ribonucleic
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As The Psychedelic Furs would say, "Should God Forget"...
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MQA entering into administration - comparable to Chapter 11 in the US
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Labels don't do any encoding for any digital format (they only do physical formats). There are third-parties that do the encoding and sell that to content distributors. In the case of MQA, I see no reason for anyone to step up and do that work. There is just no money in it, nor would they have the expertise MQA has to set the encoding parameters. Of course they provide some tools for small content producers to do the work if they want but not major labels. They won't lift a finger for you. You sign a contract for the content and send them the royalty checks.
As to expense, it all adds up. I know more than one company that produces music content for distributors and the team size and costs are what I stated. You have to receive the content in whatever format, verify it is right (labels routinely send you wrong things), encode it, and then test it on multiple players to make sure it is correct. Then you need to catalog and upload it to Tidal or whoever else is signed up for it. You need to pay rent, facilities cost, servers, back ups, salaries plus benefits, etc. Easily adds up to a $1M a year.
On what basis? I know and have run operations like this. And know the companies that do this work personally. I had a team at Microsoft just to ingest metadata for music and format it for our database of CD rips. That cost hell of a lot more than $1M per year and didn't including encoding any content.
18bit 96k FLAC was considered for comparison with Tidal streaming format and not MQA-CD format. MQA-CDs are really marginal thing. MQA topic is mostly about streaming.
But if you want to speak about MQA-CD format: On "any" CD player it has effectively lower than 16bit resolution since lowest bit(s) are MQA specific so they only increase noise floor on "any" CD player. MQA-CD as such is very odd idea.
18bit 96k FLAC can be easily converted to full 16bit CD format and burned on CD media. But sticking on CD media in 2023 looks somehow oddly to me. Even if you don't use anything other for file playback, CD players usually play FLACs from USB stick.
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ZolaIII
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Please listen this in "master quality" MQA if possible!
Good old WavPack lossy shaved 24 bit PCM to 18~19 bits and with correction file on demand (so you get full 24 bit master back if you want) always whose a right solution.
Good old WavPack lossy shaved 24 bit PCM to 18~19 bits and with correction file on demand (so you get full 24 bit master back if you want) always whose a right solution.
Wtf is an MQA CD ? Was it not bad enough already ? The CD format is pretty well confined in its limits, it’s good enough for most use cases ( meaning almost every recording ever made ) but you better not touch any of it’s parameters .
To encode the inaudible cr*p above our hearing frequency limits by sacrificing bits that could provide good s/n in the range where we actually hear stuff ?
You can sort of make up justification for the codec ( if you squint and sacrifice to the audiophile fairy) when you have 24 bits as all of the stuff below bit 18 probably is random noise anyway or equivalent to random noise delivered to you from the studio. So you can use this space to fold in stuff that’s going into extended fr response or something and deliver 24/192 ish content in a 24/48 container or something along this line , not that it’s to sound much different .
But with the CD standard ? WTH
To encode the inaudible cr*p above our hearing frequency limits by sacrificing bits that could provide good s/n in the range where we actually hear stuff ?
You can sort of make up justification for the codec ( if you squint and sacrifice to the audiophile fairy) when you have 24 bits as all of the stuff below bit 18 probably is random noise anyway or equivalent to random noise delivered to you from the studio. So you can use this space to fold in stuff that’s going into extended fr response or something and deliver 24/192 ish content in a 24/48 container or something along this line , not that it’s to sound much different .
But with the CD standard ? WTH
Yep, those are the same guys who hear "dramatic differences" in power cables, digital usb cables, and all the rest of the High End
snake-oil providers.
I understand what you're saying, that this was the selling point. But honestly, it never impressed me that MQA had backward compatibility. Basically, they argued, it was a format that would give you something like 24/96 quality if fully decoded, in a form that would be basically as good as CD quality if not decoded, in a CD-like data package. But that was only if you accepted that, although it was short on bits in both cases, it made up for it with <insert market-speak that they had no motivation in proving>.
So, the bottom line is that their solution was one that cost the consumer, and was invasive though source, distribution, and playback, for a benefit that was most likely a slightly reduction in data over 24/96k. And possibly something else that was very hard to pin down—or, it was just plain worse than either of those options, no one was sure (hard to be compelling when that happens).
The point about 18/96 is that you could achieve the same with a plan to reduce streaming to 18/96k. If that small savings were truly important in the first place (which it's not, in a world that streams high resolution video in not just movies but pet antics and gym videos all day long to its target audience).
And on the device makers aspect, didn't it require some close interaction with the licenser? At least for qualification, but I recall reading something that gave me the impression they had to work closer with the designer, not like just dropping in a chip and getting a checkmark from MQA for the logo. I don't know how true that is, but it made me think that it would be quite a bottle neck if there were a rush to MQA-compatible players.
Peterinvan
Senior Member
I asked ChatGPT:
Using the Tidal app to download music, how much storage is needed on my poratble device for a FLAC file vs. an MQA file
The amount of storage needed for a FLAC or MQA file downloaded through the Tidal app depends on the length and quality of the audio file.
In general, FLAC files are larger in size than MQA files. A typical FLAC file of a 3-minute song with CD-quality (16-bit/44.1kHz) audio can be around 20-30MB, while the same song in MQA format may be around 10-15MB.
However, if the song is available in high-resolution format, such as 24-bit/96kHz or 24-bit/192kHz, then the file size for both FLAC and MQA formats will increase significantly. In this case, a single song in FLAC format can easily take up 100-200MB or more of storage, while the same song in MQA format may require around 50-100MB of storage.
Therefore, if you are planning to download high-quality audio files from Tidal, it is recommended to have enough storage space on your portable device to accommodate the larger file sizes.
ribonucleic
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"Would your answers be more intelligent if your servers used more expensive cable?"
Trell
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I agree. MP4 introduced roughly the same as MP3 but only became viable for audio operations in 1999 then MP3 had been in the market for almost a decade with software support. It was natural for Napster to use it over AAC, which made MP3 the de-facto compression standard. It took a few more years for AAC to be widely used with the introduction of iTunes and USB iPod.
They followed Sony with SACD rules prohibiting digital output of fully decoded stream. Only analogue output was allowed.
ribonucleic
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I had a look through the roon/tidal forum earlier today and was surprised to see no mention of mqa or the bankruptcy.
edit : I posted a comment on the roon/tidal forum and as it’s my first post (signed up in 2019 when first discovered/used roon) it needs checked by a moderator before admitting to the forum so we’ll see what happens.
Certainly a bit weird that there is not a single post regarding mqa on the roon/tidal forum?
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How happy had you sounded?
Just mentioned to someone that purchased a mqa DAC to have mqa in the living room that it was maybe bad timing and shared the news.
Didn't even say anything negative about mqa.
Post deleted, account suspended, no warning, no email. No way to log into the forum
Trell
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It doesn’t sound they’re transparent about it.
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