MQA bails on Rocky Mountain Audio Fest*

Because temporal blur sounds so much better than jitter.

 

I have went from temporal blur to permanent. I thought it was just as well.

 

The filtering issues go back to my first comments about why I don't care for MQA. To be MQA certified other brands need to send their product to MQA to use the MQA filters, and/or MQA learns what other companies are doing. That becomes homogenized proprietary filtering under one company.

I'd rather see competition among manufacturers working out their filtering ideas to try to be the best. Not one central company making filters that everyone else must implement. If that happens, competition will be gone, and fewer people will be designing better mouse traps. We end up with one, homogenized slowly evolving technology.

No thanks. I prefer competition. Competition promotes advancements in technology. For that reason, I'd rather support manufacturers other than MQA. IMO, MQA can't die fast enough.

 

Not least as the labels determine the product to be MQAd. If that means the worst master, so be it. And beautifully folded and unfolded audio crap, remains crap.

 

Remember that there are many variables as to why you experience what you did.

But the important thing to remember at this point is that there is no evidence from the data to suggest there is any special "tuning" for the DACs. There is for example no evidence that there is a filter "tuning" difference between the Mytek Brooklyn, a $2000 DAC and the Audioquest Dragonfly Black, a $100 DAC! In fact, when I last checked the Brooklyn seems to be missing a few tiny features in the decoding compared to presumably a newer firmware that the Dragonfly had!

As a Shiit DAC owner, you actually should be very interested in these results because Schiit have publicly stated they will not support MQA and the way it's handling the filtering, etc... The idea that you did not like these files and what I did to simulate what MQA does including the type of upsampling it will do actually reinforces the idea that for some DACs, what the company has decided to do with its own filtering, etc. could sound better!

What you're saying and discussing here can already be answered and like I said, the way MQA is doing what they're doing is not that mysterious. Ideas like "DAC tuning" (which the company doesn't really explain what this means - there are a number of technical meanings to this vague phrase) needs to be taken with a grain of salt when the evidence for that is so far absent; at least in the way you seem to be expecting...

 

Hamsplained!

 

This aspect of MQA is a good thing,

"So, if the audio file has been up-sampled from a lo-res version, or doctored in any way at all — which is not uncommon for some supposedly hi-res audio download and streaming providers — it will not be recognised as a genuine MQA file. The intention is that, on detection of an untarnished file, an MQA replay system will display a label or light to confirm that the listener is hearing exactly what the artist approved for release. Obviously, this ‘authenticated quality’ feature is hoped to set MQA files apart from, and qualitatively above, other generic hi-res audio file formats in the marketplace."

The above was quoted from here

Here are side by comparisons of MQA and a host of other digital fromats. Just click one and listen.

 

AKA, stage one of implementing DRM. Put a great press spin on it.
Stage two would be to limit the resolution for "tarnished" files by not unfolding them.

How about we just skip all the folding and unfolding and let me buy hi-res titles and play them back using filters built into the DAC of my choosing.
They don't need to putz with them after they are on my server.

 

Hi Morinix,

Realize that the light is just a form of "error detector" to ensure the data going into the decoder is what was processed by the encoder. You're basically depending on the people doing the encoding that what was fed in was not upsampled to begin with.

For example, a few messages above I talked about the recent Beyonce album that's available on MQA thru Tidal. We can see that MQA itself upsamples the 44/48kHz data to 88/96kHz when it decodes.

Not sure I need or would pay for this light/indicator to give me assurance about anything...

 

The Mytek and Audioquest DACs have minimum phase filters for MQA. My Schiit multibit has a linear phase filter.

How can the MQA correction filters suitable to correct a minimum phase style filter be used to correct a linear phase filter? For the listening test samples I would have been listening to MQA filters intended to correct for minimum phase being played back on a linear phase DAC. That doesn't seem like a useful test.

 

I respectfully disagree. Let us look at a non hypothetical case: The source is connected to a computer which up-sample the audio to 64bit for processing, which involve volume leveling and adaptive volume and then it is dithered back to 24 or 32 bit and sent to the DAC. That's exactly what JRiver does for example and I guess it is very similar to what other non PC based sound processors do as well.

Up-sampling to 64 bit is good in this case because it enables better volume control while dithering is needed to get rid of quantization errors. At least this is what Bob Katz explained during the discussion about TPDF dithering on the JRiver forum. But, according to what you posted, this is sufficient to trip the MQA watchdog.

