McIntosh passes on MQA, calls it lossy and distorted..

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by ServingTheMusic, Jun 12, 2018.

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  1. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    Another piece of good news...EXOGAL opts out of MQA-

    EXOGAL Abandons MQA Development

    June 22, 2018
    For Immediate Release



    EXOGAL Audio announced today that they are ceasing development of MQA for inclusion in EXOGAL products.

    Said Jeff Haagenstad, CEO of EXOGAL: "We have been evaluating MQA technology and watching the wider MQA ecosystem since early 2016. After much research on the fundamental technology and more importantly on the market demand for MQA, we have reached the decision to cease the pursuit of adding MQA to our products for several reasons:

    1) Our products by themselves exceed the performance of our products with the inclusion of MQA,

    2) Regardless of the breathless hype by the audio press, actual consumer demand is just not there.

    3) Regardless of the announced support from record labels, a suitable base of playable content is not widely available.

    4) As for the technical details of our evaluation of the technology vis á vis our own technology, we prefer not to violate our NDA’s with MQA and Meridian.

    5) Much like Wadia's technology before us, EXOGAL technology is already oriented in the time domain and does not suffer from the time-smearing effect which MQA is supposed to eliminate.

    Suffice it to say we were never able to achieve the advertised level of performance using the MQA technology and thus it does not meet our standards for inclusion in our products. Many experts outside of our company have articulately made the case against MQA and we see no reason to elaborate or comment on those findings."

    “We will continue to watch the market evolve but for now, we are out of the MQA game.”

    About EXOGAL

    EXOGAL was founded in 2013 by audio industry veterans who innovated for some of the biggest names in the industry. The founders – Jim Kinne, Larry Jacoby, Jan Larsen and Jeff Haagenstad – came together around a shared vision to create products that are – as our name implies – “out of this galaxy.”

    Our design philosophy is to create products that provide for an optimal listening experience in our customers’ everyday lives, not just in the labs under ideal test conditions. Keeping our sourcing and manufacturing close to our Minnesota headquarters shortens design‐to‐manufacturing times and allows us to get to market more quickly with bold new products.

    All EXOGAL audio products use open protocols and interfaces, which allow you to play your music no matter where you bought it or where the music stream originates.

    For more information, please contact [email protected]
     
  2. Claude Benshaul

    Claude Benshaul Forum Resident

    Interesting. While points 1, 4 and 5 may be interpreted as a counter move by a company understanding that adopting MQA means being subsumed, I find that points 2+3 are both lining up with what some of us claimed in the looooong debate with our resident MQA employee. Points that, IIRC, were vehemently ignored, waived or countered with claims we were either too stupid to understand the market or too dense to realize that the revolution (or better yet - the transcendence) is right behind the corner.
     
    missan likes this.
  3. Bubbamike

    Bubbamike Forum Resident

  4. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    ...and so it will end...soon enough..:cool:
     
  5. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    You are correct that you can't know for sure, but I believe that I can discern by listening -- with enough certainty for my personal purposes -- whether it is the same master. Sometimes it is the same master, and sometimes it isn't. In my experience, it's pretty unusual for multiple hi rez versions of the same album to be available, so an MQA encoded 24/96 file is generally the same 24/96 version that I've downloaded from one of the hi rez vendors. There are certainly plenty of different redbook versions and they may or may not match up with any hi rez version.
     
    LeeS likes this.
  6. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    When using USB in an admittedly imperfect setup (streaming Roon/TIDAL from a MacBook Pro connected to my upsampler/DAC with a relatively long USB cable) there was a noticeable diffusion in the sound, i.e. transients were softened (particularly noticeable on drum thwacks and tight bass), the image and dynamics were compromised, and the background was a bit "gray" rather than black. I tried an Audioquest Jitterbug between the laptop and the USB cord, which produced an audible improvement. I switched over to a dedicated hardwired network at that point, which produced a substantial improvement and eventually replaced the laptop with a Roon Nucleus for another substantial improvement. Obviously, your setup may be better than my laptop/USB combo. If you want to see whether your USB cord is adversely affecting the sound quality of your system, I have two suggestions : compare the sound of your streamer connected by USB to your DAC with (1) music files recorded onto a USB thumb drive placed directly into the USB port in your DAC or (2) a CD played from a transport with an RCA connection to the DAC. The comparison is not perfect because you have substituted the DAC's player for your streamer, but if the background is cleaner and the sound more palpable it is an indicator that the USB is affecting your sound quality.

    Keep in mind that it is widely acknowledged that you should not use USB cables longer than 15 ft for audio purposes, and you can improve sound with a better USB cable. On the other hand, there are no practical limits to the length of ethernet cable that you can use for audio purposes and few people reliably claim to hear audible differences in certified Cat6 or better ethernet cables.
     
    LeeS likes this.
  7. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    Be honest - who here had heard of EXOGAL before reading that press release?
     
    Matt_Foley, billnunan and Morbius like this.
  8. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    over 3 years ago...
     
  9. Rolltide

    Rolltide Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vallejo, CA
    How many times have you thought about them in that three year time span?

