My new article series on MQA.

That's nice that Chesky's recordings cannot be distinguished between 24/192 and a resolution reduced format like MQA by these sound engineers.

Doesn't mean all recordings will be transparent in this way. And doesn't mean MQA is a "good" format that benefits consumers ultimately because subjectively these people could not tell a difference... (Actually, wasn't it that MQA was supposed to sound better!?)

I still want to see MQA convert some of Mark Waldrep's material (AIX Records) and see what he thinks...

 

I agree. I would take this conclusion one step further because in my tests using my system, MQA files vs only CD quality files streamed from Tidal were either indistinguishable or if there was a preference, it was generally for the CD file. This is why I believe the potential benefits of MQA to consumers are academic.

 

read: MQA Reviewed

then

It's never been done - ML was the closest - Charles Hansen - Critic's Corner

 

So MQA doesn't improve the SQ as claimed. Conclusion: just stream the plain master. No need for MQA.

 

If it’s so close that experienced sound engineers can’t hear the difference, why not just use FLAC then?

I wonder if David thought to do the same test, but also with dithered 18/96 FLAC recordings.

And if this is all about streaming, I’m less concerned, although I still think MQA is a bad idea. What bothers me though is the idea that labels may try to use this as an excuse to phase out non-MQA FLAC files available for purchase.

 

You wrote Auralic Aries in your post, not Auralic Aries Mini. So I was speaking to what I know. I own the Aries; you own the Aries Mini. One contains a DAC; the other does not. Sorry - I can only respond to what someone writes, not what I think they might have meant to write.

 

The Auralic Aries product web page is slightly at odds with the Auralic support page for firmware updates.

I plugged my Aries in again and checked a couple of songs on TIDAL HiFi. Hotel California from “The Eagles - The Very Best Of (remastered)” in the regular HiFi library runs at 16/44.1 FLAC at an average of about 875Kbps. Sounds great. In the TIDAL Masters (MQA) library, Hotel California from “Hotel California 40th Anniversary Edition (remastered)” the song at a reported 24/48 and an average of 1500 Kbps sounds badly messed up with receded vocals, abrupt transient tail cutoffs and some other issues.

So running a TIDAL HiFi Masters (MQA) stream through an otherwise superb Auralic Aries feeding a North Star Design Incanto DAC (an excellent, non-MQA DAC) results in sound that is not up to a 16/44.1 stream running at half the bitrate. On the system running the Aries, I think it’s best for me to stick with the excellent and enormous regular TIDAL HiFi library.

Got to check out both versions of the song on my friend’s MyTek Brooklyn or Manhattan II MQA DAC in the same system as the Aries. Costs me a fortune in Scotch everytime I do this sort of thing.

 

I understand your approach. It’s a perfectly reasonable point. I suppose it’s also reasonable to consider that a business that wants to maintain a certain data quality and cover its obligations and pay its suppliers, and pay royalties to artists, etc., etc., has to come up with a montly subscription price that provides it with profit while at the same time remaining affordable for a large existing and even larger prospective customer base. If the bottom line price the company needs to get in order to stay profitable at various customer volumes is too high, then the model doesn’t work and the company goes away when its investors eventually get tired of cash calls. Lowering the price to increase customer volume is a potential solution, but then a company can often begin to experience cash flow problems (very different from profit) which in turn restricts R&D, hiring, programming, music acquisition, etc., etc.

I guess I’m also saying that stating a subscription price that sounds attractive to a huge potential customer base can turn out to be an unachievable price from a purely business standpoint.

 

Can they tell a difference between the master file and a redbook CD?

If they can't, then this is all really academic.

 

Call me a groupie if you want but I trust your opinion over others (or in the case of this thread "other" as in the singular) cause in fact your opinions arent opinions but observations backed with hard data.

Cool... so my setup wont preclude a valid test and I already have identified albums that I have listened to 100's of times that I own on vinyl/cd/hi-res dvd-a and are also available on Tidal at CD and MQA quality.

Of course the sticking point with any of these compares is that there are literally decades between the various releases from the original vinyl onwards so any remasterings need to be accounted for before I let the juice run down my leg after hearing MQA (noting the historical reference is via Robert Johnson and not the more derivative LZ one)

Peter

 

Well, there you have it. Nothing to see here. MQA is awesome. Move along.

Seriously, you have a clearly stated relationship with Chesky and he's apparently all in with MQA. Hardly a neutral take on the situation.

 

Well then hallelujah, brother, and pass the Scotch! Let’s hoist a glass in celebration of . . .

Oh . . . wait. Nobody but David Chesky and “experienced engineers” (like, because an experienced engineer has better hearing, or something, than all the rest of us?!?) heard these alleged master 24/192 files and MQA processed and streamed 24/192 files behind closed doors. For the 20th time, out in the real world in living rooms and home audio listening rooms, nobody can consistently or reliably tell the difference between an MQA file and a TIDAL HiFi streaming of 16/44.1 at 850-1411Kbps FLAC.

What David Chesky appears to have stated to you was that he couldn’t tell one of his 24/192 files from the same MQA’d file at 24/192 from an MQA DAC. So 24/192 sounds just like 24/192? That’s what you’re saying Chesky told you? This is what you’re suggesting is some sort of notable accomplishment? That MQA didn’t screw up a 24/192 file? Where’s the win here?

Whatever . . . More MQA Machinations.

Let’s hear the files Mr. David Chesky - if you’re monitoring this thread. Put the two files up on TIDAL, or put the two files or your file and a link to the TIDAL Masters stream on the Chesky web site so we can hear the non-difference for ourselves.

Always and again, thus far, the amazingness of MQA is primarily audible to authoritative people behind closed doors or the press and media at show demos who in my opinion have been fooled by cleverly rigged MQA demos. Let us have access to these amazing music files, please! I’ll pay for access.

