Atkinson should elaborate on the white glove treatment that his sample files received vs. batch encodes done with no apparent regard to the ADC hardware used in the capture and/or production processes.  And also why mQa CDs are good for consumers.

 

A number of posts on this thread have stated there are currently no mQa enabled ADC converters on the market and this has been a stumbling block for third party testing and review...would be interesting to confirm if this is the case.

I understand Tidal, when planning another big batch conversion, simply fire up a gasoline powered one they rent from Home Depot.  

[fas42]

10 hours ago, FredericV said:

Regarding the deliberate crippling by dithering / adding noise / band limiting the signal during the MQA encode step to 17/96 at best, I found an actual ground breaking article how such damage could potentially be undone:

https://petapixel.com/2021/08/30/googles-new-ai-photo-upscaling-tech-is-jaw-dropping/

Why is this tech interesting?  Their upscale tech is based on a trained model which has learned from the deliberate crippling of the signal by adding noise until only pure noise remains, and knows how to do the inverse:
 

 

Deep learning technology is extremely powerful stuff - frightening, even - and can/will be used to 'fix' all sorts of recording flaws and misadventures, 😉 ... it will only take some individual, or company, to get seriously interested in getting the ball rolling, right now, for this to take off - the MQA thing is just a tiny blip on the radar, which will just fade away like so many other, similar ideas ...

[lucretius]

2 hours ago, wdw said:

number of posts on this thread have stated there are currently no mQa enabled ADC converters on the market

 

This is still available directly from the manufacturer:

 

https://mytek-europe.com/brooklyn-adc/

 

2 hours ago, wdw said:

I understand Tidal, when planning another big batch conversion, simply fire up a gasoline powered one they rent from Home Depot.  

 

The record label does that.

[wdw]

8 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

The record label does that.

was a joke

[Archimago]

On 8/30/2021 at 3:24 PM, 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.

...

 

By a similar rationale, we can also say that MP3/AAC are "elegant" formats because they recognize that human hearing is nonlinear and the algorithm can take advantage of phenomena like auditory masking to remove inaudible content and thus results in a "small number of bits"!

 

In fact, I would argue that MP3/AAC are even more elegant because of the ability to use different psychoacoustic models of hearing, target a wide range of data rates, deliver variable bitrate content, etc.

 

'Elegance' is not a selling point for audiophiles in a case like this! It's still lossy compression in an age when we have no need for such a thing and adds cost to the end user with zero (if not negative) improvement in sound quality despite claims of "deblurring" and such. Again, of which we have no evidence this scheme is able to perform.

[mevdinc]

20 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

By a similar rationale, we can also say that MP3/AAC are "elegant" formats because they recognize that human hearing is nonlinear and the algorithm can take advantage of phenomena like auditory masking to remove inaudible content and thus results in a "small number of bits"!

 

In fact, I would argue that MP3/AAC are even more elegant because of the ability to use different psychoacoustic models of hearing, target a wide range of data rates, deliver variable bitrate content, etc.

 

'Elegance' is not a selling point for audiophiles in a case like this! It's still lossy compression in an age when we have no need for such a thing and adds cost to the end user with zero (if not negative) improvement in sound quality despite claims of "deblurring" and such. Again, of which we have no evidence this scheme is able to perform.

And even more importantly, all that MQA does/offer can easily be done in software, which can also be tweakable by the user.

[UkPhil]

It’s a long haul but here is Bob doing the “technical stuff” on you tube,  probably nothing that hasn’t already been discussed 

 

[KeenObserver]

Dig out the hip boots!

Does anyone still put credence in what he says?

[Archimago]

19 hours ago, KeenObserver said:

Dig out the hip boots!

Does anyone still put credence in what he says?

 

Rubber boots and hip waders on, KO.

 

Although I have no love for MQA, he does have some nice information there about psychoacoustics and the human hearing mechanism around 20 minutes. Also the stuff on human thresholds vs. coding potential of 16/44, etc. is good (UENTH = uniformly-exciting noise at threshold):

 

 

Neuroscience shows "maximizing metabolic efficiency rather than information"; sure... 

