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

[FredericV]

Remember the GO LISTEN argument? Most arguments of MQA opinion makers fall into one of these pre-defined categories:
 

Here's how the GO LISTEN argument works, from their secret MQA group:

The post opened with "Oh boy here we go again". I removed all names from the post and replies. Screenshot used under fair use.

When they no longer have any argument left, they always revert to the GO LISTEN argument. So this is why we have articles like this one, and several MQA topics, which counteract such non-critical thinking.

They basically throw away all our research. Which means they know it's true. If there were mistakes in our research, they would attack them. They can't. So all they have left is their GO LISTEN fallback argument.

 

[manisandher]

17 hours ago, miguelito said:

After listening to a LOT of MQA over TIDAL (I have a dCS Rossini + Master Clock, which fully decodes MQA in hardware) I can tell you it is at best a mixed bag. I have found no instance in which the MQA file was markedly better than the high resolution version I own, in some cases it is a little different (eg Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert - I have a bunch of versions of this album).

 

You listened to the MQA version of KJ's Köln Concert on Tidal? I've never managed to find it.

 

Mani.

[hsmeets]

Editor's Note 1: MQA ltd was sent a copy of this article several days prior to the scheduled publication date. The company requested a phone conversation, which took place earlier this week. MQA was encouraged to write a response for inclusion with the article below, but it respectfully decline to submit a formal response.

 

Chris, can you disclose more of that conversation? What was talked about and any reason mentioned why they declined?

[Don Hills]

9 hours ago, mansr said:

I like to think that my reverse engineering efforts contributed in some small way.

 

Indeed. You confirmed that the current MQA implementation is much simpler than that inferred in the patents. You can see this in the questions in the "MQA: Q&A"

( https://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-questions-and-answers-udio-origami-or-folding-questions , thanks Peter) where they talk about true "folding" and separate encoding of the > 96 kHz info, rather than the simple upsample actually used.

[asdf1000]

2 hours ago, FredericV said:

Here's how the GO LISTEN argument works, from their secret MQA group:

 

LOL your screenshots of the 'behind the scenes' of the secret MQA group provide a great laugh.

 

Is this the same FB group that includes Bob himself? Does he 'like' the posts and ideas that are thrown around in that group? 

[firedog]

3 hours ago, FredericV said:

Remember the GO LISTEN argument? Most arguments of MQA opinion makers fall into one of these pre-defined categories:
 

Here's how the GO LISTEN argument works, from their secret MQA group:

The post opened with "Oh boy here we go again". I removed all names from the post and replies. Screenshot used under fair use.

When they no longer have any argument left, they always revert to the GO LISTEN argument. So this is why we have articles like this one, and several MQA topics, which counteract such non-critical thinking.

They basically throw away all our research. Which means they know it's true. If there were mistakes in our research, they would attack them. They can't. So all they have left is their GO LISTEN fallback argument.

 

And what about those of us who have listened and aren't impressed?

[mansr]

15 minutes ago, firedog said:

And what about those of us who have listened and aren't impressed?

You have tin ears, duh.

[FredericV]

1 hour ago, Em2016 said:

Is this the same FB group that includes Bob himself? Does he 'like' the posts and ideas that are thrown around in that group? 

 

Yes it is:

 

and Bob's a member:

 

While the group is closed, the member list is public.

 

[BW]

Great compliments to Archimacho, and to Computer Audiophile for offering him the forum. I have followed all your posts, this one being your magnum opus on the subject.

 

We behave like Lemmings, blind, deaf and misled, and it is very sad to have to conclude that we are joined (or lead!) by the so called audiophile press. Parrots is what they are, they apparently miss the desired objectivity. Great compliments however to Doug Schneider of SoundStage! Hi-Fi, being the only one who has been critical about the MQA claims from the start. Let’s say this seperates the wheat from the chaff. And compliments to the late Charles Hansen of Ayre, the Linn company and to HighResAudio.com for having the intellect and the guts to oppose.

 

There aren’t inferior MQA versions? Not true. Take the Tigerlily album of Nathalie Merchant on Tidal and compare the two versions. To me the MQA version misses everything. We simply don’t know what they are doing with the music. For instance the volume isn’t the same, prohibiting a proper comparison. We shouldn’t want all this to happen. If I want high resolution audio I’ll buy it, or stream it with Qobuz. Then I pay for what I want, not for what I don’t want.

 

And what I certainly don’t want is high frequency aliasing, my amp being linear up to 100 kHz+ and my tweeters up to 40 kHz+, don’t want the intermodulation distortion it creates, don’t want the useless heating of my tweeters, I simply don’t want any ultrasound noise around in my home.

 

I will not be buying any MQA-enabled DAC, so MOON, Chord Electronics and others, spare yourselves and us the costs and the trouble. Ever thought of subscribing to Qobuz instead of Tidal? We have to stop this wrong development while we still can.

