MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions

[mansr]

I have zero commercial relationship with MQA. I do consider Bob Stuart a professional colleague and one of our luminaries in audio. Show disrespect to him in that regard and you will motivate me to speak up.

I also think PCM format is very wasteful. And that a perceptual coder which reduces bandwidth requirements especially when it comes to high-resolution content very valid. And having a layered format is good even though it does reduce efficiency.

In other words, you're an admirer of Bob Stuart and allowed yourself to be suckered by his bullshit.

 

[JJB70]

Bob Stuart is a very clever chap and Meridian can make some superb (albeit very expensive) equipment. I don't for a minute doubt Bob Stuart's intelligence, nor do I question the logic of MQA from the perspective of equipment manufacturers or record labels. However from the consumer perspective it just seems to be the equivalent of an answer looking for a question and brings nothing to the table that I can't already get. My own preferred approach to buying music is to buy a CD, immediately rip it to FLAC and then archive the disc in case I ever lose my files or anything. Everybody wins in my view, the artist is paid for their work, the record label makes their profit and I get a recording in a quality which is if anything beyond my threshold for discerning any further qualitative improvement. To date none of the high-res formats I've tried have given my any reason to consider making the move from CDs ripped to FLAC.

 

[Thomas savage]

Iv moved the political ideological off shoot about dreams of everything being free forever to here..,

https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...utrality-restricting-media-file-sharing.4861/

 

[Cosmik]

Stick to the OP, this is about MQA.

I’d rather see a more technical direction take hold, we have too much fire and brimstone and not enough sound objective analysis.

Sorry. Just taking the 'DRM' aspect to its logical conclusion. I'll shut up now!

 

[watchnerd]

I think the audiophile world is a niche within a niche which is irrelevant to the overwhelming majority of people

This is where the MQA guys are dumb.

If I were them, I'd ditch all this high resolution stuff and focus instead on a new MONO format designed to be played on smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Apple Homepod, Sonos, etc.

It could include meta data for visualization light shows via smart lights, genre attributes to help with discovery, adult content flags so 5 year olds can't request "Pop That Pussy", hyper links to streaming augmented reality videos to watch via your VR goggles.

 

[Thomas savage]

Sorry. Just taking the 'DRM' aspect to its logical conclusion. I'll shut up now!

There’s a new thread for it, knock yourself out, If you want the title altered let me know.

You know you can still order every drug under the sun over the Internet, it arrives at your door just like amazon orders.

 

[JJB70]

This is where the MQA guys are dumb.

If I were them, I'd ditch all this high resolution stuff and focus instead on a new MONO format designed to be played on smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Apple Homepod, Sonos, etc.

It could include meta data for visualization light shows via smart lights, genre attributes to help with discovery, adult content flags so 5 year olds can't request "Pop That Pussy", hyper links to streaming augmented reality videos to watch via your VR goggles.

Indeed. I bought a JBL speaker for my wife and kids and they love it and have no urge to move up to anything better. And in all fairness if it meets their needs and sounds as good as it needs to sound to their ears then it is serving its purpose perfectly well. Developing new ideas for that market would be very lucrative I think, but it obviously means mixing with the great unwashed of audio, the sort of lower echelon types who think a perfectly good USB cable can be bought for £5......

 

[Thomas savage]

This is where the MQA guys are dumb.

If I were them, I'd ditch all this high resolution stuff and focus instead on a new MONO format designed to be played on smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Apple Homepod, Sonos, etc.

It could include meta data for visualization light shows via smart lights, genre attributes to help with discovery, adult content flags so 5 year olds can't request "Pop That Pussy", hyper links to streaming augmented reality videos to watch via your VR goggles.

Mono is the new stereo.

I do think a lot of what you mention here can ( will be in the future) be done at the speaker end or user end via ya music player. We are in some respects going backwards, ManFi is dead we now have WoFi lol

That might make a good thread, the death of stereo and rise of the single speaker and what that might mean for music production and distribution. Some of these effects we already see in the aggressive use of compression. It’s where we are heading but I don’t see it being talked about much.

Back to MQA and sorry for the temporary distraction.

 

[watchnerd]

In all honesty, the difference between high quality MP3 and FLAC is not what some tell us it is and I have a darned hard job trying to differentiate them.

