MQA vs HiRez: an apples-to-apples comparison - FINAL

[manisandher]

4 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

listening impressions done right are the only std. for a consumer

 

listening impressions conflated with confirmation bias should be dismissed

 

There could have been no confirmation bias before I revealed the results... hence the purpose of this thread.

 

Mani.

[crenca]

9 minutes ago, manisandher said:

 

There could have been no confirmation bias before I revealed the results... hence the purpose of this thread.

 

Mani.

 

I don't think I have said it in this version of the thread, but the results appear to "confirm"  @Archimagosimilar trial - that MQA is pretty transparant, a "super MP3" (without any of the actual pros of mp3  ), and that it takes a super concentrated effort to hear the small differences (given the same master - always a question).

 

Of course this success does not in any way mitigate the many cons of MQA...

[Miska]

1 hour ago, manisandher said:

 

And this? (2L's Haydn String Quartet in D Op 76 No 5 - Finale - Presto - DXD):

 

 

What a total mess! And this from 2L!

 

Mani.

 

If you want something from 2L that has flat noise floor (modulator noise completely filtered out), take a newer recording that has been made using Merging Horus.

 

[sandyk]

8 hours ago, manisandher said:

 

Alex, I would love to believe in genuine 24/192. But take a look at the spectrogram for 'Jason Vitelli - Confluence - 06 Say No More':

 

 

Which instrument has energy right up to 96 kHz (!)?

 

I did ask Barry (quite a few years ago now) what could be causing this, and he said he'd ask around... but he never got back to me.

 

Look, I'm not suggesting that this or any other hires is 'fake', in the sense that it's been deliberately derived from a lower resolution master. But the spectrograms do look odd, which suggests that something is off. (Oh, and one of those faint lines lies right on 88.2 kHz!)

 

Mani.

 

Hi Mani

 Barry's microphones are -1dB at 40KHZ, and his recordings have genuine music content as high as 57KHZ.

His recording chain has been further improved recently too.

 

Kind Regards

Alex

[manisandher]

51 minutes ago, Miska said:

If you want something from 2L that has flat noise floor (modulator noise completely filtered out), take a newer recording that has been made using Merging Horus.

 

From 'apples-to-apples II':

 

On 10/21/2018 at 11:57 PM, Miska said:

One piano album I like is Jan Gunnar Hoff's Living, recorded by 2L. There's a sample track in original DXD and other formats here:

http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html

 

There's a nice video of the same track here:

 

 

Did this use the Horus? If so, I'm not impressed - there's as much noise at 176.4 kHz as there is actual signal between 3-6 kHz:

 

 

Why would this recording require anything more than redbook?

 

Mani.

[manisandher]

33 minutes ago, sandyk said:

Barry's microphones are -1dB at 40KHZ, and his recordings have genuine music content as high as 57KHZ.

 

Thanks Alex. I have absolutely no doubt. So where does the signal going all the way to 96 kHz come from? Something is amiss.

 

Mani.

[Miska]

5 minutes ago, manisandher said:

Did this use the Horus? If so, I'm not impressed - there's as much noise at 176.4 kHz as there is actual signal between 3-6 kHz:

 

 

Why would this recording require anything more than redbook?

 

Well, that would need at least 88.2k sampling rate.

 

But by quick check following are from Horus:

2L-109

2L-110

2L-111

2L-125

2L-139

 

And then of course these:

http://www.2l.no/hires/DXD-DSD/index.html

 

[fas42]

12 minutes ago, manisandher said:

 

Thanks Alex. I have absolutely no doubt. So where does the signal going all the way to 96 kHz come from? Something is amiss.

 

Mani.

 

Sometimes, incidental noises. I examined a 2L recording some time ago, and there was genuine, above 20kHz content there - from, parts of the furniture of the studio being accidentally knocked! Zero of it had anything to do with the music - but if you want the highest resolution of stuff that has nothing to do with the playing of the instruments, go for it!

[manisandher]

4 minutes ago, Miska said:

Well, that would need at least 88.2k sampling rate.

 

But there's virtually no signal above 22.05 kHz.

 

Mani.

