Stereophile Series on MQA Technology

[mcgillroy]

16 hours ago, GUTB said:

The real reason why Schiit doesn’t implement MQA is because they’re on such tight margins with thier no-questions-asked return policy direct dealer model. They put out cheap gear in large quantities. The reason why they don’t implement DSD seems to just be lack of expertise.

 

Most of the high end is embracing MQA simply because thier clientele are much more demanding than Schiit’s or the standard Chinese shovelware users.

 

Ok you make an argument about the economics of some hifi-companies business strategy. 

 

Plz explain your take on the economics of MQA.

[mcgillroy]

8 hours ago, FredericV said:

Another article in the series:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-tested-part-1

They must be very desperate to have a paid series written by stereophile to attack the criticasters.
 

 

Both pieces indeed carry a strong scent of payola. While Atkinson deserves applause to provide links to the most important critical statements he still comes across as an armchair-MQA-believer angry at the interwebbs.

 

(stuffs pipe)

 

Austins article is rehashing MQA marketing material and offers not much more than technobabble. He should have asked for some external expertise on signal processing.

 

They are fighting on two fronts here: repairing their tainted reputation for having too obviously pushed MQA on an audience better educated than they thought while trying to push back the tide of internet-journals and fora who understood that MQA helps to outmanoeuvre the established audio press.

 

MQA truly has proven to be costly to the established audio-press. It's a war of attrition and as long as they continue to dig themselves deeper in to the MQA-trenches the incoming will keep incoming.

 

All hail to clickbait.

[mcgillroy]

Bashing the younger generation certainly is the dumbest strategy deployed in the MQA debate – yet.

 

Crecna has it right about high end vs Hifi, Charles Hansen too made the point that Gen X and Gen Y suffer the results of financialization and have very different purchasing power and monetary outlooks than their parents and grant parents. They simply can’t afford the overpriced status totems their baby boomer relatives desperately erect in order to somehow bring back the good old times when Keith & Mick were wrinklefree.

 

Last not least Gen X & Y are enjoying historically good sound for little money. Your standard room corrected AV–receiver feed with Spotify sounds more accurate than your seventies or eigthies hifi rig.

 

On top of that the Head–Fi community is full of well educated techies that know a thing or two about sampling theory and signal processing. Trying to sell these “kids” a new format with over the top bullshit marketing about Shannon-Nyquist somehow being wrong simply does not fly with that demographic.

[mcgillroy]

52 minutes ago, mansr said:

What we're seeing here is the convolution of the linear phase filter with something that isn't a simple impulse. The honest thing would be to provide those test files for all to look at in whichever way they choose. Obviously, that's never going to happen.

 

We could still ask.

[mcgillroy]

So I tried to get a grip on the ownership structure of Stereophile and that's a wee bit complicated.

 

They are owned by a holding called Source which manages a consortium called TEN standing for "The Enthusiast Network."

 

TEN publishes number of consumer interest titles ranging from sufer mags over baseball to audio. 60 mags and about a 100 online titles all together. These titles deal mostly with medium to high priced hobby consumer goods.

 

I could not find any good info on the financial structure and ownership makeup of Source but then I didn't look to hard.

 

Anybody able to shed some light on this?

 

Particularly if there are any investments or stakes in Source by Warner or any of the other big media-conglomerates. 

[mcgillroy]

3 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

It involves some really old versions of software.

FOSS related?

[mcgillroy]

The quality of MQA-shills truly is lacklustre.

[mcgillroy]

16 hours ago, GUTB said:

Sigh. My flight to LAAS got rained out so I missed the "fun". Couldn't go to RMAF due to work.

 

Jim Austin is going to dig into the MQA claims in detail. How devastated are you going to be when the claims are validated? How many pages of text will it take to isolate your ego from reality?

 

You know after four years and some very reputable people kicking MQAs tires coming away unimpressed Jim Austin really has to show that the chassis is titanium and the engine a flux-compensator - 'cause temporal blur!

 

Meanwhile I am taking the liberty to write some of the neuroscience authors (Brand, Kuchur, Siefke, King) cited in the MQA AES paper asking them a.) if they feel their work properly represented, b.) if they think their research supports MQAs claims?

 

Don't expect any responses but who know's. MQA nicely exposed journalists failure to do their job and made debunking a cottage industry.

 

Perhaps somebody else wants to have a look at the references in the AES paper and check with the authors cited. The sampling theory claims seem especially juicy and low hanging.

 

[mcgillroy]

15 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Been done by several people me included. Charley Hansen thought the sources cited didn't support the paper. Hi-Fi News used the word muddled. To me the pre MQA paper read like a tax shelter opinion. The sources were cherry picked when the overall literature doesn't support the findings of the paper. 

 

 

Yes but to my knowledge nobody has done a proper debunking of the paper and its sources. Charles opinion mattered but he was easily framed as a competitor. Hifi News is just another mag.

 

What is needed is a upping the ante on MQAs bullshit marketing and getting some science people publicly taking a good hard look at it. The neuroscience seems to be an especially low hanging fruit.

 

The FAQ on the MQA website states:

 

"MQA is based entirely on science. Specifically, it is based on new findings in Neuroscience that have told us that the resolution of timing information is critical to our hearing and our ear/brain interaction."

 

See: http://www.mqa.co.uk/professional/for-content-producers - scroll down to FAQ.

 

These are pretty unspecific claims and perhaps it's easy to find neuroscience papers supporting it.

 

But I am pretty sure that none of the neuroscience papers they cite in their AES-paper would provide proper support for their specific use-case, not to speak of their implementation. Has MQA shown any evidence that they tested and validated their stuff in some "neuroscience" setup?!

 

I am collecting the papers over the holidays and will have a look at them. Also lets see if there is any feedback from the authors.

 

 

[mcgillroy]

16 hours ago, Em2016 said:

 

Use these 2016 figures as a guesstimate only.  Obviously Dezzer is still a small piece of the pie overall, but it shows Deezer having over 6x the subcriber numbers of Tidal. 

 

And that was when Deezer Elite (CD quality streaming) was exclusive to Sonos. That exclusivity with Sonos has now ended.

 

 

 

 

 

Do you have the whole Midia slide-deck and can you share it?

 

Thx!

[mcgillroy]

If anybody was in doubt Austins texts makes one thing clear:

 

MQA = MP3+

 

Where the + stands for:

 

-  only partially lossy

-  plus DRM

 

The whole argument for the folding process is pro perceptual encoding. By that logic they would need to rally behind MP3 & AAC too, cause those smart, smart enconders know how to distinguish noise from "meaningful" data.

 

Seriously this text is an amazing feat of syncopancy. Notice also not a word about compensating for ADC-deficiencies, its all per track analysis for encoding.

 

Now somebody print t-shirts and stickers with MQA = MP3+ and sell them at audio shows. Surely a hit with discerning Audiophiles. 

[mcgillroy]

Austin in damage–control–mode. Pretty well done actually. They are trying to shift the narrative to a cautious „we have to understand the music industries point of view.”

 

But the most interesting development is that they got Brandenburg involved. He is a no bullshit guy and will call out Stuart on his sampling theory-spiel. This might well be the moment science takes notice of MQA and it won’t survive that sort of scrutiny.

[mcgillroy]

An MQA-ADC?! Where? Nobody has seen any in the wild and it’s questionable if they exist.

 

Prediction: that Mytek device if it ever appears will only lead to further disenchantment with MQA.

[mcgillroy]

Chalk up as another MQA marketing fail. Four years in and they still haven’t learned that the turf has changed.

 

Either we are living through a shill-shortage or MQA is just so bad all qualified shills decline.