Popular Post tmtomh Posted April 25, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 25, 2018 On 4/24/2018 at 8:09 AM, ARQuint said: This thread provides an opportunity to comment further on an aspect of the vexed relationship between audio publications and their constituents in online communities—a subject I addressed in an editorial that appears in the current (May/June) issue of The Absolute Sound ("Audiophiles Online: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".) I'm a faithful follower of Computer Audiophile, so I feel I have the right to participate; I'm claiming no special status as an audio writer. The term "shill" has been accurately defined (Wikipedia) as "a person who publicly helps or gives credibility to a person or organization without disclosing that they have a close relationship with the person or organization." As so defined, my colleague Steve Stone (or, for that matter, Robert Harley, John Atkinson, or Jason Serinus) is not a "shill", though a few of the less thoughtful participants on CA forums focused on MQA love applying the term to pretty much any industry person with a positive view of the technology. It's a classic ad hominum attack, questioning the motives and integrity of that person. It's noteworthy that the ire directed at MQA at CA has so easily morphed into a contemptuous dismissal of the established magazines. When it comes to assessing audio equipment, these publications, as well as strictly electronic outlets, and even some blogs that are basically one-man shows, all operate on a very well-established protocol. A manufacturer sends a product, a reviewer attempts to understand its design goals and listens to it for a length of time that varies but is always longer and more comprehensive than a non-reviewer customer could expect, and then writes about his conclusions, incorporating a variable mix of objective measurement and subjective impressions that employ a descriptive language developed decades ago in the pioneering "high-end" magazines. In case you haven't noticed, that's what goes on at Computer Audiophile. A professional journalist assesses a product in an informed and disciplined fashion and produces a cogently written piece that intelligent people will want to read. At CA, that obviously means Chris Connaker, though there may be others that CC compensates for producing content for the site. It's not hard to imagine Chris functioning very successfully as a reviewer for TAS or Stereophile—he is technically savvy and writes fluently and entertainingly. Manufacturers seek out CA, as they do Stereophile and TAS because the publication gets them in front of the customer base they need to be in front of, which is a function of the quality of the content. What strikes me as an illogical and contradictory aspect of the bashing of the established publications in several CA forums is the suggestion that the content in the magazines is merely a platform for advertisers—the possibility that hobbyists actually read the magazines for entertainment and informed opinion is dismissed. The irony, of course, is that tens of thousands of people actually pay to subscribe to TAS and Stereophile. To be sure, advertising dollars are necessary to attract decent writers and to make these enterprises at all profitable, but there is a significant base of income that comes from paid subscriptions. Nobody pays to read Computer Audiophile. All the funds needed to sustain Chris C come from advertisers. And that's where you, the enthusiastic, sometimes unbridled, and largely anonymous posters come in. Many enthusiasts come to the site to participate in or just observe the catfights, takedowns, and general mean-girl posturing that informs many of the forum discussions. Did "MQA is Vaporware" need to run 329 pages? Of course not—it became a repetitive, self-congratulatory echo chamber early on—but the number of views were manna for Chris. It's not a surprise to me that CA forums are so lightly edited, compared to the way that noxious reader comments are dealt with on the TAS and Stereophile sites. So, is Chris Connaker a "shill?" By virtue of the fact that he commissioned Archimago's thorough review of the MQA story, one could conclude that, like many in the industry, he's very skeptical of the benefit of the technology for consumers. On the other hand, he doesn't feel the need to ring in on the merits (or lack thereof) of MQA whenever the subject arises. Take Chris's piece last November on the Berkeley Alpha DAC MQA update. At the outset of the piece, Chris felt it was important to state up front that "…this article is neither a referendum on MQA, nor an endorsement or rejection of MQA." A disingenuous straddling of the fence? A look over his shoulder at the advertisers that have decided to include MQA in the design of their products? Later, Chris admitted "Of course I listened to some MQA material through the DAC but I purposely avoided using that in the review. The topic is too loaded and would distract from the real story that is the firmware update." Fair enough. But by passing on an opportunity to give an opinion regarding the effect of a modification to a top-of-the-heap digital product on SQ, was CC responding to the sensibilities of some of the manufacturers that pay the pills at Computer Audiophile—basically what the "MQA is Vaporware" crowd is so vociferously accusing TAS and Stereophile of? No, Chris Connaker is not a shill. But there's a real tension in play with Computer Audiophile. So much of the content is well informed, helpful to readers, and reflects a sense of a generous and inclusive hobbyist community. At the same time, a small number of intemperate and self-important forum participants are generating a lot of the views that Chris Connaker needs to show advertisers. He does need to keep those advertisers convinced that CA is a productive place to engage potential customers. The risk is that his wonderful site is commandeered by a tiny cadre of single-issue individuals who are very much in love