MQA The Truth lies Somewhere in the Middle

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, Sonicularity said:

It seemed like they wanted to find out who Archimago was to see if he had the wherewithal and finances to properly defend against any number of potential legal strategies that business can employ to shut down detractors.

He isn't even the one they should be going after.

[mansr]

20 minutes ago, Sonicularity said:

They shouldn't be going after anyone, but they do seem desperate.

Of course they shouldn't. What I meant was, Archimago was not responsible for uncovering the most damning aspects of what MQA really is.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, psjug said:

I wonder if @John_Atkinson has any comment on this.  Because if it's true about the crosstalk cancellation, Bob Stuart and MQA really did a nasty number on him (and many others).

It's exactly the kind of thing I'd expect them to do.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, Hugo9000 said:

Perhaps before suggesting so blithely that Mr. Carver "made it up," you should have taken that spare minute to examine those files, and then commented.

As if he won't find a way to dismiss whatever he finds, or even spin it into a desirable feature.

[mansr]

38 minutes ago, james45974 said:

I am not aware of the ins and outs of NDA's, would the MQA NDA be any different in general to what might be signed for a manufacturer to incorporate Dolby Atmos in their product line for instance?  Seems like there is a lot of hiding behind the NDA.

I have seen an NDA for evaluation of MQA. That one has nothing unusual in it. There is probably a different NDA to be signed if should you wish to proceed with integrating MQA in a product. The terms might also vary between customers.

 

The NDA document I obtained does, however, contain this interesting bit (emphasis mine):

Quote

1. The parties to this Agreement wish to discuss and exchange information in the general area of streaming or downloading, encoding, re-coding or decoding of high-resolution music, rights management, encoding and quality authentication. MQA also wishes to describe confidential information relating to proprietary coding under the descriptive umbrella of the MQA Technology. That evaluation is hereinafter called “the Purpose”.

 

Are we still supposed to believe MQA has nothing to do with DRM?

[mansr]

32 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

Given that the quietest concert hall is 40db, that leaves 80db to capture.  Since every bit is roughly 6db then you need approx. 13 bits and change to capture it all.  Then you need some extra room for CRC code, timing, etc.  So 16 bits.

You clearly don't know how the CD format works.

[mansr]

5 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

Okay, then explain where I went wrong.

I would if I thought there might be any chance you'd actually listen.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, Em2016 said:

From Bob Carver's "The Truth About MQA": 

 

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/7c4708_a6ad10f865f74369903c44599a91b04b.pdf

 

"Meridan calls this Versatile Music Distribution and it’s worth a lot of money in terms of music rights and artists’ royalties if MQA were to catch on. Versatile maybe. Intrusive definitely. The remaining seven bits are used to keep track of each customer through a variety of interrogations of their computer including its IP address, time and place of streaming, time and place of any download (forbidden, and a felony in the US), computer registration and the computer’s owner! And of course, whether or not the customer has paid for Tidal Master or not. And you were just worried about Google and Facebook getting all your personal information…yikes!"

 

@mansr have you been able to verify this tracking aspect? i.e. "interrogations of their computer including its IP address, time and place of streaming, time and place of any download, computer registration and the computer’s owner"

 

Or did Bob Carver get this from one of MQA Ltd's patent applications?

A DAC connected over USB (or S/PDIF) cannot cause the host computer to take any specific action such as communicating with a remote system, so there is no way for an MQA decoder residing there to submit any tracking information anywhere. A networked device obviously does have this capability. That said, the MQA library from the Bluesound firmware that I disassembled does no such thing. This is clear since it makes no operating system calls whatsoever. I haven't looked at what the MQA component in the Tidal player does, so it could feasibly be engaged in some manner of user tracking. Then again, any streaming service already tracks what its subscribers play, MQA or not. I really don't know what Carver is referring to here. Perhaps some other scheme dreamt up by Stuart/Meridian has such tracking, but as implemented in DACs today, MQA cannot be doing this.

 

If Carver is instead talking about tagging files for individual users or even DACs, that is a more realistic possibility. I have, however, seen nothing to suggest such capabilities in the code I examined. The Bluesound MQA component has no knowledge of device-specific parameters such as serial number or IP address, so targeting a particular unit is simply not possible. MQA downloads and Tidal streams are also, as far as I can tell, identical for all customers. This obviously doesn't mean they can't add user-specific tagging of streams at a future date, although doing so would require a substantial overhaul of the distribution infrastructure. A regular CDN with edge nodes serving static content from a local cache would no longer be usable. I'm not saying it would be impossible to implement, but there would be a significant cost involved.

