McIntosh passes on MQA, calls it lossy and distorted..

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by ServingTheMusic, Jun 12, 2018.

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  1. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

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    Vallejo, CA
    With the current placement of the MQA goalposts at “delivering low bandwidth files for mobile streaming”, I’m not sure why the upper echelon would be spending time on it. I suppose LH might consider it for the Geek Out?
     
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  2. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

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    SoCal
    Forget LH. They are going down the tubes.
     
  3. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    The problem I suspect is that there is more to the DAC than just the chip - Compare the $10,000 DAC 3.1x using the AD1865 18 bit chip against a $50,000 MSB or dCS. And try not to be biased against the old school chip and really listen to piano or any other acoustic instrument and then come back and tell me how much better those DACs are to the middle level AN DAC.

    Granted this is only one man's perspective of digital but Martin Colloms has reviewed a lot of DACs over the years and awards a point system to each product. There is no limit on the number because when he began he could not award a product 10/10 and then 2 years later something that was twice as good only gets 10/10 so he basically ended his limits.

    Martin headed the AES and formed the speaker company Monitor Audio and is an engineer - he was also the technical editor of Stereophile before leaving to form his own magazine.

    Most people who have gone the old school AN route are the folks who formerly owned the likes of dCS, TotalDac, Bricasti, MSB because they realized that perhaps listening to music is more important than having the newest chip on the market.

    Not bad for an AD 1865 chip (18bit NOS)

    Colloms Sound Quality Ratings: Digital Audio

    Mind you I am not against some of those others - I just have not yet been convinced when listening to them. However - the time may come - I mean it took a LONG time for CD to sound good and it may be that Computer audio playback will hit on something very good. I just think they need to address more than bigger number chipsets that are largely about marketing.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2018
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  4. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

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    Vallejo, CA
    It took me a while, but I've come to prefer the AD1865-sporting ANK 2.1 DAC I got to the LM 502CA. Both are excellent, and really tests the edges of the brightness vs. detail wars, but the complete absence of any trace of the "digital glare/sheen" tilts the balance to the Audio Note design. Initially when you lose that it feels like some of the music is lost with it, but spend enough time with it and you understand all the information is still there, just without any of the harsh/bright/glare/whatever.

    But I wonder how much of that has to do with that specific chip vs. all of the other design decisions and implementations that go into the AN digital philosophy? Does no other chip allow you to go NOS + no filtering? (there's the R2R as well, but I've never been sold on that sounding dramatically different then DS) I guess AN's decisions to horde that ancient chip might indicate this is true, but I'm still curious what a different chip would sound like in the same design philosophy.
     
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  5. zoomin

    zoomin Forum Resident

  6. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

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    Vallejo, CA
    I guess I can't be too surprised. It's hard to be a DAC company when so many DACs around the same price point sound so similar (unless designers make a point for them not to - tubes, monkey business, etc).

    And as you alluded to earlier, shady crowdsourcing is shady.
     
    Last edited: Jun 25, 2018
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  7. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

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    Vallejo, CA
    If you ever decide to commit to a solid state transport over discs, you'll find it isn't that hard to equal or surpass a CD transport. Connecting directly to a computer usually doesn't really cut it for various reasons, but dedicated stand alone solutions can be had for relatively cheap. And naturally our baroque AN DACs aren't built around USB and its peculiarities, favoring the SPDIF technology our ancestors perfected long ago.
     
  8. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    The interesting thing you note about the comparison is that it virtually mirrors my initial experience comparing the AN K/Spe speaker to my then favorite B&W N805. The metal tweeter on top. I auditioned a classical piece of music Barber's Adagio for Strings (commonly known as the Platoon theme). So my bias was that the K speaker being a silk dome would not have the treble extension. But playing both back to back to back the interesting thing was that at first I felt the B&W had more air on top but what eventually realized was that the K was hitting all the same high notes but "without" spurious non related to music noise generating but the tweeter. A kind of treble spit caused by the tweeter in the B&W that may have seemed like "detail or air" but was merely a kind of ssssss distortion. SInce the K went just as loud and went just as high but had no unrelated artifacts. On longer auditions it was easily the better loudspeaker and the 805 was dropped from contention - even though I was a huge B&W fan and owner and the K was an unknown and dumpy looking thing.

    AN tries to explain it in their Comparison by Contrast essay here

    Detail and Resolution

    We'd like to briefly examine one of the more interesting misperceptions common to audio critique. Many listeners speak of a playback system's revolving power in terms of its ability to articulate detail, i.e. previous unnoticed phenomena. However, it is more likely that what these listeners are responding to when they say such-and-such has more "detail" is: unconnected micro-events in the frequency and time domains. (These are events that, if they were properly connected, would have realized the correct presentation of harmonic structure, attack, and legato.) Because these events are of incredibly short duration and because there is absolutely no analog to such events in the natural world and are now being revealed to them by the sheer excellence of their audio, these listeners believe that they are hearing something for the first time, which they are! And largely because of this, they are more easily misled into a belief that what they are hearing is relevant and correct. The matter is aided and abetted by the apparentness of the perception. These "details" are undeniably there; it is only their meaning which has become subverted. The truth is that we only perceive such "detail" from an audio playback system; but never in a live musical performance.

