My new article series on MQA.

I think John Atkinson wants to be proven "right" about MQA.
As the majors (and one minor) have signed on, he will be proven "right."
How much money would you wager on Secretariats Belmont if you were with the connections?
The folks at MQA are the big winners here. It doesn't matter if it fails like
SACD or DVD-a. They boxed the ticket and will cash it in.

"So who will benefit from the bandwidth saving if these are not the end users? The answer is probably the streaming services for whom storing and streaming audio is the only business they have."
Correct! (if they pay a usage fee)

 

I’ll just stick with my 24/96 FLAC albums run through my old Multibit R2/R DAC. They got it right a long time ago and with cloud storage ....no need to pay extra or buy Dark Side of The Moon for the 20th Remaster In MQA. It’s standard record biz....only these days 90% of music listeners hit play on their phone or PC they really don’t care if it’s M4A or a new DSD format. They certainly won’t pay extra for it, as Tidal has proven. If it can’t be physically quantified, most people don’t care.

 

That's because they came before Moore's Law.

 

Yes, ultimately if they ram this through, Atkinson/Serinus/Lavorgna and Lee here might say "I told you so!". MQA would make some money. The major labels will release so-called "hi-res" music in compromised quality rather than the true lossless "studio master". The streaming companies will have to suck it up and stream at 24/88 or 24/96 (which is still a 30+% premium over 16/44 FLAC bitrate BTW).

DRM does not work. This particular DRM will achieve nothing. The pirates will still rip the stuff; if astute, releasing them as 16/88 or 16/96.

Audiophiles who want the music for their music server will remain unimpressed and look for the day when true lossless studio masters can be made available (as we have now) with of course the expectation of paying even more than the MQA files...

Again, where is the leadership in the audiophile press? Can they not see that there's something fundamentally backwards about MQA?

 

No, not those. I would have loved to have been involved with them, though. Very cool products.

In any case, I’m not discounting LeeS’ or any other forum members’ experience with different types of digital filters. I am not saying that other people cannot hear differences, even differences they perceive as blatant or obvious. All I am saying is that I strain to hear any differences between various kinds, except the extremely steep brickwall and NOS filters I mentioned below.

 

That was Gordon Rankin’s work.

 

I will address this later when I am home but MQA is not using DRM.

 

Of course it is. It's a form of proprietary conditional access. So far not copy protection but that can be implemented when they control the firmware decoding - how this can be done is obvious.

 

I'll toss out some numbers here according to the DEG;
"Home entertainment spending rose 5% to $20.5 billion in 2017 as U.S. consumers showed their growing affinity for streaming services."

• music lifestyle group (44% of listeners), for whom music serves mainly to accompany other activities;
• emotional music lovers (32% of listeners), who "are totally committed emotionally to music" and are "streaming customers" and "the future of hi-res music";
• high-tech audiophiles (15% of listeners);
• and the disinterested customers (9% of listeners), who "don't care about music at all."

 

Yeah, I'm confused on this issue of MQA not being a form of DRM.

After some reading, it's my understanding that MQA will take a label's hi-rez master and encode it with the 'origami' folding.

If you download a copy of an encoded file, sure, you can make as many copies as you want. And you can play that file on non-MQA equipment, but you will be limited to redbook resolution.

ONLY using MQA licensed h/w (DAC) can you get back to the fully unfolded hi-rez data rates. So labels need not ever clone or copy or sell hi-rez masters.

So access to the hi-rez data stream is closed within MQA system.

Isn't that a form of DRM?

 

Unless Messrs. Cook or Bezos wish to get involved the MQA will remain a niche product at best. And if they do get involved it will be as a purchase not as a license.

For my purposes, if MQA gets me something that sounds better via streaming than what I have access to at present that's great but I'm done buying equipment for the sole purpose of adopting a new format.

Those 4K blu Ray players seem pretty sweet, though...

 

It’s not DRM. The folding is just part of the algorithm.

Folks like Archimago have gotten so partisan against MQA that they consider any encryption to be DRM. The only thing closed about MQA is the authentication process but that it to ensure quality much like a standard such as THX.

 

As one can read at the end of this column

As We See It

Atkinson appears to be acknowledging the widespread views, also expressed multiple times here in this topic thread, about MQA’s hoped for monopoly on CD quality and better sound and backpedalling a bit on his previous whole-hearted endorsement. Audiophiles everywhere can only hope for a bit more acknowledgement of this common sense argument seen up to now only very rarely in the audiophile press. LeeS could be a leader in this area, but so far he has chosen not to be.

 

Until 8K comes along in a year or two... (it’s already well into development)

 

The reason for the DAC certification is to ensure the file is properly decoded.

 

Please stop the personal attacks.

 

I get the folding is part of the algorithm.

I'm talking about user choice's of getting a 'copy' of a hi-rez download which folks can do now via a variety of providers.

With MQA, you no longer have access to hi-rez unless it is *within* the closed and controlled world of MQA. The full unfolding must be done by MQA hardware (currently) and is not user accessible.

 

That’s still not DRM as you can copy MQA file.

If you want the hirez file, you csn buy it from HDTracks or get an MQA DAC.

 

But the concern is, in the future under MQA dominion, will consumer choices go away to buy an independent non-MQA hirez copy?

 

The way I think about it. It’s like HDCD in that to get the benefit you need HDCD compatible gear. But this is even better as you get hirez, you get better filtering, and you get access to the whole catalog of the three top labels and much of the independents.

It’s like a super-charged HDCD.

But it also involves the production process.

 

I don’t think so because the labels have a lot of debt and the boutique reissuers are a source of revenue.

 

The other tthing is there is no revenue model from DRM.

 

I don’t mean them as personal attacks, they are attacks in general on the cowardice of the reviewers in the audiophile press. My comments to you personally aren’t meant as attacks, but rather as disappointment that you haven’t seen theough the mirage to the reality behind it. Alternatively, you could look at it as encouragement to support the consumers’ POV rather than the record companies’,

 

The boutique labels offer only the same old titles, over and over again. That’s not really a choice.

 

As noted previously, this is undoubtedly the desire of everyone involved in the business side of MQA.