MQA Deep Dive - I published music on tidal to test MQA

[MDT]

Try finding a commercial multichannel recording that doesn't somehow have to pay licensing fees to Dolby. Or deal with the hardware compability issues today without running into licensing again.

This is part of the reason for the dislike. The creation of paywalls, tiers and other boundaries that add to complexity and expense.

It's not just paywalls. Closed, proprietary formats cause problems with archiving. If we can't access decoders for files we own in the future, we cannot access that content. And while there are many people who do a fantastic job of reverse engineering old formats to allow conversion, it shouldn't be needed. Record labels tried many years ago to lock content behind closed, proprietary, DRM controlled formats, but ultimately failed - and we as consumers have benefited from this ever since. Whereas things like Bluray and HDCP have caused many problems for viedo content over the years, accessing audio files has been relatively trouble free.

The video industry succeeded, to some extent, in that we still can't buy DRM-free videos to keep - even though there are ways around the technological protections. MQA, Dolby, all of these are a step backwards for audio. Regardless of what MQA can do, or can't do, its closed nature is a long-term problem (and the fact that only a small portion of the files on streaming services use MQA is a rubbish argument - before anyone tries to bring that up again. Ignoring it until it becomes a widespread problem is how it becomes a widespread problem in the first place!)

 

[jensgk]

... which is why he is correcting people.

Let me fix that for you: ... which is why he is promoting his own opinion about the subject.

 

[pozz]

Closed, proprietary formats cause problems with archiving.

That's a very deep concern for me as well.

 

[voodooless]

Let me fix that for you: ... which is why he is promoting his own opinion about the subject.

And that is is right, just as anyone else’s. No issue with that.

 

[Raindog123]

MQA proposes another form of lossless that says it music follows statistical distribution, they are able to fully preserve its actual informational content including what is in ultrasonic. If they are able to achieve this fully, what is your beef with it? That it doesn't spit out a bunch of bits for a rectangular channel is not used in music?

The keyword here is "proposes."

Here is another of my silly airplane analogies. (Illustrating my beef with MQA):

When you want to make (and sell) a novel, very good plane. Let's say the one that flies at 60,000ft. Or at Mach 5 speed... You can have all the right good ideas. And conduct the design. And have your customers or investors to fund you. You can even spend all the money. And have the glossy marketing brochures printed, and have ribbon-cutting champagne reveals... BUT. Until you fly the damn thing - at 60,000ft and at Mach 5 - and document the flight, and people witness it.... Until you prove it through tests, you can't claim you have a 60,000ft/Mach 5 aircraft!

 

[MDT]

Here is another of my silly airplane analogies. (Illustrating my beef with MQA):

When you want to make (and sell) a novel, very good plane. Let's say the one that flies at 60,000ft. Or at Mach 5 speed... You can have all the right good ideas. And conduct the design. And even have your customers or investors to fund you. You can even spend all the money. And have the glossy marketing brochures printed, and have champagne ribbon-cutting reveals... BUT. Until you fly the damn thing - at 60,000ft or at Mach 5 - and document the flight, and people witness it.... Until you prove it through tests, you can't claim you have a 60,000ft/Mach 5 aircraft!

And naturally, once you'd performed the test and met your specifications, you'd want everyone to see them! Whereas if you'd only managed to crash the thing shortly after takeoff....

 

[PO3c]

And naturally, once you'd performed the test and met your specifications, you'd want everyone to see them! Whereas if you'd only managed to crash the thing shortly after takeoff....

I think maybe that's where MQA are considering no proper demonstration of its featureset are provided. BS has multiple times pointed out that their partners have the ability to do proper measurement and test on MQA, yet none of them have come to rescue providing proof.

 

[levimax]

I think maybe that's where MQA are considering no proper demonstration of its featureset are provided. BS has multiple times pointed out that their partners have the ability to do proper measurement and test on MQA, yet none of them have come to rescue providing proof.

I think MQA knows it's market. Many audiophiles are subjectivists and a lot are "anti-measurement" so there is nothing to be gained by showing measurements as a lossy codec, no matter how good, is not going to show anything unrefutably "better" than a lossless file. Instead of measurements MQA has assembled a large group of "influences" that proclaim "trust your ears it sounds better" which is much more effective for them.

 

[MDT]

I think MQA knows it's market. Many audiophiles are subjectivists and a lot are "anti-measurement" so there is nothing to be gained by showing measurements as a lossy codec, no matter how good, is not going to show anything unrefutably "better" than a lossless file. Instead of measurements MQA has assembled a large group of "influences" that proclaim "trust your ears it sounds better" which is much more effective for them.

