My new article series on MQA.

Anybody remember the Burwen Bobcat? The USB DAC/software plugin combo reminds me of MQA in certain ways.

Read the two pages of this twelve year old SHTV thread to see some familiar faces with interesting things to say . . .

Anyone know anything about the Burwen Bobcat?

 

Spot on...reviewers have become industry sycophants in many cases...

 

Agree, and I should have included the reviewer's name. Vade Forrester

 

oops, should have clicked on the link

 

To these ears and those of a multiple Grammy-winning recording engineer/producer, on multiple systems ... including his own studio--involving major albums he worked on--the MQA to us proved to be colored, often unflattering version of the 24/192 flac files of the same mastering. We're doing a piece for a mainstream paper ...

 

please update.

 

We've only seen and heard vague claims about the back catalog and no time limit to get all the music ever created converted. It will NEVER happen. This is all clever marketing to make MQA seem like magic. I've been told by several people that millions of songs are only a couple of hundred thousand albums. And are probably already digitized. We'll see the same catalog of music known to sell with a few more letters (MQA) rubber stamped on the packaging.

No thanks.

 

The majority of this forum isn't convinced of the virtues of high resolution:

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/do-you-think-high-res-audio-is-an-audible-improvement-over-cd-quality-sound/

And now the industry and their puppets are trying to convince us that High Res PCM is flawed and isn't good enough.

The labels clearly have learned nothing.

 

I think the point he's making here: The MQA format mandates that the digital output is never available to the consumer. It must be delivered by analog. This precludes, for example, digital processing in your receiver that you can do now for for your digital inputs (even SACD or DVD-A), for example, parametric EQ, time correction and room delay, acoustic environments, all while never leaving the digital domain. The rights to access the digital format are managed, aka DRM. Subverting your fair-use rights to the product you purchased through technological means.

Additionally, they potentially have provisions in the crypto and the format to downgrade the "non-mqa" audio even more than the 13 bits documented, or to make you or manufacturers pay more for a higher-order "unfolding". The DRM features they may be selling to music distributors aren't published.

 

More likely the forum has learned nothing if they can’t hear the benefit of hirez.

 

Well the question is a lossy format like MQA high res? For me it isn't. But when you start out with 24 bits and then lose 7 bits and end up with 17 that doesn't sound like real high res to me. But what do I know I'm just a Bozo on this bus.

 

FLAC is a better compression scheme, bit-for-bit, and it's lossless. I don't think that fact can be emphasized enough. FLAC gives you 24 bits of real resolution. It gives you the exact output of the ADC used at the studio. You can use your own reconstruction filter or DAC at will, to suit your tastes.

Setting aside all this paranoia about being used for DRM purposes, that's what it boils down to. It's worse than what we already have. Sorry LeeS, any lame excuse you give about time-domain correction doesn't do anything to persuade me.

The public denied SACD. They denied DVD-Audio. They denied HDCD. They even deny regular CDs these days. The general public is not going to give one monkey's toss about some invisible benefit to audio that can't even be verified in a blind test. Audiophiles will deny MQA because it's lossy and requires a special DAC. This reminds me of HDCD's claim that playback in a regular CD player wouldn't be detrimental to the playback - and what a load of cock that turned out to be. Remember CX vinyl discs? Techmoan did a review on that baffling format. A load of cock. MQA wouldn't be so bad if it didn't affect non-MQA compliant DACs, but it does. You lose, at best, a bit of resolution, and gain, at best, a bit of resolution. All that and for what? Compression worse than what we already have!!

Blind tests cannot prove that hi-res audio is any better than CD-quality. Blind tests also cannot prove that inserting a CD-quality digital audio stage into a system has any audible effect. Draw your own conclusions on those blunders. As for me, I'm going to enjoy CDs because they do what they're supposed to do. They provide an accurate representation of what came out of the other end of an ADC. PCM audio isn't locked down by specific licensing restrictions or phony-ass filters. I'm sick of hearing about MQA.

Remember when Sony committed to digitizing their back catalogue in DSD64 and claiming it was as close to a master tape as you could get? Remember when they committed to releasing a huge number of SACDs from these supposedly perfect transfers? Now we've got even higher DSD rates, all of which get even more perfecter and betterer! When does it end??

It ends with CD. Digital audio will die by the CD. It's over. The public has chosen. PCM wins.

 

I'm really interested to read more about it. But please, I can't emphasis enough that this paper should include a lot of "I don't know" or "I'll have to ask" in order to appear balanced and objective.

on a more serious note: what do you mean by coloration? The worst I heard about MQA is that it doesn't sound different enough from redbook PCM to justify being addressed as HiRes.

 

You could say that. Then again, CD came in thirty-five years ago, to a standard and was industry wide.

What it didn't do was arrive late in the day, when there are already a plethora of other formats, and promising to fix a streaming "problem" that 4K, or even just SD video, doesn't have.

However, it's pitched at the audiophile market. A market that's not short of the gullible, and the hifi press that in recent years gave up all pretence, in the main, of critical objectivity. Finally, it gets touted to the record labels.

How could it fail?

Edit: I would rather that Bob retired with grace, instead of going out on the back of a scam, derided by many of the very group his previous products have brought joy to.

 

I am thinking of picking up this little box to dip my toes into MQA;

Review: Pro-Ject Audio Pre Box S2 Digital - upstream success - Headfonia Headphone Reviews

 

Pretty inexpensive for a box with TWO of ESS’ top line 9038 converters.

 

The failure of these audiophile-centric formats is why I like MQA in part. Music consumption is moving toward streaming and MQA rightly imho leverages that. The fact that MQA has been successful in getting all the labels and many of the hardware vendors on board indicates to me that it has a chance of wide adoption.

It’s a better approach than the prior focus on audiophiles.

 

I loved it. Sounded excellent in my show demo.

RMAF 2017: Pro-Ject Audio surprises and delights

 

Not when the means by which its delivered is less than audiophiles would ordinarily choose however.

 

Does anyone know how MQA would impact DSP operations in end-user equipment? Can volume control, equalization, time delay etc. be performed on MQA files without restriction, as they can today on uncompressed PCM? If not, that would greatly affect end-user flexibility.

 

Nope. MQA-encoded LPCM stream cannot be touched to remain decodable by either MQA-certified software or hardware.

 

Wow. So that wipes out entire product categories. Digital crossovers and speakers, proprietary DSP settings, and digital bass management. And how about streaming MQA across a wireless network...do all the wireless clients need to be MQA-compliant?

It appears to me that MQA is simply a scheme to lock down the entire digital chain to a proprietary, licensed ecosystem. The only way out is to analog, after all the fees have been paid. All digital processing by the end user will be at MQA's pleasure, and at MQA's profit.

 

MQA is PCM in a FLAC container with special proprietary data embedded. The restrictions are in creation and decoding. Anything that messes with the PCM prior to getting to the DAC messes up the proprietary embedded MQA data.

So it's Bob's way or the highway.

 

No, another of the stated objections to MQA

 

Neil Young’s (and Ayre’s) Pono Music Store wasn’t focused on audiophiles either, and it did worse than the download sites that do focus on audophiles. What you mean is MQA is going to be forced down our throats with no viable alternative.

I forget; what is it about your article series that is “new”?