[james45974]

1 hour ago, FredericV said:

While the group is closed, the member list is public.

 

So, an MQA Echo Chamber

 

[Pete-FIN]

Great article! Thanks for the effort to write it. Enjoyed reading it.

 

 

I have a MQA filter related question that I hope someone could give clarifying answer. 

 

I found out that Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital can not change DAC-filter when listening MQA. I am in the belief that Meridian has forbidden this to be possible. This is just my assumption, I don't know for sure. So, to get some actual knowledge to this, I present the following questions.

 

What is Meridians policy, is it allowed (or forbidden) to make an audio gear that have user changeable filters while listening MQA ? 

 

Are there any MQA enabled devices that can change DAC-filter while listening MQA ? 

[FredericV]

17 minutes ago, Pete-FIN said:

I found out that Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital can not change DAC-filter when listening MQA. I am in the belief that Meridian has forbidden this to be possible. This is just my assumption, I don't know for sure. So, to get some actual knowledge to this, I present the following questions.

 

MQA forces their leaky minimum phase upsample filter with one cycle of postringing. This filter adds content not in the original file, here's an example for truncated 16/44.1 MQA content where we threw away the part to unfold the ultrasonics.



So everything between 20 and 30 Khz is fake due to their leaky filter.

When the decoder has access to those 8 LSB bits to do the first unfold, it adds a little more spectrum:

 

Quote

 

What is Meridians policy, is it allowed (or forbidden) to make an audio gear that have user changeable filters while listening MQA ? 

 

They tried to enforce their filter to another well known manufacturer of MQA dacs. I have that on the record in a chat with the lead designer of this brand.

Any brand can refuse such filter for non-MQA content (and MQA will allow it), but for MQA playback when the MQA decoder is active, it's always played back with their leaky filters.


 

 

[firedog]

18 minutes ago, Pete-FIN said:

Great article! Thanks for the effort to write it. Enjoyed reading it.

 

 

I have a MQA filter related question that I hope someone could give clarifying answer. 

 

I found out that Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 Digital can not change DAC-filter when listening MQA. I am in the belief that Meridian has forbidden this to be possible. This is just my assumption, I don't know for sure. So, to get some actual knowledge to this, I present the following questions.

 

What is Meridians policy, is it allowed (or forbidden) to make an audio gear that have user changeable filters while listening MQA ? 

 

Are there any MQA enabled devices that can change DAC-filter while listening MQA ? 

Meridian hasn’t forbidden it, as far as we know. It apparently can be difficult to implement, which is one reason it doesn’t happen. There are DACs that switch, I can’t really remember which ones. 

[FredericV]

13 minutes ago, firedog said:

Meridian hasn’t forbidden it, as far as we know. It apparently can be difficult to implement, which is one reason it doesn’t happen. There are DACs that switch, I can’t really remember which ones. 

Agree for non-MQA content. But for MQA content you have to use MQA's filter.

Actually some DAC's sound better with non-MQA when you completely disable the MQA decoder, so the upsampler is not the leaky minimum phase filter. MQA should not mess with non-MQA PCM.

[eclectic]

1 hour ago, BW said:

And compliments to the late Charles Hansen of Ayre, the Linn company and to HighResAudio.com for having the intellect and the guts to oppose.

 

Also compliments to Mike Moffat and Jason Stoddard of Schiit. They have also opposed from the start, citing what has happened to innovation in AV when you have Dolby controlling things. 

 

Thanks to Archimago, Chris C, MansR , FredericV and all the other experts who have discovered the truth about MQA and brought it to our attention.

[miguelito]

6 hours ago, manisandher said:

You listened to the MQA version of KJ's Köln Concert on Tidal? I've never managed to find it.

 

https://tidal.com/album/77620365

 

I'll go further... I will give you my MQA review and comparison to the 24/96 version I own (from HDTracks)...

 

I find the MQA version to be slightly more "harmonically rich" meaning a bit more fullness to the notes. In fact I have found this in a few cases of solo piano recordings. The catch is I am not sure how true that extra richness is to the original recording. It feels like eq or the impact of the choice of the output filters. Additionally, the MQA version is louder.

 

There are many cases where the MQA versions don't sound any different (eg Morrissey's "Viva Hate") and cases where they sound worse than the better redbook masterings (eg INXS "Kick"). 

 

YMMV... 

[mcgillroy]

“The technical assertions made in this article have been thoroughly checked by independent engineers, both in and out of the audio industry”

 

This is little note is the most important and telling aspect of this article. It’s a testament to the failure of both MQAs marketing and of the audiophile press. They are utterly stripped of any reputation that one might attribute to them: technical assertions, independently checked by engineers in and outside industry...

 

Read that again once more. 

 

MQA choose to lie and divert from day one, that’s ok, that’s marketing. 

