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

[Brinkman Ship]

 

kinda sums it up...

"If Bob Stuart truly has discovered a new perceptual phenomenon, then he needs to demonstrate it scientifically. Otherwise MQA is just a marketing ploy to resell previously recorded material in a proprietary file format and they are Phishing for Phools."

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/links.htm

[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?!

 

 

[asdf1000]

6 minutes ago, mcgillroy said:

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

 

Music streaming subscriber numbers continue to climb with Spotify's and Apple's lossy file formats.

 

Those lossy formats (with subscriber numbers climbing, not slowing down) take up much much less space than MQA (obviously, as Doug S also mentioned in that screenshot)

 

So nope, that argument doesn't make sense.

[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...

[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.
 

[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?

 

 

[shtf]

On 5/6/2018 at 12:02 AM, mcgillroy said:

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?!

 

 

 

Remember that Bob Stuart promoted MQA as all things to all people.  I suspect the storage argument is for the poor folk.  Perhap places like the Sudan or Bangledesh or Kenya, South Central LA, etc. 

 

That's our Bob.  Always thinking of everything and everybody ahead of himself.  A selfless genius in my book.

 

 

 

 

[Brinkman Ship]

5 hours ago, shtf said:

 

Remember that Bob Stuart promoted MQA as all things to all people.  I suspect the storage argument is for the poor folk.  Perhap places like the Sudan or Bangledesh or Kenya, South Central LA, etc. 

 

That's our Bob.  Always thinking of everything and everybody ahead of himself.  A selfless genius in my book.

 

 

 

 

A true Hoomanotariyan.

 

I actually don't know why we were surprised about this..Meridian sold over priced junk for decades...but folks (of course, aside from the mags) caught on to this and dealers could not give their giant paperweights away. Hence the financial abyss and the leaching off the in laws..