My new article series on MQA.

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by LeeS, Jan 9, 2018.

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  1. Juan Matus

    Juan Matus Reformed Audiophile

    I don't disagree with you on that. MQA has a good business model.

    1. Create a bunch of hype around a new lossy codec of dubious benefit to the consumer.
    2. Get people to shill the idea in the audio press and forums like this one. (The mainstream press has ignored it)
    3. Pray pray pray that consumers take the bait. (They won't, only audiophiles will buy into it)
    4. Lock those fools that fall for it into a closed eco system.
    5. Then sit back and watch the royalty checks come in.
     
  2. LeeS

    LeeS Music Fan Thread Starter

    Location:
    Atlanta
    I take issue with much of this but especially with #2. If you are going to accuse me or others of being a shill, then you should present evidence to back the claim.
     
  3. Juan Matus

    Juan Matus Reformed Audiophile

  4. testikoff

    testikoff Seasoned n00b

    ^^^ Fellow forum members, please see my post in another thread for a link to Archimago's samples (perfectly lined up on time axis). Feel free to run ABX tests and then post your successful reports (if any)...
     
  5. Kyhl

    Kyhl On break

    Location:
    Savage
    One of my main issues with MQA is that designing digital filters is what DAC manufacturers do to differentiate their products from their competitors. In today's world, this is already happening. PS Audio designs their filters today. Meridian designs their filters today. Mytek designs their filters today. Audio Note designs..... You get the idea.

    What Meridian is doing with MQA is forcing a homogenized set of filters to be applied to each DAC for MQA playback. No more [insert your favorite manufacturer here] filter designs. But what if MQA's filter isn't better than someone else's filter?
    What if someone designs a better filter? Can they supplant the current MQA and keep selling their own hardware as an MQA enabled player?

    I don't want to live in an audio world where there is one sole filter option.
     
  6. rbbert

    rbbert Forum Resident

    Location:
    Reno, NV, USA
    Look at the history, it would make a nice article for the Wall Street Journal or Baron's if it works out well for MQA.

    Take a company with huge and mounting debt and no existing or potential products likely to change that. Spin off a new venture with an interesting and unique product, that might (or might not) offer a benefit to consumers. Promote it in all the usual ways (ads to customers, favorable reviews in trade journals, etc); nothing happens. Then try something relatively unusual but hardly unprecedented; market your product to other hardware and software companies in the same industry, who are bigger, better capitalized and with a better track record of selling products to consumers. Hmmm, success in persuading many of these companies to buy and support your product; now let them sell to consumers while you sit back and collect royalties.
     
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  7. ralf11

    ralf11 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Earth

    They are called engineers, Lee.

    The more you post your unicorn dusty view on multiple forums the more this looks like paid shilling.
     
  8. Lee is an audio enthusiast and an audio reviewer. He has certain interests and biases like all members of the audio press do. He is not pretending to be a reporter—he is a columnist. You don’t have to be a shill in order to be enthusiastic about MQA, and being enthusiastic about MQA doesn’t automatically make you a tool of the industry. There are certain things I like about MQA and certain things I dislike, especially the DRM component. And yes, to a certain extent I view it as a solution looking for a problem. That does not mean MQA isn’t worth exploring, however, and MQA has as many supporters as it has detractors. Just because Lee is a supporter—or at least, is not a detractor—doesn’t make his opinion any less valid. I am interested in the subject from all angles and plan to read Lee’s take on it. I just need to find the time!
     
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  9. ralf11

    ralf11 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Earth
    he claimed he was an "independent journalist" - but journalists have standards (which they are supposed to learn in journalism schools as undergrads.)

    His opinions about the posts on CA are just ad hominem attacks and have ZERO validity. CA is chock full of engineers and other very highly educated technical professionals. Those people understand digital audio and MQA very well, and have taken MQA apart by reverse engineering and other methods.

    As I said above I've been a fan of Bob Stuart for a long time and took quite a while for me to be convinced by the technical experts about MQA. We do NOT need alternative facts or empty minded cheerleading for MQA. I do not see the value in it.
     
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  10. LeeS

    LeeS Music Fan Thread Starter

    Location:
    Atlanta
    I mentioned the hostility and vile personal attacks I was experiencing over there to my friends and many chimed in that the place had become a snake pit, many of the commenters were inexperienced, and they had left years ago.

    When I speak to people in the industry, they tell me that Archimago doesn't really understand digital and that I should take his findings and experiments with a grain of salt. The tests he has done on the internet would fail a high school class science experiment because they are based on people listening under all sorts of conditions with varying equipment. It's a joke.

    As for engineering professionals at CA, perhaps. But why hide under assumed names? And how do we know how legitimate their engineering credentials are? Are they EEs playing with audio gear or have they done proper audio research and have solid academic credentials?

    Even when I make a good faith attempt at responding in a respectful way on CA, the replies invariably include a personal attack. It's hard to believe in that environment that there are serious engineers there being objective.

    The sense I get is that Bob Stuart has created something clever here and the armchair engineers on CA can't keep up with his math.
     
  11. Stone Turntable

    Stone Turntable Independent Head

    Location:
    New Mexico USA
    Geez Louise, could everybody take it down a notch?

