John Stuart is merely supplying a technical solution to the recording industry's money problems. Digital let the cat out of the bag and the record companies (those still standing) have been doing everything they can to put the cat back in. So far, in the past 2 years, the record companies have only been getting a look at the cat's claws - cat is having none of it. The essence of digital technology is to render the original recording as many times as desired in a form that is essentially indistinguishable from the original. And if the data can be shared and transmitted easily and essentially losslessly from one person to another, where does that leave the money man who wants to control/tax distribution? - Holding a great big empty bag of course! What John is doing is providing a technical means to degrade the quality of the original recording and digitally restore it to those willing to pay. The clever aspect is that this entire MQA charade was supposed to offer "improved sound quality" - LOL! As if one could somehow improve sound quality/accuracy over the original 192khz/24 bit format!! Most people can't appreciate the quality inherent to 90 decibel dynamic range and 22 khz bandwidth associated with "lowly" CD format - let alone 192khz/24 bit. But somehow, John Stuart is going to improve sound quality! If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you....
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"
Some people have way too much spare time.
" - Jond
And who would that be - the person with less than 10 posts? Or perhaps the one with 2700 or 6700?
Maybe I'm missing something and this is another example of the "new math"....
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"
My thoughts, I suggest you try and spend some time listening to MQA tracks than wasting your time with these futile posters.
"- lalitk
I don't think anyone here cares about YOUR "suggestion" with regard to whether or not someone has a right to discuss (correction) Bob's "philosophy". In fact, from a technical standpoint, Stuart's "invention" is more of a philosophy than an actual technical development that improves sound quality. If you actually care enough to enlighten yourself and closely examine the impulse response graphs posted in Stereophile, you'd see that MQA adds latency (distortion) to the signal and also adds dither (background noise) that masks legitimate ripple in the process of encoding.decoding. It is actually inferior to the original format. This also serves as positive proof that most "audiofaithful" couldn't tell the difference between a 192khz/24 bit replica vs. a 14 bit MQA rendition. Again, no double blind testing has been done to verify any of Stuart's claims. He's just another high priest of audiophooldom preaching to the gullible and vulnerable.
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While I agree with your sentiment overall, I have more faith in the general public understanding what's really going on ( record company attempts to control the market and boost profit by intentionally cheapening the product to the masses and offering original quality we've been used to at a premium price to those willing to pay) and stopping MQA before it can do too much damage. Perhaps I'm being too optimistic thinking that the lion's share of music buying people are not gullible fools who believe they have to spend many thousands to get good accurate reproduction of recorded. music.
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Wait 12 to 18 months...you will probably find a lot of MQA DAC in the "free stuff" section of your local waste transfer station.....
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Have you actually heard a MQA file...or should I just chalk you up in MQA haters club 😉
" - lalitk
I listened to a few Norah Jones tracks on a system that I was told were generated with MQA source files. I couldn't hear anything remarkable about them. I have most of her catalog on CD and am very familiar with her music as I've been listening to her for many years now. While I have the equipment to measure a lot of acoustical and electrical phenomenon, I have never been in a position where something I could clearly hear could not be seen in measurements. It's almost always the other way around - measurements show things I could potentially hear but don't. In the case of MQA, measurements show it is inferior. But the level of precision and accuracy inherent to the digital media format is sufficient for the limited adulteration imposed by MQA to be largely inaudible. When it comes to reproduced music, some people actually like the bass doubling that occurs when a mediocre loudspeaker woofer struggles with signal overload. To some, more distortion is better. Attenuated bass/exaggerated "warmth" often experienced with tube amps is welcome. These kind of subjective arguments are ALMOST useless in terms of being capable of informing the uninformed or misinformed. It's a lot more useful to say for example that amplifier X has a high output impedance and will attenuate bass below Y hertz Z decibels at a particular drive level than to say to someone who's never heard it - bass is kinda rolled off with low impedance speakers. The bottom line is MQA adulterates or diminishes signal quality - whether or not you personally can hear the degradation or like the degradation is largely irrelevant when it comes to the value or usefulness of a proposed standard. There's no room for subjectivity when the overall goals are supposed to be "authenticity, precision, accuracy, and faithfulness to the original". You pick your criteria standards and measure them to verify that you've achieved your goals. You don't establish a standard based on subjective mumbo jumbo that can't be measured or objectively proved through some kind of rigorous, reproducible testing/evaluation procedure.
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What do you suggest we should do to save the industry and consumers from
the evils of MQA? Do you think constant bickering on audio forums is
going to deter the forward progress of MQA?
"
My friend, we hear all the time politicians telling us that robotics and automation are the way of the future and that as a nation, we don't need most of the jobs that employed millions of Americans over the past half century. People "need to be retrained for jobs of the future" - so they tell us.
The same can be said of the "music industry". We don't need large corporations making copies of music recordings and selling them to us with large profit margins that made them rich - like in the old days. Technology has essentially made the big record company executives and their profits - extinct as a species. Time to move on and try to make boat loads of money for doing nothing in a different field. To quote some of our favorite liberal politicians - "those jobs are gone forever".
