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MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions

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StevenEleven

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Well I just signed up for the 30 day free trial of Qobuz. Some people like DACs, some people like amps. I like music streaming services. They are like giant playgrounds for me.

From the interface it looks like Qobuz brings a lot of added value to the table in terms of notes, recording information, putting the music in context, etc. It looks like they do a lot of things right. Just like the MQA label, the Hi Res label has taken on a negative connotation for me, and it’s all over Qobuz, but they give you the option of the 16 / 44.1 price tier, which is what I chose for the free trial.

Having gotten used to full CD quality streams on Amazon HD, I thought I’d try Qobuz too while they are both in their trial periods. It looks like Qobuz does deliver a lot of value that Amazon never will, not in terms of fidelity (which for my purposes is identical) but in terms of content to give insight into the music and satisfy curiosity in the app. I am not sure of the sonic benefits of lossless CD quality over high quality lossy, but it gives me more confidence if I am upmixing or using digital EQ or whatever, and I just feel more relaxed about it than a lossy stream. Part of that’s psychological, I’m sure, but it’s rooted in at least some reality, I think, knowing that I have full CD lossless quality as a baseline.

Where Amazon comes up really big for me is price of course, and not having to look at that “hi res” label, and great search capability and lyrics and a massive catalog. Amazon‘s Ultra HD label is really an “in your face” to MQA and hi res marketimg.

I do not like the kind of inane marketing that hi res represents, but I am persuaded that for Qobuz to have staying power in the market they have to offer some sort of “better than CD” quality.

I can stream Qobuz straight into my receiver via AirPlay or Chromecast. I prefer AirPlay because the receiver lets me do more upmixing and DSP with the Airplay stream. Either way I get a nice info display of track and album information fed from my receiver to my TV.

So. . . Qobuz and Amazon Music HD. . . both very highly recommended, in my book. And may MQA slowly wither away into irrelevance, obsolescence and obscurity.
 
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Steve H

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Amirm, I view what I’ve done with MQA to be education. So, I looked at site visit numbers from September using your site as comparison. Audio Science Review has more visits than all the download sites on MQA’s website combined. ASR also had more visits than HDTracks. Add a few DSD sites, ProStudio Masters and Acoustic Sounds and you get a bit over 4 times the visits to ASR in September for 10 high resolution sites. These numbers seem to indicate a lack of interest high-resolution downloads.

The last good numbers I have on Tidal are from 2017. They show the HiFi tier to have about 171k users. Qobuz has about 200k users in all tiers. Deezer I estimate to have a little over a million users in the CD quality tier. I don’t see any significant interest in CD quality and above streaming either.

So, the question is can Amazon add significant subscribers with a CD and higher quality tier? My idea of significant for their HD tier is 6 million subscribers by June 2020. And even if they get 6 million subscribers in the HD tier you would have to wonder how many came for the actual high-resolution tracks. If Amazon HD gets 6 million subscribers, CD quality and above would have about 2% of the streaming market. Still far short of what the high-resolution market research projects the market to be.

Getting back to MQA I’m pleased artists, studio engineers, mastering engineers have listened and rejected MQA forcing the labels and MQA Ltd to process MQA files after they are created. One MQA ADC is still one too many but there is no end to end recording chain. MQA is just additional processing, something I prefer to do without. And finally, Amirm high-end DAC manufactures didn’t get us to go after MQA they joined me. For a simple reason the audio press can’t get at me I’m independent. I gave everybody a chance to walk away from MQA at the end of RMAF 2017 and most did. There a couple of YouTube videos of what happens when I want to make people look foolish of the final seminar of RMAF 2018. At RMAF this year there was supposed to be an MQA demonstration Saturday. It didn’t happen, I was in the audience. No war no battle just a process of educating people.
 

ahofer

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Links to videos?
 

MediumRare

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Agreed, I still support Mark Waldrep's position that the only true Hi Rez are digital recordings that were captured from the mic's using something better then Redbooks 16/44.1 and kept that way thru the entire production chain to the listeners source. Anything that started with anything less than that is NOT a High Resolution recording, It's just it's source placed in a big bit bucket, so what?
Honest question: Is it possible that a "hi-res" reproduction of a "low-res" recording will be more accurate than a Redbook reproduction of the same?
 

sergeauckland

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Honest question: Is it possible that a "hi-res" reproduction of a "low-res" recording will be more accurate than a Redbook reproduction of the same?
Only if the Red-Book version was poorly mastered. If the original recording was done either on analogue tape or 44.1/48 sampling, then there's nothing above there to be Hi-Res, just noise from any noise shaping, or in the case of tape, amplifier noise.

S.
 

CDMC

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Well I just signed up for the 30 day free trial of Qobuz. Some people like DACs, some people like amps. I like music streaming services. They are like giant playgrounds for me.

From the interface it looks like Qobuz brings a lot of added value to the table in terms of notes, recording information, putting the music in context, etc. It looks like they do a lot of things right. Just like the MQA label, the Hi Res label has taken on a negative connotation for me, and it’s all over Qobuz, but they give you the option of the 16 / 44.1 price tier, which is what I chose for the free trial.

Having gotten used to full CD quality streams on Amazon HD, I thought I’d try Qobuz too while they are both in their trial periods. It looks like Qobuz does deliver a lot of value that Amazon never will, not in terms of fidelity (which for my purposes is identical) but in terms of content to give insight into the music and satisfy curiosity in the app. I am not sure of the sonic benefits of lossless CD quality over high quality lossy, but it gives me more confidence if I am upmixing or using digital EQ or whatever, and I just feel more relaxed about it than a lossy stream. Part of that’s psychological, I’m sure, but it’s rooted in at least some reality, I think, knowing that I have full CD lossless quality as a baseline.