    That's a rhetorical question (which means please don't provide an answer), but I think one catches my drift. I think EXOGAL could announce they're not supporting PCM either and not many people would notice.
     
  10. Hymie the Robot

    Hymie the Robot Forum Resident

    Location:
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    This wasn't my experience. I compared a Pioneer Elite FD-80 Ethernet port vs a USB DAC playing the same ripped music from my laptop. They sounded identical. Short, thick USB cable but nothing fancy.
     
  11. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    If two different DACs sound identical to you, I would not expect the difference between a short thick USB cable and an ethernet connection to be audible to you either.
     
    Davey likes this.
  12. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Those venerable reviewers apparently didn't understand that the resolution displayed by MQA-enabled DACs is the resolution of the original source file, not the actual resolution of the stream they're listening to.
     
    Kyhl and ServingTheMusic like this.
  13. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Once again, the MQA bunch set up a demo at a show that was carefully designed to elicit specific praise. It's a black box setup in which nobody knows what was actually done to the sources files, nobody knows for sure if processed versions of identical masters are being compared, few of reading the report know if the original masterings are well-known botched jobs and any competent remastering would have made a noticeable improvement, and nobody knows if the non-MQA files were manipulated for the worse specifically for the demo. Because MQA is supposedly a black box remastering process, nobody can bring a randomly chosen CD to a show or even their own recording master to a show for it to be MQA-processed and played.

    Whatever.

    In repeated listening sessions on a variety of great systems, the members of my music listening group and I have been unable to reproduce MQA's touted wonders in any of our home systems.
     
    ServingTheMusic likes this.
  14. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    . . . unless of course they devised EXOGAL-QA. Then, like Stuart and his partner, they'd have a vehicle with which to rise up out of obscurity. Good science fiction is entertaining, mind you.
     
    ServingTheMusic likes this.
  15. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Can someone provide a link to Exogel's commentary - I see no commentary about this on their website. Thanks.
     
  16. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    My Op has their annoucement verbatim...posted on numerous webzines...google.
     
  17. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    nonsense.
     
  18. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    Funny!

    I'd like to know how much effort the engineers of upper echelon, more or less bespoke digital front ends are putting into MQA. While there may not ever be a world beater digital format (to end PCM and DSD), there are DACs which have advanced closer to the extremes of fidelity.

    Thinking of Light Harmonic, etc.

    Also, wonder what those with similar resume to Andreas Koch would say.
     
  19. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Thanks - I see it on Positive Feedback - the first 3 webszines I looked at including the one I write for got no hits which is why I asked.
     
  20. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    Gotcha. Glad you found it. Some webzines are completely ignoring MQA, and some are pimping it..
     
  21. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    Light Harmonic is a barely functioning company now..

    If you want to know..iFi claims to have spent 1000 hours on MQA...

    Berkeley Audio Design claims ONE YEAR.

    And there are more stories like this..I would love ask these people if that 1000 hours and that 1 year could have
    been spent much more productively...how about Berkelyy figuring out how to do Async USB and native DSD???
    How about iFi working on quality control?
     
  22. Richard Austen

    Richard Austen Forum Resident

    Location:
    Hong Kong
    Well hell I just bought the Audio Note DAC 0.1x which uses the stone age TDA 1543 chip that is redbook capable and has been selling for 13 years - so not only have I not gotten on board with MQA (which makes ZERO sense in a place like Hong Kong with download speeds that are higher than 1gb per second and UNLIMTED data for $40US a month) I have yet to get on board with SACD!!

    I would once someone can convince me that either of these can beat CD on a TDA 1541 or 1543 chip in a good CD player. Mind you I do use computer audio and FLAC files playing through a DAC too for those times I am not in a particular serious music listening mode (background music) so I'm not a computer Luddite. I wish I could convince myself it sounded better because I really do LOVE the ease of use and convenience factor of it all.
     
  23. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    iFi? Your point on investing time is noted.

    Light Harmonic may not be much of a going concern, but their flagship DaVinci MkII certainly can't be dismissed.

    There are other bespoke examples. Aries Cerat (Kassandra). Lampizator. The stuff that if you have to ask about the price, then you can't afford it. CH Precision. Totaldac. dCS.

    Could be some appeasement from the extreme names in digital audio, but I wonder if any of them take MQA seriously as it pertains to sound quality.
     
  24. jh901

    jh901 Forum Resident

    Location:
    PARRISH FL USA
    I'd wager that any number of DACs will beat the best designs with either of those chips in both PCM and DSD. If I save up enough, then I'll wager a lot. Enough to buy a big league digital front end!
     
  25. ServingTheMusic

    ServingTheMusic Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    SoCal
    Forget LH. Larry Ho is essentially a fugitive, and probably will stay in China. He owes people millions of dollars worth of products from several crowd funding campaigns.

    Very, very few super high DAC makers have adopted MQA..some have, MSB, and dCS for example. They sell so few units that ticking
    a marketing box is very important. I would wage none of them take MQA as a technology seriously.
     
    jh901 likes this.
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