    It's possible to debate and disagree without being rude and insulting and internet-hysterical. This ain't a life-or-death topic so don't be so creepy and umbrage-poisoned, guys.
     
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  12. ralf11

    ralf11 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Earth
    To your points, Lee S. (even tho you did not respond to mine)

    1. people in what industry? those who make digital audiophile electronics??

    2. people that don't like Archimago's results, often say that Archimago doesn't really understand digital - AFAIK, he does but he is not very active there - specifics on his methodology is what they should post, but do not...

    3. engineering professionals at CA, use screen names like everyone else - you can always ask! and from what I have seen, they are all over the world
    there are also several scientists there, electricians, telecomm technical executives and more
    - for the record, I am not an engineer tho I did attend one of the xIT's for my undergrad. degrees, and have taken a couple of engineering courses

    4. * engineers are not known for their social skills

    5. The math is not particularly exotic and I have to disagree with your conclusion.


    I hope you will attempt a balanced treatment of MQA's advantages and pitfalls.
     
  13. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Why oh why do you post links of this kind which only lead to poorly researched or fabulously ignorant pandering? The author babbles about sinusoidal inter aural time (ITD) differences obviously without ever have read anything but misinformation or cherry-picked information on the subject.

    For a fact then, with respect to your persistent touting of the importance of time domain differences that MQA master file processing purports to resolve, it is a well-known, proven beyond a doubt fact of binaural hearing (according to all the respected literature and all of the scientific community) that human listeners are not able to detect interaural time differences in sine tones with frequencies greater than about 1500 Hz (1.5 KHz) . The standard reference to this fact is an article by Zwislocki and Feldman (1956) that has been reproduced and confirmed by every student lab on the subject at the university level ever since. It became a standard experiment in some areas of hearing research for year. Yet, Hugh Robjohn's article in Sound On Sound makes no mention of that fact. Instead, he cherry picks some ultrafine time domain difference number and claims it as audible, implicitly, throughout the audible spectrum. That's a high level of B.S. at worst, but more likely just ignorance or an utter lack of understanding. The seminal Zwislocki and Feldman article reported ITD threshold measurements for three listeners at octave sine-tone frequencies, 250, 500, and 1000 Hz, and also at the highest frequency at which usable data could be obtained, approximately 1300 Hz. The results agreed well with data reported by Klumpp and Eady (1956), which showed an ITD threshold of 24 μs at 1300 Hz, but unmeasurably high thresholds at 1500 Hz. Both of these articles found that the lowest threshold ITD, about 10 μs, occurred at 1000 Hz, though the frequency resolution of the experiments was coarse. That was 1956.

    Unfortunately, Hugh Robjohn's meanderings in Sound On Sound didn't even get to the heart of current research on the matter either. Binaural and time domain research by Woszczyk (McGill University, 2003) furthered the work of Nordmark and found that high-resolution in temporal, spatial, spectral, and dynamic domains together determine the quality value of perceived music and sound, and that temporal resolution may be the most important domain perceptually. That meshes pretty well with '70s, '80s and '90s research done at NRC in Ottawa and by Hirsch and others. Basically, Woszczyk has it right using state-of-the-art measuring equipment and a larger number of human subjects. Contrary to Nordmark and contrary to Hugh Robjohn's somewhat mixed up facts, we are most sensitive to time domain differences between around 1,000 Hz (1 KHz) when listening to jittered and unjittered test sounds, when listening for phase differences in various test sounds and when listening binaurally (our normal listening mode). If jitter is not heard binarually, its effect either disappears or reduces to the point of inaudibility.

    In practical terms - and I think this is the most important take-away after delving into the binaural ITD work of Zwislocki & Feldman, Nordmark, and Woszczyk - during broad-bandwidth music listening (i.e., typical music listening, rather than listening to controlled-environment lab tones and test sounds) that also typically imposes constantly varying amplitude and frequency changes whether one instrument or voice or many are playing, ITD differences above 1500 Hz are undetectable or unnoticed by any music listener with normal, healthy hearing. The MQA aficionadi can claim otherwise all they like, but the reality is in the hard research.

    I really do want MQA or some such technology to be an audibly obvious improvement. But I can't hear it, friends can hear it, and some of their friends can't hear it. Sometimes we/they can hear differences and sometimes (more rarely) an improvement of some subtle sort. None of it can be attributed directly to MQA processing. Bob Stuart is pushing pixie dust, IMO.

    I also believe absolutely what Harley and his sycophants write unrelentingly enthusiastically about with respect to the wonderfulness of the controlled MQA listening demos they've heard. But I believe Harley et al only because they heard carefully structured listening demos that were conducted by MQA congnoscenti and MQA promoters and very specially designed to impress the press. Not real. A setup. A con in some respects. I can't seem to reproduce the same sort of poetry-inducing reaction (or indeed any emotional reaction or consistently positive response to MQA tracks) no matter what DAC or TIDAL HiFi titles or 2L titles I choose. So if MQA is not working for consumers like me and my friends and their friends, what good is it?
     