 

16/44.1 as you can see above (with the lower level playback) already is pretty darn good for human thresholds. 24/96 blows human thresholds away and even lower than microphone limit. So what if MQA is designed to be below human limits if 24/96 is already easily achievable in production and consumer playback?

 

 

Log scale now. Notice the MQA limit in grey. Also, "LP silence" in orange clearly within the human hearing threshold in red (no surprise that LPs are not "hi-res" or better than CD). Notice BTW that the "Pyramix CD" which I assume is the Pyramix noise shaped dithering is actually better than MQA to about 10kHz! If that's the case, why are we bothering with MQA and all its complexities?! Again 24/96 is way better than human needs.

 

I find it interesting how he talks about time discrimination at around 32:00 with various papers but does not go into the methodology other than a broad stroke about how it "exceeds Fourier uncertainty limit by 5-50 times!" which sounds impressive superficially but unless this gets contextualized, we really have no idea what importance this has for music listening much less "enjoyment" of music. His next slide (~35min) looking at Lewicki (2002) doesn't follow on that idea of any remarkable need for time-domain discrimination.

 

IMO, nice study in psychoacoustics but by the time he gets to MQA ~55 minutes, he's basically using handwaving to talk about "not perfect" ADC and DAC steps, quantization noise, etc... Notice his quantization noise diagram:

 

He spends only a few seconds on this slide... Hmmm... Is anyone particularly worried about quantization noise below -140dBFS with test tones of -90dBFS and much of the anomalies at frequencies way above 20kHz??? What's so scary about this to be worthy of the "blues"? Surely nobody's going to lose his job over this, and no good partner's gonna leave us because our sound system's got noise levels of this magnitude, even if this is exacerbated a few times thru the ADC/DAC chain, right?! 😆

 

Beyond that, we have the typical MQA presentation about the "music information triangle" and stuff like that; basically why MQA is supposedly more efficient than lossless. All this navel gazing and moot at a time in history where storage is no problem and data rates exceed those theoretical hearing thresholds he speaks of (or vaguely speaks of with supposed time-domain resolution).

 

Hilarious that he's over time >60 minutes and then just starts talking about hi-res; again, hand waving generalizations with no convincing evidence that any of this is actually audible. It's like a guy trying to convince you that his 120dB SINAD DAC sounds better than your 115dB DAC.

 

If you watch this video, you're a better man/woman than me if you could tolerate more of BS's talking beyond 60 minutes (even at 1.5x speed). Good that AES put this video up just to get so much out there in BS's own words and slides...

[KeenObserver]

3 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Rubber boots and hip waders on, KO.

 

Although I have no love for MQA, he does have some nice information there about psychoacoustics and the human hearing mechanism around 20 minutes. Also the stuff on human thresholds vs. coding potential of 16/44, etc. is good (UENTH = uniformly-exciting noise at threshold):

 

 

Neuroscience shows "maximizing metabolic efficiency rather than information"; sure... 

 

16/44.1 as you can see above (with the lower level playback) already is pretty darn good for human thresholds. 24/96 blows human thresholds away and even lower than microphone limit. So what if MQA is designed to be below human limits if 24/96 is already easily achievable in production and consumer playback?

 

 

Log scale now. Notice the MQA limit in grey. Also, "LP silence" in orange clearly within the human hearing threshold in red (no surprise that LPs are not "hi-res" or better than CD). Notice BTW that the "Pyramix CD" which I assume is the Pyramix noise shaped dithering is actually better than MQA to about 10kHz! If that's the case, why are we bothering with MQA and all its complexities?! Again 24/96 is way better than human needs.

 

I find it interesting how he talks about time discrimination at around 32:00 with various papers but does not go into the methodology other than a broad stroke about how it "exceeds Fourier uncertainty limit by 5-50 times!" which sounds impressive superficially but unless this gets contextualized, we really have no idea what importance this has for music listening much less "enjoyment" of music. His next slide (~35min) looking at Lewicki (2002) doesn't follow on that idea of any remarkable need for time-domain discrimination.

