No-one here is beating (or murdering) anybody, I guess. If some are offended by the truth - well.. what can one do about it, they simply are.. I actually don't care about MQA personally, I like to have music, I don't stream it for serious listening but the whole idea of a new format which is lossy, the whole greed of the MQA clan with Bob Stuart and others who want everybody on every stage of involvement into music to pay for this lossy and in no way hi-res format and also all the lies we've been fed by them for me make the whole thing unacceptable almost to the point of being disgusting.. I post here for the sake of the truth, the audio truth, that's it, nothing personal so to say
Right. And even if actual MQA stakeholders are in the discussion - it's still not personal. It's business. I've long been anti-streaming for focused listening but I have to say I'm totally taken by native high res on Qobuz. I think it can sound fantastic. And if someone disagrees, that's cool too. It's all subjective at that point. Cheers!
If someone lies to me as well as tries to take my $ on the basis of those lies I’ll call them out. If someone is offended by that I really don’t care.
MQA has been completely debunked, discredited and destroyed for the absolute corporate snake oil that it is. What a fantastic week.
Go back and read the audio rags when MQA started. I'm surprised new babies were not born out of the Love Fest. The Mags were doing flips like acrobats on speed. QOBUZ sounds fantastic. For portable devices, one can choose the bit rates. Heck, Apple's iTunes bit rates sound wonderful on portable devices.
Apparently all I can do is link the group, and the post was by Steve Jones (an admin) about 22 hours ago. It's... insightful. And to be fair, the OP is provocative, but phew, it gets to namecalling fairly quickly. Facebook Groups
Why are you exaggerating? Size of a HD movie eh? You got a music album that is 20 GB? Lol Calm down.. And storage, is it cheap? Well, i've got 20 TB in my NAS drives (400ish bucks) , which holds all my movies and music that is not hard media....400 bucks?. Not bad when a dude spends tens of thousands for audio equipment, i suppose. I don't trust some cloud out there to hold my stuff. I like to keep them in my house.....makes me feel like i reaally really own it.
I made a good estimate and my current AIFF/PCM digital collection in HiRes would take up between 12-14 TB. I have maybe 30% additional tracks as MP3 I could add and Much More id like that I dont have. And this "estimate" is based on 24/96. It only gets bigger and bigger. Im NOT using a NAS box. They Suck to me. Audio quality is not what I want. I only use SSD drives. Either In my computer (Mac mini preferred) which is not possible or in an external cases which aren't cheap for a great sounding one with cables and PSU's. Im a computer geek since the early 90s' - built Hundreds of PCs and Hackintoshes over the decades. Im NOT dealing with the hassle of spinning drives anymore and the time it takes to move and backup that amount of data. Been there, done that and im not doing it anymore! I want my future desktop computers to fit in my front pocket! And it will! My A14 ARM phone is faster than my i7 clocked at 5000MHz. The future is bright. Also, an inexpensive annually subscription to Qobuz, Tidal or whomever has MUCH MORE much than I'd ever buy. Dwafs my rather large collection making the efforts over the years seem futile. So why buy anything anymor?? Im through with buying music! Been buying Music since the early 80's! No more! Except for Vinyl now and then. No more CD's, NO MORE digital downloads. No More! Now I have access to Millions of tracks for less than $200/year. No storage. No Equipment. No mess. No Nonsense. SAMSUNG 870 QVO SATA III 2.5" SSD 8TB $800 This is as cheap as Id go. Id need 4 for Redundant raid. Thats $3200 for the raw drives. An appropriate case is at least another $1000 plus cabling and PSU another $1000 est. Id blow at least $5000 to secure 16TB of redundant SSD space to store all that music and connect to whatever computer or streamer Im current using. AND at least $50,000 to BUY it all again in HiRes. Viva La QoBuz!
