MQA - A clever stealth DRM-Trojan (CCC talk)

Video is compressed (lossy) before streaming - it is clear that data compression is vital for video streaming and I see no end to that necessity for the time being (4K, 8K....).

The audio associated with these video streams is usually lossy compressed to below 16/44.1 quality, as are the majority of audio only streaming services being used currently.

MQA are asserting that they have developed a way to reduce the file size of high quality lossless digital audio (up to 24/384 PCM) such that it is feasible to scalably stream audio within the limits of current network capacity while retaining the original high-resolution.

In other words, they ostensibly use perceptual coding to efficiently capture everything you can hear while discarding information not relevant to the listener - like mp3 but for the 21st century.

The question is, how does it sound?

 

Video is compressed by necessity because it really is very high bandwidth to do lossless 1920x1080 video uncompressed. Blu-ray 1920x1080 is over 50 Mbps. 4K uncompressed is going to be even way more than that. Very few people can stream that bitrate. Lossy compression is a necessity for HD video and higher than HD video.

High-res lossless audio has much less bandwidth needs. Lossless compressed 24/192 audio is around 4-5 mbps. Lossy 1920x1080 as streamed by Youtube and Netlix is also around 4-5 mpbs. If you can stream lossy HD video on Youtube or Netflix you can stream lossless high-res 24/192 two channel audio compressed with FLAC or ALAC. 4K video is around 18 mbps. In a world where people are now streaming 4K video, lossless 24/192 and 24/96 is trivial bandwidth.

Modern home broadband can handle high-res audio streaming and HD video streaming going on at the same time. High-res audio streaming bandwidth is not an issue for people who have broadband internet. And as time moves on more people will have the necessary bandwidth and bandwidth headroom to easily to high-res audio streaming. 10 to 20 years ago Meridian could argue that MQA solved bandwidth needs for delivering high-res audio streaming. But today when 1920/1080 video streaming is the norm and 4K video streaming is becoming practical, high-res lossless audio streaming becomes easy to trivial. There is no need for MQA to make streaming easier. Lossless high-res audio streaming is already easy enough. If MQA had been introduced 10 to 20 years ago it could have made the bandwidth argument that MQA compression magically made high-res audio streaming possible. But today that argument is NULL and will become less NULL as more home internet bandwidth becomes the norm.

 

The bandwidth argument has been propped repeatedly by proponents of MQA who obviously forgot we don't live in the 90's anymore. The argument that size reduction of audio file has any benefit doesn't hold water when the global bandwidth consumption for audio is so tiny it doesn't even register (see post #296 in the mega thread discussing @LeeS article for further details).

MQA also failed repeatedly to demonstrate any quality benefit to their scheme, so my theory is that it doesn't improve anything unless specific care was taken to select the audience and the tracks that were played.

 

I don't know - it seems to me that bandwidth is limited (let's not forget online gaming) and being able to stream what is purported to effectively be a 24/384 PCM audio carrier today, in place of every audio stream on the internet would be an improvement.

This is the MQA pitch - does it live up to the claims? I've not heard much about it sounding bad in tests but there seems to be a problem in the audiophile community (such as it is) over listening tests in general. 16/44.1 that has been noise shaped from higher resolution transfers is hard to distinguish from the hi-res master so, for most, hi-res itself seems like a waste of time.

Still, if MQA really can achieve bridging the gap for those who hear* improvement in the native hi-res audio over CD down conversion, while maintaining lower data volume, then I don't see that as being 10 or 20 years too late, rather it would be the next logical step.

One thing is for certain, the world is evolving rapidly and something about the way we currently encode audio data is going to change.

* this ties back to the listening test quagmire in audio, of course...

 

Having read the blurb, indulged in the debates and joined an MQA forum on Facebook, I purchased a Meridian Explorer 2 DAC and, from the Onkyo Music site, two MQA albums.

To quickly answer your question: yes, it sounded good.

Caveat: it didn't meet my expectations based on MQA's own marketing and nothing like the claims made by a number of hifi reviewers.

I compared Led Zep II and Fleetwood Mac's Mirage albums. Both compared to Spotify on Extreme setting (highest quality) and also the CD version for Zep to compare with the Diament mastering.

It should've been obvious, right?

Well, despite the blue light coming on (designating MQA Studio 24/192), and listening to the albums through the Quad actives and headphones, I came away feeling a number of things, but mostly disappointed.