 

The audiophile press choose to collude. Even that is ok initially - but once people start to ask questions you probably should call in independent experts. Just to be safe in case there is actually fire where people smell smoke.

 

Didn’t happen in the four years of MQAs existence.

 

It took Mansr and an anonymous blogger (+ RTIndierock, Hansen and Lucey) to do some basic research in their spare time to get a clearer picture of what MQA is.

 

Atkinson, Austin and co - the ball is in your court - show that you actually got some balls and tell your readers you have failed them. 

 

Congrats and kudos to Archimago for this great piece, to Chris for putting it out and thanks to Mansr for his invaluable work.

 

Extra thanks to Bob for three+ years of great audiophile entertainment and enlightenment. Learned a ton and had great fun along the way. Send me your address I make sure the CA community sends you the promised flowers

[Doug Schneider]

Hello CA,

 

I am very pleased to see Achiamago write this article *and* CA publish it.

Almost two years ago I wrote what I think was the first critical look at MQA, which was published on our www.SoundStageHiFi.com site -- partly wondering if the technology was really all that, or even necessary, but mostly at the time questioning what appeared to be were judgments based on very flawed listening tests. 

 

At that time, that article promptly made me a Black Sheep in the hi-fi press because I was not only going against the grain, I was putting into question what others were writing, which really pissed some off. But I felt the whole thing was fishy and had an inkling that I knew what would be the right side of history -- and now more and more articles like this one are coming up and some of those original writers and even magazines are trying to cover their tracks. IMO, much more questioning needs to be done -- so keep it coming.

Doug Schneider

www.SoundStage.com

[Archimago]

9 hours ago, FredericV said:

Remember the GO LISTEN argument? Most arguments of MQA opinion makers fall into one of these pre-defined categories:
 

Here's how the GO LISTEN argument works, from their secret MQA group:

The post opened with "Oh boy here we go again". I removed all names from the post and replies. Screenshot used under fair use.

When they no longer have any argument left, they always revert to the GO LISTEN argument. So this is why we have articles like this one, and several MQA topics, which counteract such non-critical thinking.

They basically throw away all our research. Which means they know it's true. If there were mistakes in our research, they would attack them. They can't. So all they have left is their GO LISTEN fallback argument.

 

 

Thanks for the screen shot. It is interesting seeing how the FB group is responding "internally", @FredericV.

 

Apart from the "GO LISTEN" argument, maybe close cousins "TIN EARS" or "GEAR NOT GOOD ENOUGH" or perhaps  other argumentum ad hominmen style attacks ("the dude's ANONYMOUS", "BOB is the AUTHORITY"), the fact that they have nothing else intellectually sound for a debate is telling.

[iaval]

I applaud you Archimago once again!

Very good points and argumentation overall.

With DSD, there was at least a foundation that was different from what we did in PCM world. MQA is trying to rediscover PCM, claiming a lot, yet delivering 17 bits worth of audio data in the perfect scenario. I always wondered why would MQA "original resolution" be so much more expensive than say 24/96 if it clearly says on the paper that it's folding those extra frequencies down to stream-able format. 

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy with 16/44.1 or 16/48*. But if anyone can have 24/96 and 24/192 sans licensing costs of proprietary DRM technology, which in fact aims to retain no more details than hi-res, then what's the point..? Saving few kbits in the bandwidth? No thanks. 

 

*Where available, I'd take 20/48 as archival format, as some modern recordings do have lower noise floor than -90dBFS and by storing 20bit one does retain the format for future dithering to 16bit. 

 

[jhwalker]

5 minutes ago, iaval said:

I applaud you Archimago once again!

Very good points and argumentation overall.

With DSD, there was at least a foundation that was different from what we did in PCM world. MQA is trying to rediscover PCM, claiming a lot, yet delivering 17 bits worth of audio data in the perfect scenario. I always wondered why would MQA "original resolution" be so much more expensive than say 24/96 if it clearly says on the paper that it's folding those extra frequencies down to stream-able format. 

 

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy with 16/44.1 or 16/48*. But if anyone can have 24/96 and 24/192 sans licensing costs of proprietary DRM technology, which in fact aims to retain no more details than hi-res, then what's the point..? Saving few kbits in the bandwidth? No thanks. 

 

*Where available, I'd take 20/48 as archival format, as some modern recordings do have lower noise floor than -90dBFS and by storing 20bit one does retain the format for future dithering to 16bit. 

 

 

From a sheer technical standpoint, I actually like the idea of the lossy MQA format for streaming - IF we were still in the world where it was developed.

 

Keep in mind, they presumably started developing this format when Internet bandwidth was at a premium.  The idea that you could losslessly encode the audible content and lossily encode the rest, keeping it compatible with existing hardware, etc., would actually have been attractive to streaming providers 5-10 years ago.