 

IMO, nice study in psychoacoustics but by the time he gets to MQA ~55 minutes, he's basically using handwaving to talk about "not perfect" ADC and DAC steps, quantization noise, etc... Notice his quantization noise diagram:

 

He spends only a few seconds on this slide... Hmmm... Is anyone particularly worried about quantization noise below -140dBFS with test tones of -90dBFS and much of the anomalies at frequencies way above 20kHz??? What's so scary about this to be worthy of the "blues"? Surely nobody's going to lose his job over this, and no good partner's gonna leave us because our sound system's got noise levels of this magnitude, even if this is exacerbated a few times thru the ADC/DAC chain, right?! 😆

 

Beyond that, we have the typical MQA presentation about the "music information triangle" and stuff like that; basically why MQA is supposedly more efficient than lossless. All this navel gazing and moot at a time in history where storage is no problem and data rates exceed those theoretical hearing thresholds he speaks of (or vaguely speaks of with supposed time-domain resolution).

 

Hilarious that he's over time >60 minutes and then just starts talking about hi-res; again, hand waving generalizations with no convincing evidence that any of this is actually audible. It's like a guy trying to convince you that his 120dB SINAD DAC sounds better than your 115dB DAC.

 

If you watch this video, you're a better man/woman than me if you could tolerate more of BS's talking beyond 60 minutes (even at 1.5x speed). Good that AES put this video up just to get so much out there in BS's own words and slides...

 

You're a better man than I. I started to watch but then thought that it would be time that I never get back. Perhaps I'll make myself watch it if you think there was anything worthwhile.

BS generally starts out with accepted precepts in audio engineering and then descends into the "hand waving". He speaks profusely but says nothing. It's all BS talk. He's been doing this since the inception of MQA. It always seems to descend into a "Bob Stuart knows better than every one on earth". It's the MQA religion.

[Archimago]

3 hours ago, KeenObserver said:

 

You're a better man than I. I started to watch but then thought that it would be time that I never get back. Perhaps I'll make myself watch it if you think there was anything worthwhile.

BS generally starts out with accepted precepts in audio engineering and then descends into the "hand waving". He speaks profusely but says nothing. It's all BS talk. He's been doing this since the inception of MQA. It always seems to descend into a "Bob Stuart knows better than every one on earth". It's the MQA religion.

 

Hey KO. Yeah, don't waste your minutes watching if there are better things to do ;-). I think those screen captures have "encapsulated" some core principles and the questionable fashion of how he makes mountains out of ant hills IMO to "sell" us on something that again is unnecessary.

 

You're right, he tends to start with what is believable. Reasonable and rational science. Then the convenient lacunae of thought shows up after awhile. Building upon esoteric research (like the time domain stuff) to push his points with no real evidence that any of this is of concern in the real world of audio reproduction recognizing the auditory limits of being human (even if all of us did have the ideal hearing of an 18 year old!).

 

Thankfully, every once awhile he does have some data to show like that -90dBFS 24Hz and 2400Hz tone and quantization error down below -140dBFS which reminds us that what he's talking about is more than likely below the threshold of bats. 🤨

 

BS is just one of a number of guys in the "High End" who talk like this BTW. Hopefully by this point in history, the "Holy Church of MQA and BS" is well along the path of losing its membership and sagging tithes.

[BassFace]

I can't believe we're 954 pages into this.   You are all intelligent people who know their stuff. Its been established MQA is not what it seems or claims but here we are still bickering like Children. Grown Men sounding like they are still on the Playground.  I follow for factual reasons that were established a long time ago.

[KeenObserver]

49 minutes ago, BassFace said:

I can't believe we're 954 pages into this.   You are all intelligent people who know their stuff. Its been established MQA is not what it seems or claims but here we are still bickering like Children. Grown Men sounding like they are still on the Playground.  I follow for factual reasons that were established a long time ago.

 

And, yet, MQA is still trying to implement their misbegotten scheme.

 

And, yet, you still comment on this.  Who is bickering like children?

[BassFace]

18 minutes ago, KeenObserver said:

 

And, yet, MQA is still trying to implement their misbegotten scheme.

 

And, yet, you still comment on this.  Who is bickering like children?

I came on to see if there was any more in depth investigations like Golden Sound did a while back to educate myself a bit more and to see if anyone had been allowed to do further test.  I know what MQA are doing and have taken appropriate action myself in deciding not to use it. Simple really, it's not Rocket Science.