    "Resolution" on the other hand is the effect produced when these micro-events are connected ... in other words, when the events are so small that detail is unperceivable. When these events are correctly connected, we experience a more accurate sense of a musical performance. This is not unlike the way in which we perceive the difference between video and film. Video would seem to have more detail, more apparent individual visual events; but film obviously has greater resolution. If it weren't for the fact that detail in video is made up of such large particles as compared to the micro-events which exist in audio, we might not have been misled about the term "detail", and would have called it by its proper name, which is "grain". Grain creates the perception of more events, particularly in the treble region, because they are made to stand out from the musical texture in an unnaturally highlighted form. In true high-resolution audio systems, grain disappears and is replaced by a seamless flow of connected musical happenings. [cf. "As Time Goes By" Positive Feedback Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 4-5, Fall '93]. Audio Note

    And that's sort of why when I listen to SS systems now they almost always sound fake. Fluorescent light (SS) versus natural light (SET).
     
  9. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    Implementation supersedes chip (or Delta-sigma v FPGA v R2R). Start with the power supply. Am I wrong? How impressive is the power supply in AN DACs. Ask them if it's a meaningful consideration or afterthought. And the analog section? Clock generator?

    We won't get around to ticking the MQA box until the end of the list!
     
  10. captwillard

    captwillard Forum Resident

    Location:
    Nashville
    Are you confusing what the chip actually does vs the noise shaping in the output stage. Could it be that you are so tuned to the AN brand of noise shaping that you can’t hear what is spectacular about other designs?
     
  11. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    How about gapless?!? Apple nailed that a decade ago.
     
  12. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Well I was listening to gear for a lot of years before I ever heard an AN anything; however, it is possible to become used to a certain sound and then find other different presentations (which in theory could be more correct) as worse. But then that would be true for anyone with any sort of reference system. I don't have and never have had an all AN system largely because it is difficult to manage financially.

    The only thing one can do is make listening comparisons and one either does it for me or it doesn't. At the last audio show I covered the 3 best sounding rooms (all with different speakers, cables and amplifiers) that sounded the best had two things in common - NOS tube based DACs and CD transports using the best two remaining transports available - Philips Pro 2 and CEC Belt Drive. So I sort of work backwards from the result and say that well for the last 18 years or so I keep hearing a similar correlation of designs (even not by Audio Note) so it has less to do with branding and more to do with design (Border Patrol/Zanden).
     
  13. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Well the transport has it's own power supply and the DAC also has a separate power supply. They design and build their own transformers, resistors, caps, volume pots. They make more of the internal parts than any other company so I would say they take it pretty seriously because they're not buying off the shelf parts from Parts Express like 99.5% of every other manufacturer. I mean other than the parts you pretty much have to buy and usually when they do - they buy the best available part. The power supply are tube units.

    Peter Qvortrup discusses the power supply at 7:20

     
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  14. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    It follows that if AN built their own resistor ladder as well ("chipless"), then your conclusion about a given off-the-shelf chip would be disrupted.

    Finally, you can find audiophiles who've ditched AN, if you choose to, just as easily as you can find those who've become proponents. There are many great digital solutions out there now.
     
  15. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Yes they are working on their chipless resister ladder but Peter doesn't rush stuff out there just to have a new model out to get on the review cycle.

    [​IMG]

    And AN doesn't just stick any ole resister in the thing - they choose to use the best sounding part and if it doesn't exist they will build it themselves - you can be sure they have tried all the other chips.

    You are correct - there are people who have traded away AN gear for something else. AN is generally designed to be a complete system and very few people want to or can afford to do that and the AN DACs lack modern features and they very well may not be good at all in a non AN system I have experienced that myself - though I would probably have kept the DAC and replaced the rest of the system.
     
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  16. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

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    SoCal
    BAD does not do gapless plyaback? For real?
     
  17. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    With respect, you have turned this into another Audio Note marketing thread.

    Can we get back on topic? You are free to start an AN DAC/digital thread..

    Thank you.
     
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  18. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    If we're really interested in having a clean board, maybe you could just merge this conversation with one of the other anti-MQA evangelism threads where people make the same points over and over again, right?
     
  19. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    Huh? Let's move on.
     
  20. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    You mean "move on" to the other MQA bashing thread vs. having two simultaneous MQA bashing threads? Or do you mean move on to more "MQA is bad, mkay" posts in this thread?
     
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  21. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    ...move on from the Audio Note marketing..large graphics, videos, design "manifestos"..

    BACK ON TOPIC- MQA rejected by major manufacturers. Clear enough?
     
  22. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Almost, just a few more questions -

    Could talk of major manufacturers rejecting MQA not be included in the other MQA thread(s) you're actively participating in this morning? Is granularity important in MQA bashing threads, and you're worried talk of major manufacturers rejecting MQA would clutter the specific nature of those threads?

    (all joking aside, are you really going to argue for the necessity of this thread and rigidly enforcing its purpose? If so, we should all stop talking until another major manufacturer makes an announcement on MQA, right?)
     
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  23. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    Honestly you are just being difficult at this point..

    Let's be clear, this thread is bout a major manufacturer rejecting a hyped up, lossy format.

    I have no issue discussing other manufacturers approach to digital in brief..but we got was
    10 paragraph marketing posts, enormous graphics, videos, and even copy and paste from the AN web site.

    There are countless AN lovefest threads here. Now...back on topic please.
     
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  24. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    This thread is naturally going to involve some off-topic.

    Regardless, we aren't going to change the direction of the industry. We aren't even going to come to an agreement as to which direction the industry is headed in.

    I will speak for myself. My next digital front-end will not have MQA compatibility. My music collection of CDs and SACDs will grow. I'll probably start looking into DSD and hi-res PCM at some point and I doubt I'll regret not having MQA. Finally, I bet I'm going to upgrade to a new (used) SACD player soon. <smile>
     
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  25. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    which DAC or player/DACs are you considering?
     
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