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A chief inherent feature of MQA is security and authentication. Very little of this side of the "product" is talked about or acknowledged by the "inventor". The files cannot be copied for example to serve as a backup should the original get corrupted. You don't "own" the copy after purchasing it. You merely purchased the right to playback the file. The codec is proprietary and guarded as if it were (actually is) the mechanism that ensures complete control of distribution and pricing in the marketplace. It is a means of guaranteeing that all copies of the copyright protected material in the marketplace come from and fall under the full control of one source. Effectively, it is nothing like the open source standard we now have with respect to PCM digital audio. If you are an electronics company that wishes to build products that handle MQA, you have to secure a licensing agreement with MQA.
Can you all say CHA - CHING??
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FWIW, to my ears and in my system, MQA files sounds consistently better
than 16bit/44.1kHz files. That’s not to say that Tidal streaming sounds
bad on non-MQA files. I enjoy both formats and by personal preference
rooting for hi-res streaming.
" - lalitk
Brought to you by Tidal Music Streaming Service - Aspiro AB.....
No matter how many people try to politely ask you to respect that this is not a " cast your vote for/against Tidal or MQA" thread, you just had to get that last one in there, didn't you? Is that you Jayz?
Btw, your FWIW was not worth very much in this thread. People here are still trying to move beyond the cheerleader pep rally BS and focus on the wider, real world implications of what is being sought by certain members of the recording industry.
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If MQA were to actually be an ADVANCEMENT for the digital media distribution industry, it would have provided meaningful compression of digital files WITHOUT ANY PERCEPTIBLE LOSS OF CONTENT INTEGRITY/FIDELITY. We all know that 16 bit and much more demonstrably - 24 bit digital media precision is largely a waste when it comes to real world signals. The full dynamic range that comes with 24 bit systems translates to 140 db!!! That's enough to make your ears bleed! So clearly, there is potential in the marketplace for a coding scheme that scans digital files, records dynamic peaks in the content, and adjusts bit precision accordingly to fully accommodate the individual file's needs before encryption or compression takes place to facilitate more efficient transfer to the intended target. A new industry wide digital standard could place dynamic range information somewhere in a predetermined location in the media content that signals to adaptive encoding/decoding equipment what algorithm to use to fully accommodate the file without padding it with a hole bunch of 1's and 0's that don't change before it is either transmitted or stored on media. MQA could have done this and dispensed with the entire fraudulent "time correction" BS. They would have provided some factual justification for existence in being able to legitimately say - you now have lossless transmission that is more efficient than the current standard. Unfortunately, they lost all credibility when the actual response data showed a degradation of the signal (no longer lossless) while they were claiming WITHOUT ANY PROOF WHATSOEVER that time domain errors allegedly inherent to PCM were being fixed.
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The above referenced article and "Archimago's" work confirm what the impulse response measurements posted in Stereophile say directly with actual data. Noise is added by this "codec" to raise the noise floor and mask the low level ripple (commonly and erroneously referred to as "pre ring") in the impulse signal. For those who work with impulse response signals on a regular basis, they don't need a detailed explanation of how MQA degrades the signal. They can see it immediately in the response graphs. Not only is noise added (dither) to adulterate the signal - thus losing net signal precision from effectively 16 or 24 bits down to 14, but the claimed "time error correction" actually adds time domain distortion to the end result. You can see this in the Stereophile impulse response graph easily from the delayed negative going spike. The impulse response of any linear system or approximate linear system is the fullest expression of signal quality and fidelity that we know of today. It is a complete characterization of the system's time (and thus frequency domain for linear systems) domain behavior. One need look no further than the impulse response graphs. They tell the full story in an instant. MQA is not merely a flawed codec. It's a licensing lock box piece of garbage masquerading as an industry standard for digital media distribution.
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In real music signals played back on real linear, time invariant audio systems, there is no "pre or post" anything. You have passband, stopband, and transitions between them which can be anything from very steep to very shallow. The only "ringing" that can occur in such systems happens when they are not properly damped such as for transition bands using high order filters. The whole notion of "pre" and "post" ringing has nothing to do with PCM A/D and D/A conversion and everything to do with impulse responses. And if you know anything about digital sample and hold or zero/hold circuits, you know that the spectral content is tightly controlled and band limited. There is no high frequency ringing if sampling rates are sufficiently high and the sampled content is sufficiently band limited with low order filtering circuits. If you impose band limiting as Craven allegedly did - rolling off frequencies at the upper end of the sampled content, it is possible to wind up with an impulse response of mush that attenuates both pre and post ringing spectral content while adding substantial phase delay (energy storage) with attendant post impulse oscillations. It's important to remember that we're dealing with continuous time invariant audio signals. There's no Hanning window. No time zero. Do yourself a favor and buy a cheap used 100mhz scope from Ebay or borrow one from a friend. Splice an RCA cable on your stereo and connect your scope to it while playing back music. See if you can find some impulse spikes that are in the microsecond range or lower in duration. Every now and then, it can be helpful to take a step back or two to look at the big picture. Context is everything and voltage/current spikes don't exist in a vacuum. There's a great big world of energy storage elements from tiny diaphragms in microphones to 200 gram 14 inch woofers and everything in between. None of this stuff responds in any meaningful way to stimuli that span mere nanoseconds or microseconds. And neither do our ears. Craven and the Meridian gang have had significant challenges to their professional reputations over the years. I'll leave it at that.
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@ Brian Lucey
Hi Brian!
Thanks for contributing.
"
Batch processing of my work, by labels, is happening as we speak. It’s
not "Authenticated" as a master by me, or my clients ... it’s just
another lossy codec.
" - Brian Lucey
Your are spot on as usual.
Best Regards
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