 

I see that side of it. I just think hi-res streaming is currently a niche of a niche (look at how many subscribers Tidal has compared to the other services, numbers which may be inflated, and then consider that even a small portion of those are actually paying for the lossless tier), and any venture offering hi-res streaming and asking for $20-$30 per month or locking that quality behind an annual paywall as Qobuz does in the EU and UK, is a recipe for getting almost all potential customers to walk away.

 

"Apply room correction, please."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."



That, of course, is the blue light that, from what Lee tells us, the music labels are expecting to "resonate with consumers".

My new article series on MQA.

I've been looking at it for a minute or two now. I haven't felt anything resonating yet.

 

Well said, but then what is the reason for a company such as TIDAL or Qobuz to be in business? Is it to earn profit and create growth and jobs by developing a platform to serve music? I think so, which means that by definition neither company has to be anything but larger than a certain critical mass (in infrastructure and library size) at a certain price point in order to become self-sustaining. There is no implication in any of that with respect to any need to create the broadest possible access for tens of millions or hundreds of millions of music consumers.

I think that TIDAL and Qobuz have run their numbers more times than any of us could count and come up with the planning and strategies that each company needs in order to become sustainably profitable. Maybe the subscription price has to be even higher because you’re precisely correct - the potential market for subscribers to high resolution music is a niche of a niche. I tend to agree with you.

So by definition, if we’re both correct, realistically TIDAL and Qobuz have to be targeting for profitability a much smaller customer base than anything contemplated by Apple or Spotify or Amazon. I’m not sure that’s possible, but I presume we’ll find out for sure over the next year or two.

 

Experienced sound engineers can't differentiate the regular vanilla 24/192 from the MQA variant? Wasn't it supposed to be obvious?

Yes, very academic. Thanks for telling us what must of us already knew.

 

I my opinion this shows MQA advocates (aka you) have shoot themselves in the foot by touting this as evidence.

If MQA is indistinguible from an unmolested hi-res equiv then what is the point of MQA?

If I can get the same perceived audio quality without all the additional bits and pieces needed by MQA and have it in a format that is open then unmolested hi-res is what we need, not a closed loop proprietary format.

Peter

PS... dont throw the bandwidth saving as the raison d'être for MQA... cause thats not valid for all the reasons other posters have raised

 

Well, Tidal is by all accounts on the verge of bankruptcy and Qobuz did in fact declare bankruptcy once before, so I wouldn’t say what they’re doing is exactly working. I’m pretty sure Jay-Z assumed some bigger entity would have bought Tidal by now like Apple did for Beats. Also whatever money they do have sure isn’t being spent on UI or discovery algorithms, and I suspect if any of the bigger services offered lossless for even $5 less per month than Tidal, subscribers will be scrambling to switch subscriptions.

Qobuz entering the US market will be an interesting thing. Their business model is a bit different in that you pay upfront annually for unlimited hi-res streaming but also discounts on hi-res purchases. You can pay monthly for 16/44 lossless or lossy streaming. If they were smart, they’d price their 16/44 tier lower than Tidal’s, and dangle free upgrades to the hi-res service for a month to get people hooked. I’m curious to see what they chose to do.

 

Well that’s the bitrate reported by the UI from the feed/stream metadata. Problem is, when @Archimago here and masnr and soxr over at Computer Audiophile, and others, began analyzing MQA files they were seeing 17-18 bit word lengths, not 24 bit. What that tells me is that all the people in my MQA listening sessions who couldn’t reliably or consistently tell a TIDAL HiFi 16/44.1 1411 kbps stream from an MQA stream of the same song weren’t imagining things. There’s no high resolution here - not in any consistently or reliably identifiable audible way. MQA can fire up all the blue DAC lights it wants and embed whatever metadata it wants, but if the listening doesn’t measure up (in sessions where only the host knows what is being played when and in what order), then MQA is making stuff up. I can embed all sorts of nonsense in metadata.

I am wholly on board with Ayre founder Charles Hansen’s comments in the months before he died last November. I and others remain just as baffled as Hansen was about how the MQA paper submitted to the JAES passed the review board. Hansen stated flatly and repeatedly that the paper was/is “an embarrassment that should never have been allowed to see the light of day in the form it was published.” I agree. Hansen also went on record further, stating that “... the material put out to the general public [by MQA] is far, far worse. It was bad enough on the face of it, but now that mansr and soxr [at Computer Audiophile] have done a lot of reverse engineering, it reveals complete outright lies in the published MQA material.”

There’s not much more to say about MQA than that. Hansen also, as another SHF member quote earlier in this thread, repeatedly and publicly called out Bob Stuart as a liar. I don’t know how much more any reasonable audiophile needs to begin getting very suspicious of MQA and to begin his own home listening sessions in the same way I set up my listening sessions. MQA’s claims fall apart really quickly under such circumstances.

 

I trust Hansen’s word far more than Stuart’s.

 

It’s not just Chesky recordings. They are about to launch a music streaming service so they have a very large catalog that they can do the test with.

 

All of these concerns will be addressed in future versions of MQA.

MQA Silver, the current version, with "triangular" encoding.

MQA Gold, with "trapezoid" encoding, +$100.

MQA Platinum XT, with "double helix" encoding plus patented EMI noise-canceling filter, +$200.

 

Indeed, but apparently you can't see this? If MQA doesn't improve the sound, then why bother with the extra expense and complexity inevitably associated with it?

 

Hansen really disgraced himself with some very personal attacks on Stuart. Friends say he was in a great deal of pain near the end of his life but still. Several prominent audio leaders have expressed to me that they lost a good bit of respect for the man.