 

This shows the importance of adhering strictly to verifiable facts. Once we start speculating, even a little, it becomes all to easy to dismiss our arguments, and we lose credibility. Patents might provide clues to aid the analysis of an actual product, but they can also be completely unrelated to anything actually realised. Companies often patent all kinds of ideas without necessarily intending to ever use them (other than in litigation). What any patent can provide, however, is insight into the mindset of the person behind them. Someone who patents a user tracking system is probably not the kind of person who has consumer interests at heart.

[mansr]

6 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

Amusing to read some of the comments.

 

Looks like Dale Thorn hasn't forgiven Chris yet for banning him from this site.

He doesn't strike me as the forgiving type.

[mansr]

14 hours ago, rwdvis said:

First, you have no idea whether he is compensated or not, the only one’s who know that are the two parties involved.  Second, yeah, you chose to promote MQA after something went down, but I doubt it had anything to do with a demo.  Third, I said nothing about writers and compensation for articles, I mentioned shills and compensation for shilling.  Sure, writers don’t get much per article, but I bet a full-time shilling gig pays pretty well.

I wonder how much they pay me just to shut up.

[mansr]

In the past, the music industry managed to impose a "piracy tax" on all blank media. With them being shareholders in MQA, they are effectively recreating the same thing, this time with the tax paid on playback equipment as well as legal music purchases.

[mansr]

14 minutes ago, crenca said:

Even an "objectivist" such as Amir over at ASR has to lock down threads when he himself tries to sell MQA over and against everything he is supposed to be about.

That was bizarre.

[mansr]

8 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

Then you get what happened at Chris' MQA seminar which was priceless.

I've seen a number of people commenting that before watching that video, they didn't really care one way or another. Afterwards, they want nothing to do with it.

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

I loved the part about Archimago being a competitor. 

Even if he were, what would it matter?

[mansr]

17 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

for a few dollars more

Oh, this is all a spaghetti western. Why didn't you just say so? Who is Clint Eastwood playing?

[mansr]

3 minutes ago, MikeyFresh said:

Thats gross revenue Lee, you know, before anyone or anything known as a cost (content) is paid for?

Sure, but as @Rt66indierock said, they're not paying taxes or royalties.

[mansr]

9 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Too much double talk for me lee.

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don't need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free

[mansr]

9 hours ago, Lee Scoggins said:

the timing issues inherent in the ADC

What are those, exactly?

[mansr]

19 minutes ago, Lee Scoggins said:

The key for MQA is to get a revenue stream from most of the participants in the ecosystem.

Therein lies the problem. Nobody should be allowed to leech off of everybody else like that.

[mansr]

4 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

You can’t count the press as third party experts.

Because they are neither third party nor experts.

[mansr]

25 minutes ago, Miska said:

It is the latest buzzword on IT sector. Sounds cool until you look under the surface, for example the buggy utter crap Google has put out under name of Tensorflow.

 

Some warning signs you should take into account:

1) Someone creates their own yet another programming language (Go, Swift, etc)

2) Someone creates their own yet another build system (Bazel)

3) Someone requires you build the stuff under some really esoteric and one of kind container environment because they cannot be bothered to write good enough code that it would build on multiple compilers and platforms (builds properly only inside xxx Docker container)

More briefly put, "ecosystem" is really just a polite way of saying "doesn't play well with others."

[mansr]

1 minute ago, firedog said:

Don’t companies like Berkeley and Aurender count? Or are you saying they don’t because they’ve bought into MQA? What’s a third party in this context?

Someone without a financial stake.

[mansr]

5 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

You sure it’s still about to launch?

It's still out to lunch.

[mansr]

1 hour ago, testererr said:

The whole claim of MQA capturing other audible data than standard processes lies in the idea of Finite Rate of Innovation, related to sparsity of real-world signals and field of "compressed sensing". 

Compressed sensing is useful when regular sampling would result in overwhelming amounts of data or require a sample rate too high to be practically realised. This is not the case for audio.

[mansr]

15 minutes ago, testererr said:

The transient ("dirac") being _non-bandlimited_ is why this is done. Even in theory you cannot capture a "stream of diracs" with a standard sinc kernel as it is band-limited by definition (brickwall LPF). In 2d it is capturing edges, which is a similarly-hard problem as capturing transients in music. 

Audio isn't a sequence of dirac pulses. Techniques created to capture such signals are not applicable here.