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

[mtristand]

I do not intend to argue against you, but in that case your criticism should probably also apply to Qobuz, Amazon HD etc because they market High-Res with very dubious arguments.

I don't know enough about Qobuz or AmazonHD / haven't looked into them yet, so I have no comment on either one.

But I'd extend the same criticism to any business that puts out pseudoscience or unsubstantiated/misleading claims.

This thread happens to be about MQA so that's the focus here.

 

[GoldenOne]

Then put your qualifications on your sleeve,Amir has done that a lot of these other so called experts have not.

Stop with the credentials top trumps. The tests done are honestly fairly basic and don't require an EE degree. You don't need a calibrated colorimeter to tell that the sky isn't pink.
I never claimed to be an "expert", and the idea that you have to have 20 years industry experience to conduct a fairly basic test is quite frankly ridiculous.

also they have a closed codec you want it to be open,they don't have to do that for you.

They don't no.
But their choice not to then leaves it open to rightful criticism.

Would you use the same defense for $5000 cables?
They keep their design process a secret, they don't have to open it up to you. Should we therefore just start taking them at their word?

This is a silly double standard. Closed-off products with no proof of benefit SHOULD be criticised and questioned. Isn't that half the point of this forum?

 

[Jimbob54]

Then put your qualifications on your sleeve,Amir has done that a lot of these other so called experts have not.
also they have a closed codec you want it to be open,they don't have to do that for you.

Too much about mqa relies on, essentially, "trust us, we know what we are doing ". When you blend obvious technical know how with an aggressive marketing /spin machine it becomes very dangerous.

 

[KSTR]

In simplest terms, if you want to use MQA with EQ (and/or any DSP, eg room correction) then today you MUST upgrade to ROON (and pay it’s hefty fee ).

Yeah, this is the death blow for all users that want to use the content creativly in one way or another. MQA must offer -- at a resonable price -- fully decoding file readers (basically, proprietary stream converter libraries) so any application can do the full unfold. They seem to have completey missed that more and more users are too clever these days to feed the original stream to their DACs.

 

[dmac6419]

Stop with the credentials top trumps. The tests done are honestly fairly basic and don't require an EE degree. You don't need a calibrated colorimeter to tell that the sky isn't pink.
I never claimed to be an "expert", and the idea that you have to have 20 years industry experience to conduct a fairly basic test is quite frankly ridiculous.



They don't no.
But their choice not to then leaves it open to rightful criticism.

Would you use the same defense for $5000 cables?
They keep their design process a secret, they don't have to open it up to you. Should we therefore just start taking them at their word?

This is a silly double standard. Closed-off products with no proof of benefit SHOULD be criticised and questioned. Isn't that half the point of this forum?

Don't like the Orange one never have,won't buy a $5000 cables,didn't google everything negative about MQA and put it in my dossier and called it scientific,you did.

 

[Hai-Fri. Audio]

And if you can't defend it, you need to concede that it's misleading and MQA needs to be more honest and transparent.

And if you can't or won't do either, then I think you lose the right to act incredulous as to why people are critical.

Most here, including Amir, have already explicitly expressed their skepticism with a lot of MQA's claims and "marketing" speech.

We are long past this point, please stop making us have to rehash it again and again. MQA can have a horrible business model and marketing strategy and still be a good technology that delivers on its core promises. These things are not mutually exclusive.

You need to get the anti-MQA and pro-MQA picture out of your head. It's a free market, don't want to use it because their marketing rubs you the wrong way? or worse you, believe its a scam? Fine.

The annoyance shown to some commenters is warranted when we keep having to rehash things like:
a. good business model vs. good technology are separate
b. poorly constructed and technically deficient arguments against MQA

Bad logic can still spit out correct answers once in a while.

 

[THW]

maybe i just haven't seen enough adverts, but imo advertising/marketing usually involves at least some kind of embellishment of the product's qualities. i would be surprised if the advertising/marketing doesn't involve some form of exaggeration or half-truths. i mean everyone wants to say their own product is the bestestestest so...

just my $0.02.

 

[ericrosenfield]

Then put your qualifications on your sleeve,Amir has done that a lot of these other so called experts have not.
also they have a closed codec you want it to be open,they don't have to do that for you.

Can someone explain what the credentialism is all about? Either the results are true and reproducible or they aren’t, I don’t understand what it matters if the person has the right degree or whatever.

 

[dmac6419]

Can someone explain what the credentialism is all about? Either the results are true and reproducible or they aren’t, I don’t understand what it matters if the person has the right degree or whatever.

Do you want me cutting on you or a qualified surgeon ?

 

[Hai-Fri. Audio]

maybe i just haven't seen enough adverts, but imo advertising/marketing usually involves at least some kind of embellishment of the product's qualities. i would be surprised if the advertising/marketing doesn't involve some form of exaggeration or half-truths. i mean everyone wants to say their own product is the bestestestest so...

just my $0.02.

Your $.02 converts to several dollars for some of these trolls...

 

[GoldenOne]

Do you want me cutting on you or a qualified surgeon ?

Do you REALLY think this is an apt comparison?

 

[Hai-Fri. Audio]

Do you want me cutting on you or a qualified surgeon ?

Someone should make a PSA about the difference between the word "peer" in context of an industry standard journal vs. a jury.

some of these...

 

[tmtomh]

What is a lossy "masking" algorithm?

You know full well he means perceptual encoding.

 

[dmac6419]

Do you REALLY think this is an apt comparison?

Yes I do.

