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

[FredericV]

Quote

My first truth, which I have found universal, is that if you really want to hear what MQA can do, you must begin with a well-recorded phase-correct recording of instruments in a real acoustic space.

MQA is not phase correct. It's leaky filters are not phase correct.
 

Quote

My own live concert recordings with the purist sonic characteristics have sounded better when encoded into MQA.

 

He just likes the audible effects as documented here:

http://www.iar-80.com/page170.html

 

including:

- high frequency content of non-periodic sounds such as transients being erased /  softened by MQA

- added ultrasonic and HF garbage, which some may like

- out of phase content, because MQA's minimum phase filter which is not phase correct

 

Quote

The mere addition of random incoherent phase versions of a recording's signal, to the original accurate recording, boosts the human ear/brain's perception of rich ambience and space (the well-known Damaske effect).

MQA messes up the phase, and also adds aliasing, thereby triggering the well-known Damaske effect.
 

Quote

Similarly, MQA softens, eviscerates, or completely erases virtually all transient attacks, which is especially pernicious and noticeable when the attack transient is naturally hard, e.g. the "t" of a triangle ting, or the "t" sound formed by a singer's tongue and teeth.

Some naïve listeners might subjectively prefer all their sounds to be softened, or even have the naturally hard transient attacks be completely erased. Such naïve listeners might well prefer the sound of MQA to other competing systems that reveal the truth about real sounds, so they might well erroneously pronounce MQA's sound to be superior precisely because of what is in fact MQA's gross distortion and reconstruction failure here, with all brief transient attacks.

The second sonic contrast we noted was that MQA's high frequencies had a much more airy, open quality, whereas PCM's high frequencies sounded more closed in. They were surely different, but that does not answer the crucial questions of which is better, and why.

One sonic clue was that MQA's high frequencies were also soft, defocused, diffused, phasey, and fuzzy smeared (not articulate, individuated, or coherently focused). This suggests that something was wrong with these high frequencies (perhaps the same factor producing their airier, more open quality).

 

[FredericV]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

I know Aurender decided MQA filters make everything sound better. So what? Non MQA files weren't intended to be played back with those filters. Playing them back that way gives an advantage to MQA playback, IMO. If I have other filters I prefer for non-MQA, the real comparison to MQA is using those non-MQA filters for the non-MQA file playback.

 

We implemented time domain filters in our own solution, as one of the several upsampling filters, including linear phase, minimum phase, minimum phase with one cycle of postringing (similar to MQA and Ayre's filter) and archimago's intermediate phase - in total 10 filters to play with as several filters have variations.

Then we gave these filters away as a free update and got a lot of feedback on facebook, and from reviewers.

Personally I don't like time domain filters, it makes everything too tight, bass kicks more, but decay is lost. It also changes voices, much like what I heard when I compared 2L.no tracks in DXD (the real master) vs MQA (the decimated lossy master, with dulled transients to make everything softer, and abusing the Damaske effect to give the illusion of more air / bigger soundstage). These time domain filters create content not in the original (due to aliasing) and also change the phase.

See also http://www.iar-80.com/page170.html

The general feedback is that intermediate phase sounded best. Much better than any time domain filter. More fluent, more fine details, no phase issues, not altering of width/depth/soundstage. Nobody was commenting on time domain, except for one reviewer who said it made a big difference compared to linear phase, but in the end he preferred intermediate phase. From a technical standpoint, it also has the best aspects of minimum and linear phase, see Archimago's article. This translates into better sound.

So if a company decides to enforce the MQA filters on all content going to their internal DAC, this is very wrong.

The Mytek Brooklyn also has this MQA alike upsampling filter by default, and it's always upsampling for PCM. Compared to other DAC's, I don't find the sound fluid, so one of the first things I did was turn off MQA on the Mytek. On the Mytek you can't disable upsampling, but at least you can disable that it uses a time domain upsampling filter for this.

The main issue here is that most users won't be disabling MQA, so for non-MQA content they will also suffer from degraded playback.

 

This is the real evil from MQA: they decimate real master quality and they also infect non-MQA playback on some DACs.

This is why I contacted one of the DAC brands we use, to warn them about the risk that MQA may mess up their great design, and this delayed their decision to partner up with MQA until he got those answers and guarantees.


 

[FredericV]

19 minutes ago, firedog said:

Is there another name for intermediate phase? What would a filter like that be called in HQP?

We don't use HQP.

Parameters for time domain:

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

 

Any dev can study these parameters and put the filters in their own player.

[FredericV]

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.

 

[FredericV]

53 minutes ago, mcgillroy said:

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

 

There isn't. The 15th bit in an MQA container contains a hash which authenticates bits 0-14. Bits 16-23 are not authenticated, can be replaced by garbage or thrown away. MQA will not do the first unfold in this case, but just upsample with their weird filters.

 

MQA-CD has the same effect as stripped 24 bit MQA into 16 bit:

 

http://archimago.blogspot.be/2018/04/musings-on-drm-mqa-supposed-techno.html

Converting MQA into something else that would still be MQA compatible would still require the new stream to be be authenticated by any MQA decoder. As the studio's don't even encode MQA, but the encoding happens in an MQA facility, that it not going to happen anytime soon. Access to the MQA encoder is not given to third parties, unless their policy has changed in the meantime.

Furthermore MQA is already compressed, why compress it further? All it can become is even a more lossy format.