John Atkinson: Yes, MQA IS Elegant...

[christopher3393]

18 minutes ago, crenca said:

`

I guess his comment was deleted? 

 

Just checked: it is still there.

[christopher3393]

6 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

Your right, somehow I missed it...

 

Could happen to anyone. My eyes often begin to glaze over when reading the comments sections of these articles.

For the most part: many words, little or no substance.

[christopher3393]

On 8/14/2018 at 3:54 PM, Brinkman Ship said:

 

Zen & the Art of A/D Conversion:

 

"In a series of recent feature articles for Stereophile, Jim Austin has examined how the controversial MQA codec works: "MQA Tested, Part 1," "MQA Tested Part 2: Into the Fold," "MQA Contextualized," "MQA, DRM, and Other Four-Letter Words," and, most recently, "MQA: Aliasing, B-Splines, Centers of Gravity." I doubt there is a Stereophile reader who is unaware of the fracas associated with MQA, and I have been repeatedly criticized on web forums for describing its underlying concept as "elegant."

 

But elegant it is, I feel. MQA Ltd.'s Bob Stuart has described the goal of MQA as being to reduce to "plumbing" everything between the original analog signal fed to the analog/digital (A/D) converter and the analog signal output by the digital/analog (D/A) converter, other than routing the signal from the original event to the end-user's system. In other words, the A/D conversion of the output of the microphone preamps (in a purist recording) or the mixing console (in a conventional recording), the transmission, storage, and subsequent D/A conversion will be transparent, except for an ultrasonic rolloff equivalent to a signal path of a few feet in air."

 

https://www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion#bf4kky2Hi5SiOKXP.99

 

 I'm still trying to puzzle out precisely what it means to describe an underlying concept as elegant and to say I feel it is elegant.

 

Wiki: "Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. It is frequently used as a standard of tastefulness particularly in the areas of visual design, decoration, the sciences, and the aesthetics of mathematics."

 

So, this is a judgement of a kind of beauty. It is a judgement of taste. So does this make it subjective? Does this in part depend upon what "I feel" means? And it regards a concept as its object, suggesting this is a kind of conceptual beauty, an abstract, non-material beauty? Does the concept need to be objective or true to still be "elegant", still beautiful in this case?

 

If this is just J.A.'s expression of taste, how can you argue with it?

[christopher3393]

3 minutes ago, mav52 said:

 

John since you are a person who enjoys the proof of measurements, prove any accusations as noted are false.  

 

So, mav,....are you asking for bank statements? availbility of all communications regarding MQA? a special prosecutor?  

[christopher3393]

24 minutes ago, mansr said:

All anyone said was that the behaviour of the audio press suggests that some kind of reward, or hope thereof, is involved. If you go about acting exactly like someone being compensated under the table would, you shouldn't be surprised when people start suspecting it.

 

a most generous reading of wdw's post, which was more a venting of understandable frustration that went a bit overboard