I think their target is even wider than just audiophiles. MQA, as something that can be marketed as being "special" (we already have lossless as a selling point, so they needed something else), that streaming services can use to sell more expensive plans. So just from a marketing standpoint, its value is in being able to sell a "better" tier of music. A bit like how some schitty audio manufacturers, that make abyssmal gear, need to find some way to compete in a very competent and technologically well developed market.

 

[muslhead]

I think their target is even wider than just audiophiles. MQA, as something that can be marketed as being "special" (we already have lossless as a selling point, so they needed something else), that streaming services can use to sell more expensive plans. So just from a marketing standpoint, its value is in being able to sell a "better" tier of music. A bit like how some schitty audio manufacturers, that make abyssmal gear, need to find some way to compete in a very competent and technologically well developed market.

Who wouldn't want something "special", especially this market?

 

[Zensō]

I think MQA knows it's market. Many audiophiles are subjectivists and a lot are "anti-measurement" so there is nothing to be gained by showing measurements as a lossy codec, no matter how good, is not going to show anything unrefutably "better" than a lossless file. Instead of measurements MQA has assembled a large group of "influences" that proclaim "trust your ears it sounds better" which is much more effective for them.

I think this has been true in the past, but as some guy once said, the times they are a-changin’.

 

[krabapple]

So, MQA is perhaps *perceptually* lossless (like the best lossy codecs at optimal settings) for music, but not strictly lossless (not bit-perfect).
I write 'perhaps' because Dr. Bob hasn't graced us with independent double blind listening test results using killer and sub-killer samples, to demonstrate it one way or the other.

What MQA remains, either way, is pointless.

Maybe we're done here now?

 

[Zensō]

So, MQA is perhaps *perceptually* lossless (like the best lossy codecs at optimal settings) for music, but not strictly lossless (not bit-perfect).
I write 'perhaps' because Dr. Bob hasn't graced us with independent double blind listening test results using killer and sub-killer samples, to demonstrate it one way or the other.

What MQA remains, either way, is pointless.

Maybe we're done here now?

Oh, I’m pretty sure we’re far from done on this subject.

 

[amirm]

@amirm, Within the many audio communities, you are a very public internet figure. Your expressions and motives can and will be discussed in many forums, especially given your strong defense of MQA, which is very puzzling to many of us.

I hear you and read the criticism elsewhere from time to time. Given a choice of making a few detractors happy and being on the right side of correct technology understanding, I take the latter. My ethics in upholding what science and engineering say is far more important than getting people to like me/ASR.

So you know your point is not lost on me, someone reached out to me to see if I would be on a a zoom panel discussing MQA. I told him no. And that the only answer people want to hear is that "MQA sucks." Anything else just creates negativity. That made the moderator rethink the idea of holding that panel as well!

It is for this reason that sometimes I stop posting here. It seems that people don't want better understanding of technology. They just want to hear who is for and against MQA. The concept that I don't care about that battle doesn't compute with them. The fact that I have done a video talking about how undecoded MQA damages the content doesn't penetrate. The fact that I have said MQA is likely going to die with 2 out of 10 chances of success goes in one ear and comes out the other. The fact that I predicted major players like Amazon and Apple would do high-res without MQA and that has come true, seems to be long forgotten as well. They just come out and say what you said: "Amir is strongly defending MQA." Facts be damned.

So it is clear, OP is not technical. Neither are vast majority of people opining about this discussion. So it is natural that they say things that are simply incorrect. Do you really wish these incorrect technical assessments to be left alone here without me correcting them? I sure hope not or we are wasting our time here and just seem to want political victories, not a search for understanding.

 

[amirm]

"perceptually lossless", by definition, depends on the perception of the listener, ergo will be different for every single person and even for every possible permutation of gear combinations of every single person... in other words "perceptually lossless" is a pretty worthless claim

That is not what it means. Don't spin things you don't understand.

A perceptual codec like MP3, AAC, WMA, Ogg, etc. has a psychoacoustic model of human hearing. This is how it is able to analyze music and throw out massive amounts of it and have the results be very similar to the original. MP3/AAC/WMA, etc. at 128 kbps has a fraction of the data that CD has at 1,400 kbps. Yet to millions of people it sounds like the CD. This is the power of psychoacoustics.

The goal of the psychoacoustic model is to achieve transparency. It however runs into a brick wall when the bit rate has to be constant like "128 kpbs" above. Music has varying complexity with parts of it that are dead easy to compress and others that are not. Silence for example is trivial to compress by almost infinite compression ratio. A high frequency transient like an acoustic guitar pick is the opposite. If you keep the bit rate constant, you can't allow the psychoacoustic engine to produce the fidelity it wants. So it compromises and throws out data that it knows will cause audible artifacts.