I've done blind A/B tests comparing:

320 kbps MP3 vs 256 kbps AAC vs Ogg Vorbis vs SD FLAC vs HD FLAC:

~50% success rate (i.e pretty random)

MQA vs FLAC:

100% success rate (so far)

Now there is a *HUGE* caveat here, because I can't convert my own HD lossless files into MQA, thus ensuring the same mastering, so I have no idea how much of what I'm hearing is MQA "sound" vs just a remastering.

 

[watchnerd]

Mono is the new stereo.

Clearly you haven't read my thread about mono phono cartridges for LP playback....I'm so trend-setting, I scare myself.

 

[Thomas savage]

Clearly you haven't read my thread about mono phono cartridges for LP playback....I'm so trend-setting, I touch myself.

Fify

 

[watchnerd]

The "MQA frequency gap" discussion is pretty interesting:

"If there is an error anywhere in the process you will get gaps or overlaps in the frequency axis or the amplitude axis. This is how the notch arose from a signal processing failure where the up shift was too great on playback or the downshift was insufficient on recording encryption."

 

[svart-hvitt]

Stick to the OP, this is about MQA.

I’d rather see a more technical direction take hold, we have too much fire and brimstone and not enough sound objective analysis.

@Thomas savage , I think all the technicalities have been covered (elsewhere by for example Archimago). And MQA’s original claims have been refuted. MQA is not about technicalities anymore. It’s about business politics and it is a fight between interests, where @amirm has taken the balanced view (the sum of business interests and consumer interests) as opposed to the narrower consumer view.

 

[JJB70]

Now there is a *HUGE* caveat here, because I can't convert my own HD lossless files into MQA, thus ensuring the same mastering, so I have no idea how much of what I'm hearing is MQA "sound" vs just a remastering.

I think that is indeed a big caveat as listening to different versions of the same recording can make a huge difference regardless of format, particularly the obsession with adding compression to many remasters.

 

[Thomas savage]

@Thomas savage , I think all the technicalities have been covered (elsewhere by for example Archimago). And MQA’s original claims have been refuted. MQA is not about technicalities anymore. It’s about business politics and it is a fight between interests, where @amirm has taken the balanced view (the sum of business interests and consumer interests) as opposed to the narrower consumer view.

In some respects yes but it’s my job to make sure we don’t end up with another climate change thread scenario. There’s enough aggravation in this thread as it is and the off shoot of ‘ net neutrality ‘( leftist political ideology and all) is too big a subject to get lost in the end of a Ill mannered MQA thread.

So we agree but there’s a new thread for it ( I did look for a exsisting thread but it was u.s. orientated so made a new one).

 

[watchnerd]

I think that is indeed a big caveat as listening to different versions of the same recording can make a huge difference regardless of format, particularly the obsession with adding compression to many remasters.

It's not just compression...any tweakery of the EQ or adding effects via soft synth (both common), or changing the reference level all make it obvious to hear differences.

 

[svart-hvitt]

In some respects yes but it’s my job to make sure we don’t end up with another climate change thread scenario. There’s enough aggravation in this thread as it is and the off shoot of ‘ net neutrality ‘( leftist political ideology and all) is too big a subject to get lost in the end of a Ill mannered MQA thread.

So we agree but there’s a new thread for it ( I did look for a exsisting thread but it was u.s. orientated so made a new one).

No problem. You do a good moderating job, maestro

 

[watchnerd]

Interestingly, the MQA codec, in binary form, has been included in an open source player, MPD:

http://mailman.blarg.de/pipermail/mpd-devel/2018-January/000682.html

Which, as the thread points out, leads to a GPL conflict.

 

[watchnerd]

Okay, here is an intriguing file comparison:

http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html

DSD, high-rez PCM, RBCD, MQA, "MQA CD" (I don't even know what that is...), multi-channel, you name it.

 

[watchnerd]

A quick and dirty Audacity frequency spectrum analysis of the first track on the 2L site, "POLARITY - an acoustic jazz project." Spectrum plots taken from 2:30 - 3:30 marks on both files because that's where a lot of action is happening and buffer size limits in Audacity.

MQA plot:

24bit/88khz plot:

Unfortunately, I didn't normalize the plots.

But even without that step, there are visible differences, especially in the high end.