More on Lenbrook's plans for MQA

[boxerfan88]

The new plug-ins seem to be well received in the studio sector: Link

What's so special about another version of minimum phase filter?
Inspira impulse response decay tail looks very uneven.
It's just another effect plugin for content creators.

 

[Soniclife]

What's so special about another version of minimum phase filter?
Inspira impulse response decay tail looks very uneven.
It's just another effect plugin for content creators.



View attachment 455892

Those impulses are not from a digital recorder, they are non bandwidth limited digital creations. If they showed real recordings things would look very different.

 

[NTK]

What's so special about another version of minimum phase filter?
Inspira impulse response decay tail looks very uneven.
It's just another effect plugin for content creators.



View attachment 455892

The response showed in fig 1 is of a non-causal filter. It is physically impossible to produce that response with a properly bandlimited sampled signal (i.e. with an analog anti-alias filter before A/D conversion). It is pure BS.

 

[tmtomh]

No, I'm just reading up on the subject with an open mind. It seems that a lot of communication went wrong on both sides in the past.

I certainly don't think you're trolling. But if you're reading up on the subject with an open mind, then you will surely come across the data and evidence that demonstrate that MQA's claims - "not lossless," "better than lossless," "truer to the master source," "restores accurate time information," and so on - were demonstrably and provably bogus. And you will surely discover that "a lot of communication went wrong on both sides" does not accurately capture what the problem was (and is).

The call to open-mindedness is great... unless or until it becomes a claim of false equivalency based on willful ignorance of the known facts.

 

[tmtomh]

That's where the misunderstandings begin. Every conversion and reconstruction is subject to loss. Every signal chain leaves its mark, whether in the frequency domain or in the time domain. MQA places more emphasis on the time domain. In the meantime, you can read about this in this thread, including the misunderstandings that have occurred in the past: Link

I have read about it, extensively, and with respect, calling it a "misunderstanding" is precisely what I was referencing in my prior comment. The "misunderstandings" as you term them, began because Bob Stuart and MQA made dozens of public statements that ranged from unclear to actively misleading to flat-out untrue. The uncertainty came from MQA's obfuscation, and the vast majority of their claims - whether made clearly, unclearly, or in a misleading way - turned out to be simply false.

As for the time domain performance improvement of MQA's filters, it simply is not what Bob Stuart and MQA claim. For you to claim or imply that folks like @Archimago who've pointed this out simply "don't understand" the technology is to demonstrate your own lack of understanding.

 

[pogo]

The electronics industry and its experts seem to see it differently. ESS TECHNOLOGY was probably just the beginning.

 

[IPunchCholla]

The electronics industry is just as prone to cognitive bias as the rest of us. They are also under pressure to differentiate products even where the engineering problems are solved from their marketing wings.

So, after reading all the links, I’ll believe the people who are trying to get my money after someone provides strong evidence there is an audible benefit.

 

[pogo]

That doesn't sound like marketing jargon to me:
The result of an intense collaboration with MQA Labs, aiming to improve the fidelity of audio signal conversion stages. The new ES9823MPRO is the first ADC in the world to integrate FOQUS by MQA Labs — a decimation filter with a minimum-phase response engineered to stay below human perceptual thresholds. ESS recognized that this single dithered quantization step and low-complexity architecture make FOQUS the most transparent decimation technology available today.

 

[Mnyb]

Both ESS and AKM besides producing excellent chips also provides a plethora of different filters purely to increase the possibility for their customers to make products with ”features” etc that would increase the marketability. Knowing very well the SQ was solved by them decades ago .

Especially if you can go Hirez then all potential problems are moved far beyond human potential.
If CD gives you FOMO the solution has always been Hirez no special sauce needed, but no proprietary patented FuD to sell

 

[IPunchCholla]

That doesn't sound like marketing jargon to me:
The result of an intense collaboration with MQA Labs, aiming to improve the fidelity of audio signal conversion stages. The new ES9823MPRO is the first ADC in the world to integrate FOQUS by MQA Labs — a decimation filter with a minimum-phase response engineered to stay below human perceptual thresholds. ESS recognized that this single dithered quantization step and low-complexity architecture make FOQUS the most transparent decimation technology available today.

That’s odd, because it’s a paragraph written by marketing to sound impressive without making any real world claims.

