Another major look at MQA by another pro.

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1 hour ago, rickca said:

I get the impression that the current MQA implementation is a very watered down version of the original theory.  

 

Not really. It still matches the understanding I got early in 2015. The biggest delta is that apparently there is not much customisation of the render filters with respect of the actual DAC going on.

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18 hours ago, soxr said:

All temporal blur reduction happens in the renderer stage of the MQA chain using weird filters.

 

Think again.

 

The plots below are starting from a DXD impulse, downsampled to 96kHz, then upsampled to 192kHz. The upper trace uses a normal filter for downsampling, as any studio could/would do, and a 'weird' MQA filter for upsampling.

 

The lower trace uses weird MQA filters in both operations, as MQA themselves describe in their earliest papers and patents.

 

(As an aside: both impulses were originally aligned. Observe how at least one of the signal paths messes with temporal relations.)

 

 

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32 minutes ago, PeterV said:

 

 I noticed a too many hostile and impolite reactions as if the forum is owned by only none-MQA believers.

 

Coming here and asking for information, and then wilfully ignoring the wealth of information you are given, that is impolite.

 

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17 minutes ago, soxr said:

What phase setting was used for downsampling to 96kHz version in the above simulation? It ads pre-ringing, so I assume it's not minimum phase but linear phase.

 

LP, obviously. You can easily imagine what MP would look like.

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8 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

 I remain neutral with too many unanswered questions.  I also still see too much unproven speculation and innuendo from the anti-MQA brigade in general, some of which is spurious, disingenuous even.

 

Also, I only know vaguely who you are and what your vested interests might be, even if certifiably non-financial.  Ditto for certain other anti-MQA stalwarts here. 

 

1) If you have unanswered questions, please ask them (again). Perhaps an update is available.

 

2) Any 'brigade', anti or pro, tends to attract people who are, let's say, somewhat diplomatically challenged. And this often to the detriment of the brigade's agenda. Learn to ignore their hate speech or incoherent ramblings.

 

3) I can tell you that I have no connections to the audio or music industry whatsoever (the faint connection I had evaporated over ten years ago, and was not related to digital at all). I have a scientific and engineering background, with published (and apparently appreciated) papers. I am not an audio engineer, but I studied and obtained my degrees because of my life-long fascination with audio. I have zero financial interest in this: I can afford any audio system I like (if only I had the time to enjoy it). So I think I can see MQA for what it is: a cynically disguised attempt at a land grab,  based on shaky research, and this while the prevailing outside atmosphere is one of open-sourcing to the benefit of the many.

 

 

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9 hours ago, mcgillroy said:

The irony of the whole MQA-marketing debacle is that if they just would have sold the whole thing as "DRM you can live with while it gives you high-rez-streaming" they'd probably saved themselves a lot of trouble.

 

That. And open-sourcing (at least the unfolding part of) the decoder, so that by now just about every software-based player (PC, Mac, RPi/Cubox/..., LMS, phone apps, ...) could do something with the embedded data and send it through DSP. Less people antagonised. Less landfill.

 

Like I said two years ago, with such a scenario they would have had a chance. But of course they would also have had to find less obvious ways for making much money out of it. I suppose.

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4 hours ago, Charles Hansen said:

. You can look at all the financials for both Meridian and MQA courtesy of the Queen's government:

 

https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/09123512/persons-with-significant-control

 

 

 

I know that. I find these things not suitable for a public forum, especially when mixed with conjecture. 'Talked into'? 'Mafia'?

 

However, I can tell you that the actual development cost for MQA certainly did not have to run in the millions. With millions one can do very profound things.