with the sound of their own voices. Andrew Quint Senior Writer The Absolute Sound Thank you for this post. I don't agree entirely, but that's not the point: I think it's a generally well-reasoned and provocative comment. I share your concern about folks breaking out the "shill" and "it's all about the advertising" accusation time after time, and if one were to survey my comments in the massive MQA thread, one would find multiple comments to that effect, urging folks (in vain, alas) to lay off the conspiracy theories. In that spirit I am going hope/assume that your detailed analysis and insinuations about @The Computer Audiophile were offered more as a thought experiment than an actual attempt to flip the script by claiming that Chris and this site are somehow compromised more than TAS and other publications. I do think your analysis misses one important component: This site and TAS represent different aspects of audiophile culture. While "subjectivist" and "objectivist" are imprecise terms, and one can find listening impressions and measurements both here and in the pages of TAS, it seems obvious that there's more emphasis here on investigating, verifying, and debunking claims about the electrical, electronic, and acoustic mechanisms behind what manufacturers say their products do and what we hear when we listen. In the case of MQA, this generally means that write-ups in TAS will take as fact the claims MQA makes about deblurring, high-resolution unfolding/rendering, and custom digital filtering. Reviewers might or might not hear every specific sonic benefit that MQA claims flow from those technical features, but they generally don't question the technical claims, and most of the writing seems to proceed from the assumption that these features will in fact produce favorable audible differences. The only question is how subtle or large they will be, and what language to use to describe them. You of course might disagree with my characterization, and you surely have a more encyclopedic knowledge than I do of the full range of material published in TAS. But I am content to let others survey TAS's output on MQA and decide for themselves whether or not my characterization holds water. Here at CA, by contrast, there's been a good deal of testing of MQA files and equipment, to try to see exactly what happens with the audio processing, and to compare the results with other processing methods. Some of this testing has produced results that seem to clearly contradict MQA's claims - for example, some of the digital filtering appears to be much simpler than MQA claims or implies; the temporal deblurring appears, at least in some cases, simply to trade one source of phase nonlinearity for another; and MQA has been shown to apply the exact same supposedly "custom filter" with radically different DACs, which MQA's claims say should have different filters applied to them. Even the very basic fact that MQA decoding is lossy would in my view not have become widely known among audiophiles were it not for CA and other sites relentlessly putting that point front and center. And even today, there is little if any recognition in the established audiophile press that MQA's effective bit-depth falls far short of 24-bit, and apparently is closer to 16-bit. This, in my view, is the most damning indictment of how most of the audiophile press has discussed MQA (especially until the last couple of months). No one can deny that for years, in fact a couple of decades by now, it has been an article of faith in the audiophile press (not to mention most of the audiophile community) that lossless audio formats are to be avoided, and that higher-resolution digital sources are superior to lower-resolution ones. I would be hard-pressed to think of an audiophile magazine writer or editor who has staked out a public position that 16-bit redbook sounds just as good as 24-bit high-res. And yet, with MQA these same publications (and often the same writers) repeatedly say that MQA's lossiness is "not the point," and so far as I can tell have simply chosen to ignore the fact that MQA's effective bit-depth is by no means high-resolution by the commonly accepted audiophile definition. I am sure that there is no specific, organized intent at TAS to give MQA a free pass on its claims. But from my point of view, too many writers at TAS and other publications are way too confident in their ability to avoid confirmation bias. To any outside observer, their overwhelmingly favorable listening impressions of MQA, almost always in the absence of any kind of truly apples-to-apples comparative environment, reeks of confirmation bias that proceeds from the assumption that MQA's tech is exactly as MQA claims, making the only task of the reviewer to see how much of the improvement they can hear. In this context, if the reviewer claims not to hear any improvement, he or she risks having his or her listening abilities questioned, especially when virtually everyone else who writes for the publication claims to hear improvements. I view that, rather than ad revenue or manufacturer relationships, as the main motivation and explanaton for the pro-MQA tilt in most audiophile publications. And it's a factor I've yet to see the editors and prominent writers of those publications talk about in any honest or open-handed way. MikeyFresh, crenca and rickca 1 2 Link to comment
tmtomh Posted April 26, 2018 Share Posted April 26, 2018 5 hours ago, daverich4 said: Any chance you meant to say "lossy audio formats"? Yes indeed! I meant lossy; unfortunately I didn't catch the typo until it was too late to edit the post. MikeyFresh 1 Link to comment
tmtomh Posted May 2, 2018 Share Posted May 2, 2018 6 minutes ago, firedog said: I have to agree. Your constant accusations of conspiracy and fake user identities - with no supporting evidence- gets rather tiresome and adds nothing to the conversation. I agree as well. It's beyond old. christopher3393 1 Link to comment
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