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  14. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    So the personal attacks you’ve unfortunately experienced on CA are similar to the personal attack you’ve just levelled at @Archimago? Different? What am I missing here?

    So on the one hand your “people in the industry” deride @Archimago’s approach (and mine too, by implication), but offer no unbiased test results of their own. All the MQA people offer are very carefully setup, non-falsifiable listening sessions, structured to invariably produce high praise.

    Yet, neither I nor my friends nor their friends who’ve all been included in blinded MQA comparison listening tests have been able to conclude anything even vaguely resembling the effusive praise that the MQA group and its press minions are trying to make us believe. I don’t know how to account for that, except to suggest that MQA is unsupportable.
     
  15. I haven’t looked at LeeS’s posts on CA. In my experience, CA CAN be a good resource and an entertaining read, but if you don’t fall in line with Chris Connaker’s particular predilections, you can be toast. There are a lot of Connaker sycophants there as well as “armchair experts.” So, anything that goes on at CA I tend to take with a grain of salt. Plus, the vibe there can get nasty.
     
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  16. ralf11

    ralf11 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Earth
    I see less of that there than here to be honest.

    CA has more people with technical backgrounds & this site has more mastering/recording info & knowledge. (Audiogon as more... something... but it would be impolite to post what it is.)

    I did just take another look at Lee S's comments and I suspect some of the hostility he gets is form him telling people "shut up" and calling them idiots. Great journalism!
     
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  17. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    Bad because it's not perfect tells me that your preferred analogue is very much the definition of a coat hanging off a shoogly peg by comparison.


    Can you explain how this fits into MQA please?
     
  18. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    This is a good point, and I believe that it is the reason that a number of equipment manufacturers have not implemented MQA. In my opinion, MQA should show some flexibility around the filter issue to allow manufacturers to take advantage of the "folding" technology (to facilitate hirez streaming) without deploying MQA's filters.

    That being said, I disagree with the notion stated by other posters that MQA is a solution looking for a problem. When I buy new or used vinyl, I can tell what I am buying from information furnished by the seller or by looking at the cover, label and/or deadwax. If I want an original or early pressing, or a particular remaster, I know how to purchase it with reasonable certainty. On the other hand, when I purchase a hirez download, I have little or no idea what I am really getting (other than the resolution of the download). I may hope to get a flat transfer of the original master to a hirez format, but I may actually be getting something sourced from a fourth-generation tape, a needle drop or a redbook CD -- and even if it comes from a good source it may have been subjected to dynamic compression. Usually my money is spent before I know whether I have purchased something acceptable. This is a big problem. MQA may or may not be part of a solution, but there is most definitely a serious problem that will eventually kill hirez downloads and streaming if it is not addressed.
     
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  19. rbbert

    rbbert Forum Resident

    Location:
    Reno, NV, USA
    In quite a few cases, at least for music I am interested in, the Web site (HDTracks, Prostudiomasters, 7Digital, etc) does give some information, such as the year of remaster and/or the mastering engineer. I haven't seen any of that for the MQA albums on Tidal
     
  20. Ski Bum

    Ski Bum Happy Audiophile

    Location:
    Vail, CO
    Telling me when the conversion to hirez was done tells me nothing about the source, and telling me who did the conversion tells me nothing about the master (assuming it even is a master) from which the conversion was produced. At least, identifying the mastering engineer for the conversion might give us some information as to the likelihood of the hirez download being ruined by brickwalled compression. Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) is supposed to be assurance that we are getting something generated from the master (or at least the best source according to the artist). Time will tell whether MQA lives up to this promise, but we really need someone reliable to tell us about the source material.
     
  21. Stone Turntable

    Stone Turntable Independent Head

    Location:
    New Mexico USA
    I don't mean to single out your post, but making a bunch of well-argued points but then feeling compelled to describe MQA demos as "a con" is the kind of mean, excessive rhetoric that's poisoning this thread on both sides.

    Why not discuss MQA with a little kindness and good humor?
     
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  22. rbbert

    rbbert Forum Resident

    Location:
    Reno, NV, USA
    Really? When does the consumer ever have more information than that? And there are many ways to use that information to get a good idea of how that master sounds,, unlike MQA, where it's usually a wild guess (although on Tidal, you can just listen)
     
  23. rednedtugent

    rednedtugent Forum Resident

    Location:
    Funk, Ohio
    "Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) is supposed to be assurance that we are getting something generated from the master (or at least the best source according to the artist). "

    Actually it doesn't from my understanding. Plus, it's the MQA's filters version of what the "master" is supposed to sound like.
    This is the classic MacGuffin IMHO.
     
  24. ZenArcher

    ZenArcher Senior Member

    Location:
    Durham, NC
    You've said this several times, so I want to make sure I understand. The vision is that music will be mastered ONLY to MQA? No mastering for CD or LP or Itunes or any other format?

    That is truly scary. The ONLY mastered copy of new music will be in a proprietary, lossy, DRM-capable format, which cannot be converted into the original PCM file? So are you saying CDs and LPs and other media will all be generated from from a MQA file?

    This sounds pretty dangerous. How is this a good thing?
     
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  25. elvisizer

    elvisizer Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Jose
    for real, people.
     
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