If you now relax the bit rate constraint completely and let the codec produce whatever data rate it wants, then the psychoacoustic model can produce exceptionally good quality while still providing significant savings. It can still throw out a faint tone in the presence of a very loud one without a single person being able to hear the difference. Typical data rates climb to 400 kbps on the average for large amount of music but importantly, the peaks can be as high as 1.4 mbit/sec allowing full fidelity of the CD when needed. In the worst case situation, the encoded rate may be close to one megabit. Fortunately music has a lot of redundancy and as I said, the average winds up being less than mathematically lossless encoding that has no psychoacoustic model.

This is how Ogg Vorbis got its reputation for being a good codec by the way even though by design it was not. The developer chose to make the output format variable by default whereas all the other encoders by default picked constant bit rate (128 kbps, 256, etc.). A cheat but an effective one.

Note that not every codec can achieve full transparency in this mode. MP3 for example likely never becomes transparent. You need a compression system with bit-exact transforms and such to get there.

So perceptual lossless works and it works because its design is based on how human hearing works. If I truncated everything above 50 kHz it would not matter to you because we know you can't hear above 50 kHz. "Everyone being different" doesn't enter the equation.

 

[amirm]

Amir from Audio Pseudoscience Review strikes again..

When I was in elementary school, our teacher was late so we all went to town and created a riot in the classroom. Then this stranger comes in and sits in the teacher's chair and waits for things to calm down and of course it did not. He eventually raised his voice and we all sat down. In calm voice he then said: "every classroom needs a clown. you should try to NOT be that one."

I suggest as a new member you first contribute something of value instead of commentary that makes you like that clown. To be sure, we need clowns as fodders to get the real technical answers out but I suggest you don't volunteer to be the one.

Forgot to mention that the stranger was a temporary teacher and we only saw him for that day. Shame as I am sure he had a lot more wisdom to share with us.

 

[amirm]

Could you please clarify the apparent disparity between the above and your prior post on lossy vs. lossless?

Sure. It is all about context. If the discussion is whether you can losslessly encode full rectangular bandwidth of 88.2/96 kHz PCM into 44.1/48 kHz, the answer is no, you can't do that losslessly. That's what I said in what you quoted from me.

If the discussion is, as was the latter post, "marketing department is calling MQA lossless, how can they do that?" the answer is that there are different types of lossless so they can get away with that claim to some extent. I proceeded to give different examples of it.

So be careful about what you mean. I am when there is ambiguity by using the term "mathematically lossless." See this example from yesterday:

MQA when asked to encode high res files into standard res it not mathematically lossless. It cannot be. Question is, if music is encoded at its full information-level or not. They say it is and OP's tests don't nullify that.

I suggest adopting this terminology so that it is clear what is being talked about.

 

[amirm]

Regardless of what MQA can do, or can't do, its closed nature is a long-term problem (and the fact that only a small portion of the files on streaming services use MQA is a rubbish argument - before anyone tries to bring that up again. Ignoring it until it becomes a widespread problem is how it becomes a widespread problem in the first place!)

You mean the likes of Apple and Amazon are going to cave, start paying royalties to MQA and force people to buy MQA hardware? Really? What do you know that these companies don't know? That MQA value proposition is that strong that they are already defeated by offering open-format high-res content?

 

[tmtomh]

I hear you and read the criticism elsewhere from time to time. Given a choice of making a few detractors happy and being on the right side of correct technology understanding, I take the latter. My ethics in upholding what science and engineering say is far more important than getting people to like me/ASR.

So you know your point is not lost on me, someone reached out to me to see if I would be on a a zoom panel discussing MQA. I told him no. And that the only answer people want to hear is that "MQA sucks." Anything else just creates negativity. That made the moderator rethink the idea of holding that panel as well!

It is for this reason that sometimes I stop posting here. It seems that people don't want better understanding of technology. They just want to hear who is for and against MQA. The concept that I don't care about that battle doesn't compute with them. The fact that I have done a video talking about how undecoded MQA damages the content doesn't penetrate. The fact that I have said MQA is likely going to die with 2 out of 10 chances of success goes in one ear and comes out the other. The fact that I predicted major players like Amazon and Apple would do high-res without MQA and that has come true, seems to be long forgotten as well. They just come out and say what you said: "Amir is strongly defending MQA." Facts be damned.

So it is clear, OP is not technical. Neither are vast majority of people opining about this discussion. So it is natural that they say things that are simply incorrect. Do you really wish these incorrect technical assessments to be left alone here without me correcting them? I sure hope not or we are wasting our time here and just seem to want political victories, not a search for understanding.

I appreciate your comment here, Amir, but with respect I don’t see evidence that the more technically expert MQA critics in this forum are “on the wrong side of technology understanding.”

 

[BinkieHuckerback]

What issue is MQA trying to solve? If Amazon and Apple can stream lossless...was this not possible previously?