Popular Post FredericV Posted February 5, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted February 5, 2018 Quote Verdict: In each an every, case, without exception, we both preferred the non MQA version. Some by a little, and some it was not even close. The MQA version created a whole in the center and an artificial Left and Right Spread, and a digital sheen that was off putting to say the least. We both concluded MQA was DESTRUCTIVE to the music. It was quite an eye opener. It sounded like what happens when you hit the "3D" or "Loudness" buttons on mid level home theater receivers. MQA was putting far too strong a stamp on the music. We even preferred his 24 bit vinyl rips to the MQA versions. MQA screws up the tonality and the soundstage. Period. I had a lot of forum and facebook battles with Peter Veth, the guy who opened the secret MQA group on Facebook. In the end, I decided to go listen to MQA by buying the Mytek Brooklyn, use a linear Sbooster supply to power it, connect it to my Vitus RI-100 amp and use Amphion's Two 18 studio monitor in a nearfield setup. I sold my Auralic Vega and the Brooklyn was it's replacement. My main DAC is not the Mytek, but Metrum's Adagio flagship which has multiple R2R networks per channel (similar to MSB). The Brooklyn is one of the toys in the lab. The first thing that struck me was that MQA has more echo & reverb than the DXD original from which it was derived on the Mytek. The stage was clearly altered. Then I concentrated on voices, and female voices lost a certain quality, the raw aspect of the voice became polished. So anyone claiming MQA is Master Quality Authenticated is not telling the truth. Then Archimago & Mansr discovered that MQA is doing upsampling with minimum phase + a very short post-ringing tail. The renderer part of MQA, or the second unfold, is nothing more than upsampling + dithering + some filters to kill post-ringing. After I discovered Ayre had a very similar filter which was well documented in a ~ 10 year old PDF, I started creating DSP recipes in SOX which kill post-ringing, which would give me the exact same impulse response when a dirac pulse was sent through this filter. Listened via our music server, the Metrum Adagio, a Vitus SS-025 and Amphion's Krypton 3 flagship, which is a very large speaker capable of projecting a near field sound into a larger room, thanks to Amphion's cardiod system. Krypton 3 is like the studio Two 18 flagship on steroids. As the Metrum does not do any DSP or digital filtering, I only heard our own SOX DSP config. Very similar effects happened with this MQA alike filter: 1. bass: with EDM, the bass is more tight, but it loses body. The kick is more aggressive. 2. voices: again something is lost, the decay is shortened 3. fluidity: these filters lack fluidity of a decent linear phase, or intermediate phase filter Something is lost. Transients are boosted and bass kicks more, but any decay is artificially shortened. Instruments which in real life have body, now are thinner. These filters may be nice for some music genres, but enforcing them on all music genres like MQA is doing, feels wrong.When you buy an MQA dac, you risk that redbook CD is also processed via such filter. For this reason, I contacted my own DAC manufacturer Metrum Acoustics, that I did not want to have a NOS dac where everything is going through an MQA decoder. The MSB is also a NOS dac, so to keep the NOS sound, any MQA processing, filtering or upsampling should only occur when MQA files are being played, and the MQA module should be bypassed when no MQA is entering the DAC. Today I got confirmation from Cees Ruijtenberg that no processing is occurring when the MQA decoder does not detect an MQA encoded PCM stream, which is good. Not all manufacturers implement it this way, and mk2 versions of existing non-MQA dacs may actually sound worse than the original mk1. Quote Bob Stuart, John Atkinson, Michael Lavorgna, Robert Harley, Jim Austin, John Darko (did I miss anyone?).. you should all be ashamed of your selves. MQA is by far the biggest farce ever perpetrated in "high end audio". So many excellent DAC's have been called "outdated" by these magazines. They should be ashamed. Quote Couple this with all the data presented here, the measurements, and looking behind the curtain at the financials, the motives, and the players, it is clear MQA is a wholesale fraud. They are selling a solution to a non-problem, and hyping the deblur and time domain arguments. Well I played with the time domain argument by implementing it in SOX, and I did not like what I hear. These filters cause a frequency dependent phase shift, which alters the width/depth/soundstage. We also tested all of these filters on a very expensive Aries Cerat system (also includes an R2R dac, but with tubes), and the owner did not like the MQA alike filters at all. Last weekend, Archimago debunked the deblur features of MQA. He found the opposite: MQA most likely adds blur by consecutive minimum phase steps, instead of removing blur: http://archimago.blogspot.be/2018/02/musingsmeasurements-on-blurring-and-why.html They already lost the bandwidth argument, as the shelf life of a x4 to x5 compression factor compared to lossless flac, is just a few years with data doubling every 18 months, an 5G on the rise. They already lost the time domain argument, and last weekend they lost the deblur argument. The proof: when MQA came out, we had 200 mbit in Belgium. Now we have 500 mbit on cable and gigabit fiber is being rolled out now in cities. So the doubling every 18 months can't be stopped by MQA, and the bandwidth advantage will soon be irrelevant. Not much will be left of MQA when it has been fully debunked and reverse engineered. Except for the believers who are already sold on MQA gear combined with Tidal. Today I encountered a few, with the typical arguments copy pasted from MQA's marketing. They want to stay in their bubble. It's like talking to flat earthers. PS: I also owe you an apology. I misjudged you. You did your homework well in doing this test, which cannot be said of certain MQA believers. beetlemania, Teresa, MrMoM and 2 others 2 3 Designer of the 432 EVO music server and Linux specialist Discoverer of the independent open source sox based mqa playback method with optional one cycle postringing. Link to comment
FredericV Posted February 6, 2018 Share Posted February 6, 2018 6 hours ago, GUTB said: Achimago's "work" doesn't prove anything. Ever talked to a flat earther? Whatever proof of curvature is presented to these crazies, they always say "this does not prove anything". At least the forum offers an ignore function Designer of the 432 EVO music server and Linux specialist Discoverer of the independent open source sox based mqa playback method with optional one cycle postringing. Link to comment
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