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

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26 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

You have to love footnote 10.

I *did* love the concluding sentence:

Quote

 

: the authority of double-blind testing becomes powerless in the presence of that uncon-

trollable urge to tap your foot

 

 

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Thanks for publishing this, Mr. Connaker. This is the type of article Charles Hansen pleaded you to publish months ago. Bravo!

 

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So, did Brink get banned? Can't believe he hasn't chimed in here.

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10 hours ago, michael123 said:

almost all manufactures jumped so quickly into MQA wagon

 

Schitt, Linn, Ayre, MBL, Playback Designs - give these companies some love. PS Audio apparently has caved.

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12 minutes ago, botrytis said:

If they see something that a buyer wants, they will add it. I don't think it is anything more than that.

 

Linn and Schiit each put anti-MQA statements on their webpages. Charles Hansen lit every forum on fire with his disdain for MQA. MBL and Playback were more reserved publicly but still resolute. PS Audio came out anti but more recently added MQA. I guess that's your "very few" qualifier.

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9 hours ago, Archimago said:

Are these the words of "true believers"?

Or the words of one with an all expenses paid vacation professional trip to Europe? Maybe not unlike the "news" readers on teevee that get paid $$$$ to repeat corporate and government propaganda.

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13 minutes ago, kissov said:

Your response to the Beekhuyzen video is exactly why you should keep your idenity a secret. 

 

Say more - what is your rationale? Why does his real name make any difference here?

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35 minutes ago, Archimago said:

There's also a good "Letters" from Grammy winning classical audio engineer Tony Faulkner

 

Now we know that no less than Faulkner and Hansen were PMing Atkinson for some time re: MQA. I get that JA thinks his personally recorded files sound better via MQA but it mystifies me why he dismissed the many criticisms out of hand (I'm too lazy to find the relevant posts on AA). Regardless, kudos to John Atkinson for allowing Iverson to dissent from his view.

 

Any idea when the McGill study will be finished and published?

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1 hour ago, Doug Schneider said:

he wanted 24/176.4 and 24/192 because at these high frequencies no sound will get into the signal chain anyway and, therefore, ADCs could be designed filterless, as he did. In any event, the key about this is there is no "blurring" for MQA to correct. So what you would've heard from these recordings had nothing to do with any of that -- unless, of course, as Archiamago's tests show, MQA actually worsens timing accuracy, or it's some other effect.

 

This is very interesting and, I think, further explains Hansen's disdain for MQA. I would love to hear Mr. Atkinson's PCM files through, say, a QX-5 and the MQA version (assuming the same master) decoded with a Meridian. Hmm, actually there  *is* someone who could perform that trial.

[beetlemania]

9 minutes ago, Doug Schneider said:

it shows none of the filter artifacts typical of ADCs

 

It appears that Ayre discontinued the QA-9. Must not have sold well? Sign me up for the parallel Earth where all albums are recorded by such a device and the end user can play it back on the DAC and format of their choice .

 

10 minutes ago, Doug Schneider said:

in AA a couple of times, he credited John Curl with inspiring basically all the work in his analog designs

 

 IIRC, he wrote something to the effect of: "if I have seen further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of John Curl".

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4 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

For once agreeing with mansr,  the QA-9 does have a digital-domain filter, offering two different characteristics.

 

From Charles Hansen in your QA-9 review:

Quote

In short, the reason that DSD sounds as good as it does is because there is no filtering done on the record side. The playback side requires a filter (per the Scarlet Book specs), but compared to the brick-wall filters used in typical PCM products, this is a much, much gentler affair. When we developed the QB-9 we spent nearly four months performing listening tests on digital filters. It was clear that both the anti-aliasing (record) and reconstruction (playback) filters had a very strong influence on the sound of digital audio (remember how the 'non-oversampling' DACs were quite popular for a few years?), and so we wanted to really understand what was going on. . . .
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/ayre-acoustics-qa-9-usb-ad-converter#sD026VIUZ8SSkSmd.99

 

Perhaps that is what Doug Schneider heard from Hansen regarding "no filter"?

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7 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

It was always in the magazine.

 

Waat?

 

I just pulled out the November 2008 issue. I see "Sam Tellig" on the masthead, not so much "Tom Gillette".

 

But this is way off topic. Mr. Atkinson has the chops to confirm or rebut the technical material in this article. Not a good look that he instead chooses to write about the author's choice of a pseudonym.

 

It's increasingly obvious that Mr. Atkinson and Stereophile made an embarrassing mistake by climbing on the MQA train. But instead of explaining how you were led astray you just keep digging. Oy.

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12 hours ago, Kal Rubinson said:

The only reason I posted about this at all was that I had always thought his identity was obvious to me.

 

Is this Stereophile's new M.O.? Arrive at an opinion that the average person probably wouldn't, then double-down without evidence?

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3 minutes ago, wdw said:

Perhaps Mr. JA is so completely bound up in layers of NDA and cannot easily participate.

Could be it! He can't disclose that he can't disclose. Double-secret NDA.

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8 minutes ago, Kal Rubinson said:

Since when are conversations of an individual's personal recollections subject to scientific scrutiny?  If you want to believe my memory is faulty, so be it. 

 

You wrote that you knew Tellig was a pseudonym before you were associated with Stereophile but provided no source that informed that knowledge - falsely, as far as I can tell, claiming "it was always in the magazine" . I've been reading Stereophile for ~30 years and have known about Tellig/Gillett for several years but I think I read about it on AudioAsylum, certainly not within the pages of Stereophile. I find it curious it was "obvious" to you.

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1 hour ago, Doug Schneider said:

the magazine that did go so over the top wasn't yours -- in fact, it's not even discussed her. Charley Hansen -- the most vocal anti-MQAer there was -- wouldn't even discuss them because, in his words, "they are a lost cause."

 

hehe, I wonder which magazine that would be?

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46 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

the intention is that the analog signal output by the consumer's D/A converter is identical to that output by the mike preamps (in a purist recording) or the mixing console (in a conventional recording). 

 

The mic preamp out is an analog signal as is the DAC output. But, in between, digital conversions are required. True fidelity seems a tall order, especially with a lossy codec. What am I missing? And how can MQA outperform the quad-rate sampling advocated by Charles Hansen?

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On 3/16/2018 at 8:50 AM, Archimago said:

Yeah, the Ayre "Listen" minimum phase and slow roll-off filter was not something I liked with my PonoPlayer.

 

Interesting. The similarity between Ayre's "listen" and MQA is a reason I'm willing to give JA some leeway regarding his comments about SQ. The Ayre filter sounds really good to me and I prefer it to the "measure" filter. FWIW, I've been using first-order Thiel and Vandersteen speakers since 2002, maybe that makes a difference when listening to a minimum phase filter? YMMV. If I understand correctly, the leakage issue with the Ayre filter goes away at higher sample rates.

[beetlemania]

There are so many MQA threads I’m not sure where to post this?‍♂️

 

With Roon 1.5 I am able to do a valid comparison between Mqa and PCM 24 bit. The only caveat is I have no idea if the master is the same. That aside, I preferred PCM on each track I compared. In particular, vocals were more full and liquid. MQA was fine but not as good in direct comparison.  

 

I usually trust JA’s ears but he is wrong about the new world birthing ?

I can only assume that MQA was able to do “extra “ doctoring on his files after he provided the raw mics and impulse response.

 

 I was skeptical about Brinkmanship’s MQA trial but now I’m inclined to believe his account.