It does seem a bit odd that you are utterly convinced you need huge SSDs, completely uncompressed files, won't run a NAS, and a $1000 PSU for local file storage to sound good. But files streamed over the Internet are completely flawless? Now, I'm not arguing that EITHER is incorrect - but you've clearly convinced yourself that local storage is full of bugaboos and have forced yourself into a corner of either ridiculously excessive overkill local storage... or the pitfalls and pros and cons of file streaming. Maybe I'm missing something, but those two stances seem at odds with one another. Personally I use both. Local file storage (on a *gasp* spinning drive!!) that goes through not one, but two PCs (powered on a separate circuit at least) that gets to my audio room via optical fiber ethernet, and Qobuz Hi Res. Both sound phenomenal to me on a very transparent, open system. Files are stored as FLAC and I use Roon + HQPlayer as my file transport. To each their own, of course, but your stance and justifications seem off. And how did $3200 in drives (which is absolutely ridiculous in and of itself) become $5000? I don't actually want to know, I just find that funny.
Most people's experience is that it is very challenging (and potentially expensive) to get streaming audio to sound as good as music played from a local SSD or RAM cache?
Are there any audio magazines that retain any sort of integrity especially as @DaleClark mentioned, they had a “lovefest” over MQA?
I might shave my head if your ‘Mac mini’ or whatever with a Samsung 870 SSD sounded better than my NAS drive (with relatively humble Seagate Ironwolves, I suppose!) powered through a balanced isolation trans feeding my dedicated streamer+Denafrips Venus. My NAS sits in a corner and it feeds 4 setups I have in the house (cave, bedroom, family room, etc and I really like the convenience as well. On the same note, I might shave my head twice if you swapped a Seagate Ironwolf with a SSD on a NAS and heard a difference. You actually think a SSD vs regular drive makes a difference?!?! And…and..and..you pay for overpriced apple products??!!! I don’t. And and and,, you “like” every album you hear on this vast Qobuz/Tidal database?….How many artists/albums do you actually LIKE to listen to? No, I wouldn’t pay 200/year to simply have access to a large database with all kinds of crap I don’t like. I know what music I like and I buy it when I like it. I can find all kinds of new music for on pandora, youtube, etc for free. If your Tidal cloud went down, i will continue to stream the files on my NAS in the house gleefully. As I said before, I really really like to feel like I own it and keep the files in my house. Kinda bizarre, but, what is this talk about small PCs anyway? My small form factor HTPC with a Ryzen 5 5600X and a RTX 3080 is about the size of a bluray player. It is currently mining and paying for itself btw (wink wink). Why do you want your PCs to fit in your front pocket? Will your fit your speakers in you pant pockets? Oh wait, you’re a headphones kinda guy? No, I really don’t like headphones, I prefer speakers.
Important question. Chris Connaker at Audiophile Style and Doug Schneider at SoundStage! were about the only 2 in the audiophile media who were able to keep an open mind, appreciating the questionable nature of MQA soon after the sales push. I'm most disappointed in Stereophile. IMO, John Atkinson should have known early on. To this day, I don't think he has ever acknowledged any problems with MQA. His "birth of a new world" article is one of the most egregious examples of sucking up to the Industry with questionable "pseudo-technical" graphs that already hint at lossy techniques to achieve what is claimed; yet he never examined this with his subsequent articles.... He's also one of the few who actually was able to get Bob Stuart to encode his music and could have asked that a few test signals years ago be encoded (or report if MQA refuses to do such a simple thing). While I appreciate John Atkinson as one who kept objective analysis alive at Stereophile, this latter chapter of his tenure at the magazine is an unfortunate one and reminds us of the relationship the media has with industry and part of his legacy.
One would need native non-MQA files and the MQA’d files to do a valid listening test. And the MQA powers that be have any such files removed from streaming services. Almost like they have something to hide...
Well, I do both - Hi-Res streaming from Qobuz and playing files from NAS storage. Software architecture is exactly the same - LMS server and RPi renderer. There is no difference between two methods. Both are verified to be bit-perfect. When you store music or video files there is zero advantage from SSD vs. spinning disk. Playing requires sequential reading and in that SSD does not have any real advantage in speed or response time. Of cause all network connections are hard wired - no WiFi here. Many people have problem with streaming simply because they try to use wireless network. For any real time transport service there is nothing better than real wires or (better again) optical fibre.
Did you mean to quote me? Because none of that applies to what I said. Just checking because I confused Yea, I think this was directed at fish. No worries!
