MQA Shill Steve Stone Provides a Good Laugh For a Friday...

[mcgillroy]

Another great day for the MQA-PR brigades: Houston, we have an acclaimed recording engineer & label owner calling us a hoax...

[mcgillroy]

Hi Andrew,

 

thx for making your point.

 

One thing is striking though: suddenly this is not about MQA but about incumbents versus new entrants in the audiophile-press market. You even go so far to suggest that advertisers might turn away from CA in the wake of the MQA debate.

 

Time will tell. But what is certain already is that just like Stereophile TAS has painted itself into a corner with its endorsement of MQA. There is a significant crisis in trust in the readership that is a direct result of MQA-hyperbole and failure to represent the criticism that came from the very center of the industry. Ayre, Benchmark, Linn, MBL, Naim, Shiit to name just a small number of vendors. Add audio-engineers like Mark Waldrep & Brian Lucey speaking up and you probably should take note, cause your audience might have had already.

 

You dug yourself into a hole and now you are throwing dirt at the competition that was a bit more cautious.

 

Classy.

 

MQA was a solution looking for a problem. Turns out that problem was the audio-press. Bob deserves a medal for this.

 

Come back when TAS has run a set of stories asking above vendors and engineers for their opinion.

 

Best

 

mcgillroy the housefly

 

 

[mcgillroy]

On 4/27/2018 at 1:39 AM, Rt66indierock said:

A reasonable person can conclude the American print audio publications violated all five basic tenants of journalism in their coverage of MQA.

 

 

Thx for this! Well put and to the point. MQA proved to be a journalism litmus test and the established audiophile turned out to be rather acidic.

 

Good luck to TAS and Stereophile trying to neutralise that impression.

[mcgillroy]

On 4.5.2018 at 11:35 PM, FredericV said:

Steven Stone actually confirms in a discussion with Soundstage's Doug Schneider, that MQA is all about protecting the interests of the labels, and the storage reduction for streaming providers:

 

It's not about us, the audiophiles.

 

He gives two reasons for MQA: storage & security. Security I can understand, the record companies want same cryptographic leverage for their content. That‘s just DRM by a different name and a credible if despicable business interest. 

 

But the storage argument has me sceptical: video and game content has much higher storage requirements than lossless or even high-rez music. MQAs storage savings are demonstrably not big, FLAC does better and what are 3-5 petabytes in today’s cloud environments anyway?! Which is about the size the 50 Million track library of a typical streaming service will require if content is stored lossless.

 

This doesn’t add up. Anybody an idea what this storage argument is about?!

 

 

[mcgillroy]

Yes but even though Spotify and Apple  stream lossy formats they require labels and artists to deliver their tracks losslessly. Apple even recommends 24/96 as the delivery format.

 

Transcoding is done within their infrastructure, partly on the fly, partly beforehand via batch processing. The original files are left in place, transcoded copies are staged globally via content delivery systems. At least that is what a former Spotify engineer now with SoundCloud told me.

 

You want lossless as delivery formats to ensure best possible quality of the transcode. Since MQA is lossy you cannot guarantee that.

 

Unless there is a transcode-from-MQA-to-lossy-a-delivery-format angle to the story we haven’t discovered yet...

[mcgillroy]

Well my line of thinking was less quality-related but licensing-oriented. Could you monetise transcoding or transcoding-events at streaming-services and would MQA open an avenue for that?