Where Amazon comes up really big for me is price of course, and not having to look at that “hi res” label, and great search capability and lyrics and a massive catalog. Amazon‘s Ultra HD label is really an “in your face” to MQA and hi res marketimg.

I do not like the kind of inane marketing that hi res represents, but I am persuaded that for Qobuz to have staying power in the market they have to offer some sort of “better than CD” quality.

I can stream Qobuz straight into my receiver via AirPlay or Chromecast. I prefer AirPlay because the receiver lets me do more upmixing and DSP with the Airplay stream. Either way I get a nice info display of track and album information fed from my receiver to my TV.

So. . . Qobuz and Amazon Music HD. . . both very highly recommended, in my book. And may MQA slowly wither away into irrelevance, obsolescence and obscurity.

Qobuz is nice and what I use, but I preferred Deezer, specifically it's flow function. I switched from Deezer for two reasons: 1) Deezer has no exclusive mode and must run through Windows sound mixer when played on a Windows computer. I noticed there was a degradation as opposed to being able to play the same tracks in exclusive mode through WASPI. 2) Lack of hi res support with Sonos. While Sonos will play Deezer just fine, it won't play any music above 16/48. The problem is that I have some music in my library that is at higher resolutions and it would drive me nuts when I go to play a song and get an error message. As a result I migrated to Roon, which unfortunately only supports Qobuz and some whacky Jayz company that does MQA.
 

Julf

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Honest question: Is it possible that a "hi-res" reproduction of a "low-res" recording will be more accurate than a Redbook reproduction of the same?

No. You can't create information that isn't there.
 

Sal1950

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Honest question: Is it possible that a "hi-res" reproduction of a "low-res" recording will be more accurate than a Redbook reproduction of the same?
Only if the Red-Book version was poorly mastered. If the original recording was done either on analogue tape or 44.1/48 sampling, then there's nothing above there to be Hi-Res, just noise from any noise shaping, or in the case of tape, amplifier noise.
S.
No. You can't create information that isn't there.
MediumRare, I believe you have your answers above. Thanks gentlemen. ;)
 

solderdude

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Honest question: Is it possible that a "hi-res" reproduction of a "low-res" recording will be more accurate than a Redbook reproduction of the same?

Only if one is using a filterless NOS DAC, in all other cases Julf is correct.
 

Julf

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Only if one is using a filterless NOS DAC, in all other cases Julf is correct.

I would argue that a filterless NOS DAC is broken by design.
 

Julf

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Sal1950

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Thunder240

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Amazon HD only makes sense from a cost perspective give if you already have an Amazon-approved streaming device in your signal path. If you don’t, you are going to have to add one, which at a minimum will involve subbing equipment (perhaps sonically inferior) and could necessitate buying new equipment such as a Denon HEOS Link, which drives up cost. Or you could stream it from a device such as a computer/iOS/Android via Airplay, but then you are back to CD quality. Until Amazon opens up their API, I’m sticking with Qobuz.
 

JohnYang1997

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This thread is live again. And I have some more insights.
According to unpublished data, MQA is underperforming against "CD quality" having standing tones in the high frequency around 16KHz.
MQA is indeed audibly differentiable from CD quality format because it is inferior to CD quality instead of arguably better, after all.
 

Thunder240

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I'm failing to see the issue with "CD quality."

Well, presumably anyone paying for Amazon HD, Qobuz Sublime, or whatever Tidal and Deezer refer to their premium tiers as wants to get the all of the bits they are paying for. And they don’t get all those hi res bits if they have to resort to AirPlay to get their Amazon HD stream to their streamer of choice. That’s the issue.
 

JohnYang1997

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Well, presumably anyone paying for Amazon HD, Qobuz Sublime, or whatever Tidal and Deezer refer to their premium tiers as wants to get the all of the bits they are paying for. And they don’t get all those hi res bits if they have to resort to AirPlay to get their Amazon HD stream to their streamer of choice. That’s the issue.
Just pay for the CD quality then. Pretty simple.
 

Thunder240

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Just pay for the CD quality then. Pretty simple.

Sure.

Sorry I'm not making my point clearly. I shouldn't have mentioned airplay and cd quality and then taken the bait to go off on a tangent. What I was trying to say is that my issue is with Amazon's closed API, and the fact that they dictate what hardware I can use to decode their stream. Previous posters focus on streaming services' support for various codecs (MQA, FLAC, etc.), user interface, etc etc. I choose to give Qobuz my money for the simple fact that they allow me to stream to Bubble UPnP Server and onward to any UPnP-enabled device I choose. (And they're fairly cheap, as streaming services go, at least currently -- cheaper than Tidal and Deezer.)
 

firedog

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Well, presumably anyone paying for Amazon HD, Qobuz Sublime, or whatever Tidal and Deezer refer to their premium tiers as wants to get the all of the bits they are paying for. And they don’t get all those hi res bits if they have to resort to AirPlay to get their Amazon HD stream to their streamer of choice. That’s the issue.

No, not really. You are so dismissive you can't see the forest for the trees.
I pay for Qobuz sublime+ because it gives me about 50% discount on albums I want to buy for download. I still buy music, and the subscription pretty much pays for itself if I buy 2 albums a month.
And anyway, if something was recorded and/or mastered in 24 bits or 96k (most classical music is, for instance) why not get the format it was recorded/produced in? I'm making no claims the hi-res sounds better, but what's wrong with having it?
 
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