 

[pogo]

A plethora of different filters is quite different from FOQUS. In order to recoup the costs of integration, high ADC quantities will be required. This suggests a high level of interest from end device manufacturers.

 

[IPunchCholla]

A plethora of different filters is quite different from FOQUS. In order to recoup the costs of integration, high ADC quantities will be required. This suggests a high level of interest from end device manufacturers.

This is known as an argument from ignorance on informal logic. We don’t know if FOQUS has any benefit. Full stop. It is an unknown and nothing can be known until a benefit is demonstrated. Many many things exist that are prima facia absurd in terms of benefit, that are sold and are profitable.

The argument you posted would hold for every woo tweak out there.

 

[mags65]

This does indeed sound like a great potential for positive adverse selection. I will absolutely deselect any manufacturer and product that elects to go down the route of fucqus, and maintain that stance for the entirety of their product range, for as long as I live.

 

[pogo]

We don’t know if FOQUS has any benefit. Full stop. It is an unknown and nothing can be known until a benefit is demonstrated.

I completely agree with you and I can't understand why Archimago made negative comments about these new technologies in January. He didn't know how they worked.

This was also a misjudgment on the part of Archimago:
FOQUS - "Represents an innovative approach for analogue to digital conversion". I assume this is the encoding portion of the MQA-like codec +/- some kind of DSP that supposedly cleans up the data from an ADC. Regardless, this is for studios rather than consumers. I'm curious to see if 2L's Morten Lindberg continues to champion this stuff as he had during the MQA/Bob Stuart years. Please man, just walk away.

 

[tmtomh]

That doesn't sound like marketing jargon to me:
The result of an intense collaboration with MQA Labs, aiming to improve the fidelity of audio signal conversion stages. The new ES9823MPRO is the first ADC in the world to integrate FOQUS by MQA Labs — a decimation filter with a minimum-phase response engineered to stay below human perceptual thresholds. ESS recognized that this single dithered quantization step and low-complexity architecture make FOQUS the most transparent decimation technology available today.

It sounds exactly like marketing jargon and is quite typical - there’s exactly nothing there to support the claim made at the very end, let alone any evidence that the claim is true, or anything to indicate that other decimation filters aren’t already way below human perceptual thresholds.

Your comments in this thread seem bizarrely committed to Argument from Authority combined with a seemingly large dose of unwarranted credulity.

 

[kemmler3D]

That doesn't sound like marketing jargon to me:
The result of an intense collaboration with MQA Labs, aiming to improve the fidelity of audio signal conversion stages. The new ES9823MPRO is the first ADC in the world to integrate FOQUS by MQA Labs — a decimation filter with a minimum-phase response engineered to stay below human perceptual thresholds. ESS recognized that this single dithered quantization step and low-complexity architecture make FOQUS the most transparent decimation technology available today.

I used to write audio marketing jargon for a living. If you can, take my word for it, that's what this is.

 

[pogo]

To me, that sounds like hard work on both sides that has led to success.

 

[kemmler3D]

To me, that sounds like hard work on both sides that has led to success.

I'm honestly not sure if you're sincere about any of this, but I'll just point out that there are no legal implications at all to using the phases "intense collaboration" or "improve the fidelity of audio" or even really "most transparent". They could send 3 emails and call it an intense collaboration.

For the rest of the claims, if dragged into court, they would just need to show that the filter is different somehow. Transparency and fidelity would be subjective concepts in that situation.

All we can say for sure from this blurb is that the chip in question has the filter in question.

Based on the absence of other more interesting concrete claims, there is no clear reason to care about that.

Let me put it another way from the marketers perspective. If this filter beat some other filter in a blind listening test, or ANY legitimate listening test, they would never stop talking about it.

 

[Barrelhouse Solly]

Auria, Foqus, Orono — it’s a farrago of rebranding and re-animating the dead.

“That’s going to be on every [streaming] service.”

What seems to be more MQA-adjacent technical gibberish is a lot less interesting to me than the branding saga, and the eternally recurring idea with these guys that retooling one of the most damaged and widely reviled failed brands in the history of audio is going to be welcomed by the biggest companies in streaming audio as something anyone would want to get it bed with again.

If any of this happens at any significant monetizing scale it will be one of the most astounding and unlikely turnarounds in business history.

Band wagon. Try to create the impression that whatever you're promoting is very popular.

 

[pogo]

It will have taken more than 3 emails to integrate the FOQUS architecture.