[sandyk]

39 minutes ago, fas42 said:

 

Sometimes, incidental noises. I examined a 2L recording some time ago, and there was genuine, above 20kHz content there - from, parts of the furniture of the studio being accidentally knocked! Zero of it had anything to do with the music - but if you want the highest resolution of stuff that has nothing to do with the playing of the instruments, go for it!

 

http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~boyk/spectra/spectra.htm

 

 

Click a few times for a full size image.

[Ralf11]

1 hour ago, manisandher said:

 

There could have been no confirmation bias before I revealed the results... hence the purpose of this thread.

 

Mani.

 

Right - with respect to knowledge of processing; but not w.r.t. order preference or all the other things that can affect choice results...

[Miska]

20 minutes ago, manisandher said:

But there's virtually no signal above 22.05 kHz.

 

To me it looks like the content fades to background noise around 40 kHz. But you have very little scale on X-axis so it is hard to say.

 

For fun I ran some tests for Mark Knopfler's Privateering and David Gilmour's Rattle That Lock. Also Knopfler's Tracker (in 192/24) showed similar content.

 

Of these, the first "Don't forget your hat" is clearly band limited by ADC's decimation anti-alias filter. And some parts of "Faces of stone".

[manisandher]

35 minutes ago, Miska said:

To me it looks like the content fades to background noise around 40 kHz. But you have very little scale on X-axis so it is hard to say.

 

More like 26 kHz. But the signal peaks at around -125dB at 22.05 kHz:

 

But just look at all that HF noise you'd be putting through your system! For what?

 

'JGH_take-111_raw-DXD' seems perhaps worthy of a higher-than-redbook sample rate:

 

 

Though the signal above 22.05 kHz remains vanishingly small. At least the HF noise is under control with the Horus.

 

Mani.

[Miska]

54 minutes ago, manisandher said:

More like 26 kHz. But the signal peaks at around -125dB at 22.05 kHz:

 

But just look at all that HF noise you'd be putting through your system! For what?

 

'JGH_take-111_raw-DXD' seems perhaps worthy of a higher-than-redbook sample rate:

 

 

Though the signal above 22.05 kHz remains vanishingly small. At least the HF noise is under control with the Horus.

 

From the older recordings I have found content up to 60 kHz.

 

Horus just runs more aggressive filter for the modulator noise, you can see it begins to roll-off around 88.2 kHz. While the older one (IIRC, AX24) runs less filter and thus has also some aliased noise at the top of the spectrum. Not so different compared to for example AKM chips running at 352.8k:

 

Remember that all modern ADCs output DSD-like data that is just converted to PCM inside the ADC chip using digital decimation filter.

 

For comparison, same ADC, but instead of PCM, running at DSD256 and then software converted to 352.8k PCM with standard compliant noise filter:

And alternative noise filter:

 

[Le Concombre Masqué]

8 hours ago, manisandher said:

 

 

Let me know if you're still confused and I'll see if I can state it any more simply for you.

 

Mani.

If your Majesty condescends to, I’ll be honored.

Since you don’t care to discuss what, in your highly regarded opinion, would be the source to your preferred output (first mqa, then rb) of this Anouar Brahem recording but the hires itself, you seriously fed my suspicion that you might have a business agenda with MQA Ltd.

But then, your graphs competition with Miska puzzled me further: what do you want, studios equipped 16/44, no more? What’s next; aggressive recordings/mastering tamed by mp3 that would win?

TV studio lighting is arguably technically better than candle light; nevertheless, the most beautiful being better be made up under it: the hires with Chopin for me, with Anouar Brahem for you maybe, might just be better at depicting too close miking by too many scattered mikes. 

Rather than going back 35 years back or promoting blurring techniques, maybe we should pass the message that more resolution means more exposure of defects and that greater care in recording/mixing techniques is required + that the mastering stage, even if it’s @ some resolution, ie going from 24/96 to 24/96, should not be overlooked, ie that there should be some thinking about what are the idiosyncrasies of the in studio monitors and about priorities for the music buyer, ie a piano sounding as one instrument vs an output pinpointing each mike’s feed

[Ryan Berry]

21 hours ago, manisandher said:

I apologise if the MQA capture sounds 'better than it has any right to' - but it has nothing to do with lack of resolution on the part of the capturing chain.

