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Article: MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions


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This minor ad hominem carping about @Archimago using a pseudonym is the first time in the annals of MQA-gate I feel that @John_Atkinson has slightly lost his cool after showing a lot of grace under fire. Through his well-established and long-running blog and frequent posting on the Steve Hoffman and CA forums, I think that Archimago has earned his place in the hi-fi community as a voice of civility and integrity. Meanwhile, I still own several major components purchased because the pseudonymous Stereophile columnist Sam Tellig recommended them so eloquently back in the day. Mr. Atkinson says he inherited Tellig's byline and that the made-up name "never sat right with me." I think it was a  non-issue for Tellig then and for Archimago now.

 

Ironically I've just re-upped to Stereophile for two years after letting my subscription lapse for a fairly long period, and I did it despite my sense that the magazine is on the wrong side of history MQA-wise. But meanwhile the MQA saga has helped reawaken my interest in audiophile psychodrama and I've always thought that Stereophile's virtues and professionalism far outweigh its vices.

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27 minutes ago, sullis02 said:

From my perspective of what science has told us so far (including numerous published attempts to test the idea that there's something 'wrong' with CD audio)

- we didn't really need 'hi rez' (at the consumer end)

- we didn't really need DSD

- we didn't need HDCD

- we don't need MQA

- you very probably don't need a new DAC

 

CD audio done 'right', as it turns out, is excellent (within the limits of 2 channel audio*).  So what we 'need' for 2 channel home digital audio, if we are most interested in transparent playback of what was recorded, is *good mastering* , *good loudspeakers* and *good room acoustics*.  Everything else is a 'more than good enough' commodity at this point.  From that perspective, even this site (Computeraudiophile) is mainly spinning its wheels, trying doggedly to 'improve' the sound of audio that is already easily delivered with incredible sonic fidelity along the chain from file to loudspeakers.  

 

All hail the Red Book audio God of Xiph.org!

 

 

Mola_Ram_(ToD).jpg

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4 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

I also wrote about this aspect of perception in my 2011 Richard Heyser Memorial Lecture to the AES: 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/2011-richard-c-heyser-memorial-lecture-where-did-negative-frequencies-go-nothing-real

Money quote: "The auditory system . .. attempts to build an internal model of the external world with partial input. The perceptual system is designed to work with grossly insufficient data." - Barry Blesser,

The Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, October 2001 issue.

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

I know we’re all supposed to be fighting to the death in the muddy trenches here, but I want to say that your Heyser Lecture from 2011 is a fascinating survey of ideas and studies surrounding the field of psychoacoustics and listening. (As for the comments below it, see “muddy trenches,” above. Yikes.)  I missed it the first time around and look forward to re-reading it carefully again.

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I just cant get with the paranoid view that MQA is somehow going to prevail and wreak all kinds of havoc on audiophile options and impose a degraded level of sound quality on listeners, especially if its most important potential customers continue to balk and demand a fair, open test of MQA’s claims. And if there continues to be a widespread perception that MQA is dodging such a fair, open test, and/or MQA fails to make a convincing case in the court of audiophile and AES opinion, I just don’t see the brand thriving.

 

The blowback to date has been brutal, companies hate controversy, and if things don’t somehow turn around in terms of convincing skeptics, MQA is doomed.

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5 minutes ago, botrytis said:

 

I think we need to put a nail in it's coffin. I don't want them trying to resurrect MQA at a later date when we forget about it. Archimago did a fine job of using  reason, proof of experiments, and concise arguments to de-bunk MQA. Now we just need to make sure it doesn't have 9 lives.

The way I think about it, MQA doesn’t need to be destroyed, it needs to win or lose on the actual merits. And on that score it’s losing badly and is a tainted brand. If there was an Amazon MQA product page, it would feature nothing but a minority of five-star and a majority of one-star reviews — in other words, a sales nightmare.

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34 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

 

I also don't really want MQA being around.

 

But we are the 1%. The fate of MQA mostly lies in the hands of the labels... They aren't listening to us (the 1%)...

 

That doesn't mean 'the good fight' shouldn't keep going of course. There's a chance this debate spills out into the more mainstream (not audiophile) website one day, to get more of the label's attention.

 

Tidal, the only hope for a modicum of mass-market success for MQA, is on thin ice. The tech world is dominated by audio skeptics who embrace 256 kbps AAC as a very high-quality standard (which it is) and who could care less about even 16/44 Red Book, much less high-resolution audiophile snake oil (as they see it). Ars Technica and Pitchfork looked at MQA and pronounced it meh. Any Google searcher exploring MQA quickly runs into Linn’s “Why MQA is bad for music” link and this forum’s “MQA is Vaporware” thread. 

 

The idea that record labels are going to give MQA a sustained and committed push seems highly doubtful to me. So far Apple and Spotify are giving it a hard pass. Four years of not gaining momentum and traction is an eternity in tech.

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I sympathize with the case for alarm and distress that MQA might be imposed from above, that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, etc. But I'm convinced the MQA worm has turned. 

 

In fact, I'd be willing to make a substantial bet with favorable odds* with any of you MQA Winter Is Coming guys that the major record companies and their constituent labels are NOT going to "switch on" MQA and make it an unavoidable, hegemonic, de facto standard; that it's NOT going to make significant inroads beyond Tidal and a smattering of DACs; that in fact over the next three or four years it's going to peter out and at most linger as a minor codec option, but nothing more than that.

 

* For entertainment purposes only. Kids, don't gamble with strangers on the Internet!

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26 minutes ago, Doug Schneider said:

It's basically a niche thing, promoted by handful of audiophile writers (that number appears to be shrinking now), known only to audiophiles. I would guess that at least 9 of 10 Tidal users don't even know what the Masters tab is.


Doug
SoundStage!

 

 

I recently started a Tidal Hi-Fi trial so I could listen to a bunch of MQA, and to see how the MQA renderer in my brand-new iFi Nano iDSD Black Label DAC/amp sounds.

 

If I wasn't highly attuned to all of the controversy and hype about MQA on forums like this one, I would have no reason to know or care about MQA's presence on Tidal. It's hardly mentioned and mostly buried throughout the sign-up and set-up process, and the Mac desktop app is free of any reference to MQA apart from its implicit use on those Masters tab albums (which currently features a fairly mediocre selection). I had to do a lot of vigorous digging just to make sure I was actually zeroing in on MQA content.

 

I was quite surprised how aggressively downplayed MQA is on Tidal.

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