 

[Grooved]

Then put your qualifications on your sleeve,Amir has done that a lot of these other so called experts have not.
also they have a closed codec you want it to be open,they don't have to do that for you.

Yes he could, like other, but then what?
You know that there are fields where you won't work with people from country A because they keep it based on a diploma X, while you can work a lot with country B people because you have two diplomas Y and Z in complementing fields... and much more important in their minds, experience.
It happened to me in the past, and I'm not the only one on earth in this case.

If it can satisfy anybody, I'm not talking about these two in the case above, but I also have sound engineer diploma, and one in the electricity field, that were more easy (on some parts) to get than I thought at first, certainly because I've built/work with electronic devices since I was a kid, and always had people very experimented in a lot of different fields around me.

I know some people without any diploma that can open a digital (or analog) mixing board that they don't know yet and immediately understand what's going on and find a problem faster than one with a diploma. Yes, they have study it themselves, but also with others with a diploma, but they practiced more than others, and with very experimented people. Maybe they have gift too to be able to understand this so much fast.
It's not always the truth, but it happens enough to know that judging one person based on his qualifications only is just stupid, and I'm pretty sure there will be people doing it if he shares it.

Anyway, there are things that don't require any technical background except some logic, so I will ask you this :
the OPs test was far from perfect, I even thought when he shared a bit of information here before posting the video that he should also upload a "music only track" but it was too late when I thought about it, but do you not even find strange that his supposed incorrect file that generated errors in encoder log, ended up getting a Blue mark ?

 

[mtristand]

Most here, including Amir, have already explicitly expressed their skepticism with a lot of MQA's claims and "marketing" speech.

Where? When I was going through this thread, I never saw Amir offer any such criticisms of their marketing or claims of losslessness etc, though it's possible I missed it somewhere.

At least, for several pages now, if anything, the pro-MQA crowd has been giving a pass to their marketing and others have been coming up with reasons to justify a misleading use of "lossless."

We are long past this point, please stop making us have to rehash it again and again. MQA can have a horrible business model and marketing strategy and still be a good technology that delivers on its core promises. These things are not mutually exclusive.

If your core promises as-defined by your marketing material are misleading or false, then it's not really delivering on core promises.

This isn't like a situation where some bakery has the best cookies ever but can't make an ad campaign to save their life.

 

[pkane]

@Grooved has the right idea with DeltaWave. It's fairly easy to measure differences between two music tracks as long as they are not too different (use the same masters, for example). By the way, DW can also be used to determine if two tracks come from the same master.

Since I don't have access to an MQA-decoded track to match against an equivalent PCM file, I'll start with an example from 2L website, comparing the un-decoded MQA file to the PCM one. This is for track 38, Mozart's Violin concerto in D major, first 2 minutes analyzed:

Un-decoded MQA (24 bits, 98MB size) vs. PCM (16 bits, 48MB size), 44.1kHz, track 38
This is showing the un-decoded MQA file compared to PCM. This would be the case of someone playing the MQA-encoded content on a non-MQA-capable DAC.

Spectra of the two files (blue is the PCM, white is MQA-encoded):

The differences between two spectra, becomes significant above 20kHz, but pretty noisy since there's not a lot of signal there:

As you can see, the RMS Null is -71dBFS. That's not a bad result for an analog/digital loopback recording, but remember that this comparing two pure digital files.

Spectrum of the error signal (null/delta file) goes a bit above -100dBFS, but only above 18kHz:

Difference in phase gets noisy with higher frequencies, but remember that the signal level falls below -96dBFS at around 16KHz, so noise starts to creep in:

PK Metric, for completeness, shows nothing in the difference signal that should be audible based on various perception-based weights (ERB smoothing, 400ms averaging, and equal loudness curves applied):

Impulse response as derived from these two files:

From DeltaWave log, 50% of samples in the two files will match perfectly at 11.6bits. In other words, signal and noise carried in both files will match with mathematical precision (losslessly) at around 11 bits out of 16. Whatever MQA encoding is doing to the file, it's altering around 5 of the least significant bits.

 

[KSTR]

Want a diploma? I can get you a diploma by 3 o'clock this afternoon!

 

[dmac6419]

Yes he could, like other, but then what?
You know that there are fields where you won't work with people from country A because they keep it based on a diploma X, while you can work a lot with country B people because you have two diplomas Y and Z in complementing fields... and much more important in their minds, experience.
I know some people without any diploma that can open a digital mixing board and immediately understand what's going on and find a problem faster than one with a diploma. Yes, they have study it themselves, but also with other with a diploma, but they practice more than others.
It's not always the truth, but it happens enough to know that judging one person based on his qualifications only is just stupid, and I'm pretty sure there will be people doing it if he shares it.

Most people who listen to music are listener,most people who drive fast cars are not race car drivers,I play music but I'm not a professional (very hard work) I record music at home,but if i want it publish for the masses,it have to go to other engineers for it to be mastered,etc.

 

[THW]

Your $.02 converts to several dollars for some of these trolls...

wouldn't call them trolls tbh, i like some of the guys shooting off their criticisms here...

also funny anecdote about advertising not necessarily being truthful, not really audio related but i thought i would share it: the advertising campaign for either the Winchester 1907 or 1910 (i forgot which one) rifles marketed them as "Thor's Hammer", implying that the rifles have greater per-shot power than other rifles of the period... when in reality .351 and .401 was really only barely reaching the power of .30-30 and certainly not anywhere near .30-06.

edit: to be clear, i'm not condoning this kind of marketing, i'm just saying its a given that marketing material is going to contain embellishments in at least some form. just the reality of the situation.