 

But then they started layering on DRM to appeal to the record labels, adding their custom filters to the concept, etc., and it all got out of hand.  By the time they actually brought it to market with all the supposed "benefits", we were on the cusp of not NEEDING to conserve bandwidth, and the other bells and whistles are for the industry, NOT consumers.

 

Three years later, broadband is ubiquitous in most countries where streaming is available and I'd much rather just stream 24/48, 24/96, 24/192 (or even Miska's 18/96), etc. LOSSLESS content.  So while MQA is still a curiosity to me in terms of the technology involved, I just don't see the benefit to consumers over lossless streaming.

[manisandher]

2 hours ago, miguelito said:

https://tidal.com/album/77620365

 

Thanks. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available here in the UK :-(

 

Mani.

[FredericV]

1 hour ago, mcgillroy said:

Extra thanks to Bob for three+ years of great audiophile entertainment and enlightenment. Learned a ton and had great fun along the way. Send me your address I make sure the CA community sends you the promised flowers

 

I knew from day 1 something was wrong with MQA. It was more like a gut feeling. So thanks to CA & Archimago we started to research filters and validate MQA's claims, which was something for the long term, but thanks to MQA, we started with it sooner.

So:

1. sox can also do MQA's time domain



 

2. sox can also generate fake spectrum from 16/44.1 MQA distrbution files

 

But the best part: sox can implement much better filters than all these crappy time domain filters which are leaky and have aliasing issues. Again thanks to Archimago for figuring out intermediate phase, which to my ears beats all these leaky MQA filters:

http://archimago.blogspot.be/2018/01/musings-more-fun-with-digital-filters.html

 

Best part is that anyone with 30 euro budget (with SD card and PSU let's say 50 euro, unless you buy the raspberry pi zero w which is even cheaper) and any USB dac can play with these filters thanks to the raspberry pi.

Independent researchers not affiliated with the industry can come up with better filters than well established brands.
For me this is not a small revolution.

So thanks @Archimago for publishing all your informative articles. A year ago we suspected minimum phase & apodizing to be used as MQA would re-use their old Meridian tricks, but thanks to @mansr reverse engineering, it's more clear what MQA is doing under the hood in each stage.

In the past, my job was authentication of bank transactions logs in a PCI compliant environment. So messing with MQA's authentication system was a fun part to do    I had to guarantee logs were not faked, and not altered. I also had to protect who could read the log using crypto. Sysadmins could not read the logs, even as root. And there was a complete PKI behind it.

So MQA's authentication is one big joke and 1/3 of the data can be dropped no longer making it highres, and the blue light still shines.

[iaval]

12 minutes ago, jhwalker said:

 

From a sheer technical standpoint, I actually like the idea of the lossy MQA format for streaming - IF we were still in the world where it was developed.

 

Keep in mind, they presumably started developing this format when Internet bandwidth was at a premium.  The idea that you could losslessly encode the audible content and lossily encode the rest, keeping it compatible with existing hardware, etc., would actually have been attractive to streaming providers 5-10 years ago.

 

But then they started layering on DRM to appeal to the record labels, adding their custom filters to the concept, etc., and it all got out of hand.  By the time they actually brought it to market with all the supposed "benefits", we were on the cusp of not NEEDING to conserve bandwidth, and the other bells and whistles are for the industry, NOT consumers.

 

Three years later, broadband is ubiquitous in most countries where streaming is available and I'd much rather just stream 24/48, 24/96, 24/192 (or even Miska's 18/96), etc. LOSSLESS content.  So while MQA is still a curiosity to me in terms of the technology involved, I just don't see the benefit to consumers over lossless streaming.

Hi jhwalker,

I am rather unsure when exactly they started with development (considering they filled the patent in Dec-2013), however broadband 20Mbit+ dedicated fibre is a reality in most Eastern European countries since 2007. I had my 100/100 connection installed in Nov.2007 which should have no problem streaming 4,608 kbit/s for stereo 24/96.

As far as mobile data, where to this day (unless you're on unlimited data plan), you pay for every MB downloaded, MQA 24/48 container isn't really helping the situation much, in non-urban areas, you might be lucky to get 10Mbit/s on B20 LTE band (EU allocation), and yet the 10GB data package would be done for in just few albums. 

 

Opus should be the way to go for streaming IMHO. Personally, I don't stream at all - keeping everything local has its advantages when network drops out. 

[tallica1]

Not to get political but it’s the MSM (MQA) telling us to support only the people who they vote for 98% of the time ? 

The chorus has spoken! Bravo ? extremely well written! WE really don’t need MQA (when we can perfectly stream 4K video on Netflix) so why can easily (which we can) stream DSD AUDIO which is by far superior then MQA? 

 

And unless I missed the comparison (why has this not been done) MQA streamed vs DSD.

 

 

Thanks in advance.