How does DRM in MQA work?

[trappy]

5 hours ago, hvbias said:

 

Yeah as I mentioned in the ASR watermarking thread I can definitely hear the watermark on many classical pieces. I have a harder time hearing it on some rock or pop (using Matt Montag's blog for samples).

 

 

Have you listened to the Tidal MQA versions? Sounds to me like those are NOT watermarked. That annoys me  as I’m  finding I don’t generally like MQA, (although it kind of works on my Bluesound Pulse.) Anyway, as this place has already made me paranoid about MQA, I now suspect collusion between them, Tidal, and Univeral Music Group (or whatever they’re called now) to only permit the unwatermarked masters to be used for MQA. Looking forward to Qobuz coming to Canada...

[firedog]

24 minutes ago, trappy said:

Have you listened to the Tidal MQA versions? Sounds to me like those are NOT watermarked. 

Yes, this is apparently the case.

[wgscott]

On 10/15/2018 at 1:49 PM, GUTB said:

DRM doesn't work in MQA as there is none.

 

Please keep it real.

 

Welcome back.  We almost missed you.

[hvbias]

On 10/20/2018 at 7:10 AM, trappy said:

Have you listened to the Tidal MQA versions? Sounds to me like those are NOT watermarked. That annoys me  as I’m  finding I don’t generally like MQA, (although it kind of works on my Bluesound Pulse.) Anyway, as this place has already made me paranoid about MQA, I now suspect collusion between them, Tidal, and Univeral Music Group (or whatever they’re called now) to only permit the unwatermarked masters to be used for MQA. Looking forward to Qobuz coming to Canada...

 

No I haven't heard Tidal MQA, I'm planning to resubscribe soon to hear a certain Beethoven sonata cycle.

[FredericV]

On 10/15/2018 at 11:23 PM, mansr said:

That's why there are many companies willing to do it in exchange for money. With a proprietary format, the owner gets to decide who is allowed to make a player. That is a bad thing. Before someone says Dolby, I'll point out that they had to open their spec (as ATSC A/52) in order to be accepted for use in broadcast TV. They still made tons of money on patent licences, of course.

The big tech companies are going for open standards, e.g. AV1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Open_Media

 

Quote

In 2018, the founder and chairman of the MPEG acknowledged the Alliance to be the biggest threat to their business model, furthermore stating that:^[22]

Alliance for Open Media has occupied the void created by MPEG’s outdated video compression standard (AVC), absence of competitive [royalty free] standards (IVC) and unusable modern standard (HEVC)... Everybody realises that the old MPEG business model is now broke.

— Leonardo Chiariglione, A crisis, the causes and a solution

Why would any of the top tech companies would want to go for MQA? The open flac standard combined with blanking of the noisy bits (entropy optimization e.g. Xivero -> we don't encode the noise) reaches better compression than MQA.

[trappy]

23 hours ago, hvbias said:

 

No I haven't heard Tidal MQA, I'm planning to resubscribe soon to hear a certain Beethoven sonata cycle.

 

Which one? If you don’t mind me asking...

[hvbias]

On 10/22/2018 at 12:28 PM, trappy said:

  

Which one? If you don’t mind me asking...

 

Andrea Lucchesini, I've since been able to find the CD box thanks to the help of a friend. After over 20 years of hearing dozens of artists play these works I can confidently say it's one of the best interpretations I've ever heard.

 

[trappy]

Thanks! I will look for these.

[trappy]

Well you’d have been pretty annoyed finding it on Tidal, as it’s another one of the albums where they’ve screwed up the track organization... too much work to organize into playlists as I’ve done with some others. What a PITA.

 

Edit: I found a way of fixing it.