The "issues" that MQA cite, once resolved (presumably), offered really not better than Spotify. So it's either:-

• the DAC isn't up to much
• Spotify is better than many would have you believe (I've always liked it, so I need no convincing)
• whatever MQA is solving, it is less relevant from an audible standpoint than a data compression one.

So you can buy into it, but it's not adding anything - in my experience - from an audio quality perspective that other existing formats and providers aren't already doing.

Edit: my sources were my correctly configured laptop running Foobar and WASAPI to the ME2 and also my Samsung Galaxy S7 phone. The ME2 is USB only.

The additional claim made by some that an MQA file without any MQA treatment would surpass CD quality, is, to be kind, misleading if not a wholesale falsehood.

 

MQA is socialism. Because it doesn't effect you personally, or rather you can't see it, doesn't mean it isn't there.
You will pay for MQA whether you like it or not.

 

That is how you want to frame the discussion. That is not the only issue here.

 

This ship has sailed as far as I am concerned. I am happy enough with 24/48, 24/96 and 24/192. I have plenty of spare bits around and can afford to waste a few. Maybe 20 years ago MQA might have been of interest. When MP3 came along I couldn't understand why there wasn't an option for compressed audio but at CD bitrate.

 

The whole thing (scam or not) hinges on the promised sound quality.

Noise shaping from hi-res transfers to CD is effectively a perceptual coding lossy compression scheme to provide the perceived benefits from the higher resolution transfer in the 16/44.1 format. Since the mid 90s, practically all CDs have been made this way.

 

Britain hoisting this kind of crap on us over here is why America isn't subject of the crown today. Putting lipstick on this pig changes nothing.

Wha?
"Noise shaping from hi-res transfers to CD is effectively a perceptual coding lossy compression scheme to provide the perceived benefits from the higher resolution transfer in the 16/44.1 format. "

First off, it wasn't a scheme. CDs and their storage capibility solved issues.
MQA is a scheme.

Well, I have to work. Others will have to carry on the good fight.

 

Ridiculous comment. Bob Stuart can hardly to be said to represent Britain, and I don’t see much enthusiasm among British audiophiles for MQA either.

 

I'm using 'scheme' here in the technical sense.

 

Were I to use a typical British phrase to describe our perception of MQA it would be, “a load of old bollocks”. I may get in trouble for posting that.

 

I just got in a Mytek Brooklyn+ and I am hearing some sound quality improvements over CD with MQA files (there are some mediocre sounding MQA files but most have been good). But each user will have to decide if they feel the upgrade is worthwhile. And I object to the comment on MQA failing to demonstrate their sonic benefits. Everyone I spoke to at the LA demo found MQA worthwhile as did I.

 

Well said Mal.

 

Don't be fooled by the display when playing MQA. It is my understanding that the display shows the bit rate of the source file based on a flag within the MQA stream. MQA is only able to create an 18/96 retrieval via lossy unfold where 49 - 96 is an estimate of the original data. It then upsamples to 192 to help hide the effects of the aliasing filters used by the DAC, which adds high frequency noise to the output and high frequency group delay. These are problems that are introduced by MQA and do not exist in other DACs.

For evidence of flagging, see FredericV's experiments with manipulating bits from a 24 bit file. He was able to zero out bits 0-7 and still have the MQA light illuminate because the MQA flag information is stored in bit 8. With bits 0-7 zeroed what exactly is MQA supposedly unfolding when the light is on and the display reads 16/352.8? At least it recognized that the file was truncated to 16 bits.

This makes me wonder what is really on an MQA CD, a flag and their proprietary leaky filter with no hi-res info and a loss of resolution to 15 bits plus group delay added to high frequency information?

 

Just curious, what DAC did you use for listening?

 

Well as long as anybody isn´t, for some reason, pushing an advantage in SQ it should die a natural death.

 

MQA benefits one entity, MQA, Ltd. FLAC is open source and does the job for real world use.

 

There's one problem with this thinking. FLAC has not secured commitments from all the big labels to release music in hirez. MQA has.

 

Well, there is an indicator telling you it's MQA - so you just read the PCM sample rate and word length as that of the parent lossless source. If there was no MQA indicator, then it would be misleading.

If someone has invested in an MQA DAC and doesn't understand that MQA openly claims to reduce the data volume of lossless PCM while retaining the same audible resolution then so be it.

 

I agree. Another thing is of course that FLAC can be hi-res, while MQA isn´t.

 

The Meridian Explorer 2.

 

Yes, and when nobody buys MQA product because the target audience have seen that it doesn’t offer anything useful it’ll rightly disappear off to the great format graveyard in the sky.

 

Sometimes it really is the only way of describing something.