 

Thanks Manis.  Like I said, that's a level that I just don't get into with digital.  I don't know if the MQA sounds "better than it has any right to", just that it was less different from the other formats when I've listened in other tests -- for better or for worse.  But then again, I haven't listened to this particular song before either.

[Rexp]

2 hours ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

If your Majesty condescends to, I’ll be honored.

Since you don’t care to discuss what, in your highly regarded opinion, would be the source to your preferred output (first mqa, then rb) of this Anouar Brahem recording but the hires itself, you seriously fed my suspicion that you might have a business agenda with MQA Ltd.

But then, your graphs competition with Miska puzzled me further: what do you want, studios equipped 16/44, no more? What’s next; aggressive recordings/mastering tamed by mp3 that would win?

TV studio lighting is arguably technically better than candle light; nevertheless, the most beautiful being better be made up under it: the hires with Chopin for me, with Anouar Brahem for you maybe, might just be better at depicting too close miking by too many scattered mikes. 

Rather than going back 35 years back or promoting blurring techniques, maybe we should pass the message that more resolution means more exposure of defects and that greater care in recording/mixing techniques is required + that the mastering stage, even if it’s @ some resolution, ie going from 24/96 to 24/96, should not be overlooked, ie that there should be some thinking about what are the idiosyncrasies of the in studio monitors and about priorities for the music buyer, ie a piano sounding as one instrument vs an output pinpointing each mike’s feed

Or maybe some listeners have their own filter that makes digital sound good, older folks for example just dont hear the higher frequencies, 

[manisandher]

2 hours ago, Le Concombre Masqué said:

... you seriously fed my suspicion that you might have a business agenda with MQA Ltd.

 

Your problem, not mine. Get over it.

 

Mani.

[manisandher]

Getting back to the track at hand, here's the spectrum/spectrogram of the first minute of Sample B (original hires), before the cymbals kick in:

 

Is it possible to record an instrument like this...

 

... and produce output that extends up to 48 kHz?

 

If the answer is 'yes', then all may be good with the track.

 

Mani.

[Miska]

30 minutes ago, manisandher said:

Getting back to the track at hand, here's the spectrum/spectrogram of the first minute of Sample B (original hires), before the cymbals kick in:

 

Is it possible to record an instrument like this...

 

... and produce output that extends up to 48 kHz?

 

If the answer is 'yes', then all may be good with the track.

 

Yes, likely it is, with that kind of mic setup. Not the instrument itself after you have released the string, but the sound of nails hitting the strings can produce fairly sharp transients which you would see as horizontal lines in your vertical flowing spectrogram.

 

You could of course try it yourself. I purchased bunch of percussive instruments in the back to try these things out myself. Most expensive investments are wideband microphones:

https://www.thomann.de/gb/sennheiser_mkh_8020_stereo_paar.htm

 

But what does this have to do with MQA?

[manisandher]

17 minutes ago, Miska said:

But what does this have to do with MQA?

 

It's in the title of the thread - 'MQA vs. hires'. I'm trying to establish whether the track I used in this thread is a 'legit' example of hires, after earlier comments such as:

 

On 10/28/2018 at 4:21 PM, PeterSt said:

 

Thank you for this.

What troubles me is that there is no decay in the highs (towards the higher frequency). This can't exist.

 

Maybe you forgot to show the end cymbals. Of course you could argue that the ride on the (ride-)cymbal shows ever so much more frequency, but ... 45KHz ? No way. And at this (soft ticking) level ? triple no.

The end cymbals oddly enough show about right to me.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/percussion-frequencies-part-2-cymbals/

 

I did not emphasize anything with n dB and I always compare at this level. So the Greendale I showed - same thing. I never touch the level (in no 10 years of time) thus both are comparable. 

 

Also, I looked into this this morning because if I had to be correct on the how I came to my judgment on the Hires (sounds the worst) then first I had to be correct on it being fake, right ?

 

Peter

 

 

 

On 10/29/2018 at 3:28 AM, pkane2001 said:

By the way, I neglected to post the cepstrum plot for the comparison of MQA and Hires. It does point fairly strongly to a Hires file that was manipulated from a 48KHz original.