What about padding? Sometime it's better to pad a 24 bit audio to 32 bit by adding zero. Nothing is changed in the audio quality but will this be also considered a doctoring that will fail on the MQA inspection?

MQA is basically returning us to the bit perfect bit-streaming days and is too restrictive even when don't consider there might be artifacts that may be introduced by the MQA process itself (just think who "validates" the MQA end product and what else they approve for release) and the same MQA watchdog will also trip if and when someone invent a filter specifically designed to get rid of these artifacts.

The way I understand the blurbs, MQA will prevent any kind of DSP other than MQA itself and this is a bad thing.

 

Easy Ham.

When I converted the MQA decode to 24/176.4 or 192kHz, I utilized a minimum phase upsampler of an extremely high accuracy (iZotope's 64-bit DSP - likely better than what's in your DAC). That's how. Beyond 176.4 and 192, your DAC might have upsampled further to 352kHz and whatnot with a linear phase filter but the effect will be insignificant in the analogue output. The effect of my minimum phase filter has been "baked in" to the signal and sound.

No magic.

 

Except it changes the sound from that of the master.

 

Nothing confusing about DRM...

 

ridiculously simplistic overview.

 

Why Can't The Audio Magazines Do This? - Charles Hansen - Critic's Corner

If MQA is the "new world" of audio, I want no part of it - I'd rather dig ditches - Charles Hansen - Critic's Corner



Charles Hansen of the respected audio firm Ayre talks about potential impact of MQA and the cost of building digital players and the cost of building digital disc machines. Great read!

 

So in all the years of work in digital audio, no one has published any paper proving a correlation between measurable "temporal blur" and its audible effect on a music signal? Your argument is drifting off into the "I can't prove something but I know it's there" area of belief. Seem familiar? A lot of people gather on Sunday morning for the same reason.......

As mentioned before in this forum it sounds like MQA has a "solution" in search of problem.

 

I am reserving judgment until I hear it for myself.

Perhaps when Stuart and Craven started down this path the streaming bandwidth available at the time was so low that their solution would have had tangible benefits. But with the speeds we see now (and they will only increase) there is no need for MQA. They could probably just stream 24bits x 96kHz PCM or DSD64.

MQA does seem like a "solution in search of a problem".

Andreas Koch of Playback Designs described it well and in a humourous way in this artificial interview in Positive Feedback (March 2017):

MQA

 

Guttenberg doesn't say anything about the change these engineers are hearing. Why doesn't he clarify the comments? What is the point of posting a video like this with no information and asking the public to chime in. I don't understand what MQA is supposed to be doing that I assume some of the engineers are not liking.

 

Guttenberg is way out of his league here...

 

what is MQA doing they don’t like?

how about the fact with 24 bit masters it is producing a lossy 15-17 bit file, with a clearly distorted frequency spectrum and aliasing.
oh and no musical information over 48 Khz, even if they started with a 192 Khz.

 

I see. And I see this:
MQA: FINAL "Final" comments... Simply put, why I don't like MQA.

Ouch!

 

Great, lively threads you linked to. I loked at Hansen’s other threads and he really has a dislike for The Absolute Sound. Very opinionated.

Thanks for sharing

 

Friday I listened to a brief back and forth of the 192 version of an Ella & Loius song versus the MQA played back on a Bel Canto Black and Magnapans and there was a major difference in the sound of the piano. In the MQA the piano was more prominent and up front in the mix. It was so different that I have a hard time believing the two versions were from the same mastering.

If they were from the same master then MQA was changing the master into something other than what was intended. It was simple enough for me to hear the difference.

I don't know which version was correct but they were clearly different.

 

I think we shouldn’t inadvertently imply that musical information exists above the range of human audibility. Children can certainly hear musical harmonics up to something like double or triple the highest note (5587 kHz) on an extended piano, and generated tones up to 18-20 kHz or so. Not so for adults at all, but everybody knows that I think. So even if there was musical information above 16kHz or so (the well documented upper limit of 35-40 year old adult hearing that gets lower still as we age), let alone your suggestion about 48 kHz, who could hear it?

Anyway, I agree with your main point: MQA begs belief, and listeners strain to hear any difference.