 

Please see the large peak at 24KHz and an additional +/-4KHz ringing around it (blue is original Hires, pink is MQA):

 

What's interesting is that after MQA processing, some of the ringing has been reduced (same plot, but MQA is now on top):

 

 

 

[Highlights mine.]

 

Mani.

[Le Concombre Masqué]

2 hours ago, Rexp said:

Or maybe some listeners have their own filter that makes digital sound good, older folks for example just dont hear the higher frequencies, 

I see you did not get the samples right, just voted for mqa; are you concerned with your hearing? good thing with loss in HF is that it doesn't really make older folks at odds in a concert hall https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e4c9/b3222f26472f6ba12e7fea900c2edb10c14c.pdf

 

[Le Concombre Masqué]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, likely it is, with that kind of mic setup. Not the instrument itself after you have released the string, but the sound of nails hitting the strings can produce fairly sharp transients which you would see as horizontal lines in your vertical flowing spectrogram.

 

You could of course try it yourself. I purchased bunch of percussive instruments in the back to try these things out myself. Most expensive investments are wideband microphones:

https://www.thomann.de/gb/sennheiser_mkh_8020_stereo_paar.htm

 

But what does this have to do with MQA?

how would show the use of Lexicon reverb the engineer applies heavily when recording for ECM? http://www.josephbranciforte.com/james_farber.html

[Miska]

1 hour ago, manisandher said:

It's in the title of the thread - 'MQA vs. hires'. I'm trying to establish whether the track I used in this thread is a 'legit' example of hires, after earlier comments such as:

 

OK, not sure about that one, since I haven't looked. I've looked into material I have. I've seen some material, also in MQA that are clearly upsamples. Some material is combination of upsampled and real hires, one such example being Pink Floyd's Endless River album. The older material on that album is recorded in 48k and newer in 96k. So for mixing they've upsampled the older 48k material to 96k.

 

I can imagine also new material where you could find mixture of sampling rates, because some gear have digital output at 48k (including some digital mics, like some wireless ones) and you could be still recording other stuff in analog at 96k. And with good ADC, even if you record it from analog outputs of a synth or something like that, at 96k, you may capture features of the not so perfect DAC in the synth or other piece of digital or semi-digital gear...

 

So I'd say this is a complex question sometimes.

 

[Arpiben]

 

4 hours ago, manisandher said:

 

It's in the title of the thread - 'MQA vs. hires'. I'm trying to establish whether the track I used in this thread is a 'legit' example of hires, after earlier comments such as:

 

 

 

[Highlights mine.]

 

Mani.

 

I pointed a few posts back that i was not convinced by the argument in favour of a 'fake' Hires whether it is true or not.

It is only recently that I started paying more attention to Time-Frequency analysis when dealing with digital audio files.

Therefore I am lacking experience and will welcome any correction or comments.

 

As mentioned by @Miska the task is not easy and not always you get a definitive answer.

Nevertheless there are still some points/details you may consider in a check.

1. Cymbals.They do indeed provide harmonics up to 50 kHz. Have a look at the link for more details about their sound signatures. https://hometheaterhifi.com/latest-reviews/cymbal-reviews/. 
2. Average spectra of orchestral instruments tones: Like cymbals all instruments have a natural power decay for harmonics. The following charts and document are providing the averaged energy.                  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/887c/aac7b5eb734341e3f46bee63d0e6f1531b24.pdf. Now, IMHO it is easy to verify if the instruments natural decay is kept or not in whatever digital audio file.                                           
3. Distorsions:  Mikes and amplifiers and others do provide wide range spectra.
4. Spurious:      Spurious may appear in  Spectrum / Spectrogram  most  of them are inter modulations IMD from clock residuals from video displays, wireless items, etc...Common ones are around 16 kHz / 19 kHz and their harmonics.
5. Sound absorption:    In principle listener hears are not located a few inches or feet like some mikes. High frequencies are having much more attenuation in standard atmosphere. 

At the end it all depends on what the sound engineers want us to perceive. The above points, not exhaustive, may give some hints where to start looking at.

Hope it helps.