MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions

[Parzival]

The irony, it burns.

well another one

 

[SIY]

Why do you keep confusing between ultrasonics and transients?

So you also don't understand Fourier.

 

[GDK]

Given the number of times it is referenced in these discussions, I bet Monty wishes he had posted that video YouTube so that he could earn some money.

 

[Blumlein 88]

such retorts don’t take the debate anywhere.
Please elaborate what in your opinion, apart from bitrate and sampling frequency, is required to capture and reproduce finer resolution in audio.

There really isn't anything required. The analog electronics and filters have to be made correctly, in order to reach the limits of the format. That isn't really possible for 24 bit formats. So the analog world (and the physics that rule it) limit how much information can get thru the digital channels. The digital formats aren't the limiting factor (or bottleneck).

 

[Blumlein 88]

Given the number of times it is referenced in these discussions, I bet Monty wishes he had posted that video YouTube so that he could earn some money.

Well for a non-technical explanation of digital audio Monty does get the money shot.

 

[krabapple]

haha we are not taking about your college professor nor is it about you. Chill.

You continue to write nonsense.

 

[krabapple]

Yeah, what else to do, so many people resist change and a healthy debate . Some are dismissive without any substance in their responses. I am NOT prescribing things for any particular person. I was talking about the progress in the industry and hopefully a change in mainstream consumer tastes and preferences and by that corollary changing the standard of what is hires by the audiophile community. We can’t be stuckups to a 40 year CD tech.

You act as if no one else here has ever encountered the debates which have existed since the 1990s, concerning audibility of hi rez audio. It is not 'healthy' to retread arguments that, if you are actually aware of the history, have already been extremely well-worn.

 

[Parzival]

Ok since you insist, will give it watch. But going by what you say, humans are sorted till kingdom comes, with the 1979 CD technology 16/44 resolution. Don’t you find that to be having strong implications. Thx for the video though, will watch.

Ok.... It's time to invoke the Monty on this BS.

For anyone who believes that we need higher sampling rates to capture transients (in a bandwidth limited signal no less this shows a profound lack of understanding of Shannon Nyquist) Please view the following video:

Watch it a few times, there is plenty of good information in it. Note the part at around 21 mins, where it shows how signal edges are correctly encoded and reproduced "between the sample points".

[EDIT] Bleumein88 and my posts crossed, but I'll leave this because it points to the part of the video that makes the point.

Having watched this video, I must say it is a good video and very illustrative.

A little knowledge may help.

https://troll-audio.com/articles/time-resolution-of-digital-audio/

To skip the full explanation above, redbook CD is capable of time resolution into the 110 picosecond range. So 4 milliseconds is nothing to worry about. You can just accept our help and not worry about it or figure it out with some help. Trust us is simpler.

You can also watch the Monty Montgomery video where he will demonstrate the truth of this in one portion of this video. 17:23 is the specific point on timing.

Watched this. This is a great video and nicely illustrated. Stair stepping, dithering, noise floor shaping, band limiting, continuous to discrete to continuous signal reconstruction etc is covered. But that is not what we have been discussing here.

the video doesn’t talk anything about 16/44 CD quality being the limit of human hearing. Or the need and evolution of high-res standards. Obviously it also begs the question why over sample and need for interpolation in a DAC also especially when supposedly the anti aliasing filter is not causing artifacts?

Also the article by Monty (why 24/192 music downloads are silly) is deleted and redacted at so many sites referred by google search. I can’t find it.

Can somebody link the article please, it should make an interesting read.

 

[Parzival]

You act as if no one else here has ever encountered the debates which have existed since the 1990s, concerning audibility of hi rez audio. It is not 'healthy' to retread arguments that, if you are actually aware of the history, have already been extremely well-worn.

you do realise that people often pose this very same question whenever there is something new in the market or when there is a generational shift in technology.
I am sure people were repeatedly distraught over the decades when we moved from mono channel to stereo and then to multichannel audio. But yeah, tech keeps progressing man.

 

[Parzival]

Uh huh.

Can't wait for you to help straighten it all out

I’m having a hunch, that some of you stalwarts and professors are teaching me wrong

 

[RayDunzl]

I’m having a hunch, that some of you stalwarts and professors are teaching me wrong

The rules are flexible.

Adjust as you see fit for your own purposes.

Come prepared with new data if you want to change consensus.

 

[PaulD]

Having watched this video, I must say it is a good video and very illustrative.


Watched this. This is a great video and nicely illustrated. Stair stepping, dithering, noise floor shaping, band limiting, continuous to discrete to continuous signal reconstruction etc is covered. But that is not what we have been discussing here.

the video doesn’t talk anything about 16/44 CD quality being the limit of human hearing. Or the need and evolution of high-res standards. Obviously it also begs the question why over sample and need for interpolation in a DAC also especially when supposedly the anti aliasing filter is not causing artifacts?

Also the article by Monty (why 24/192 music downloads are silly) is deleted and redacted at so many sites referred by google search. I can’t find it.

Can somebody link the article please, it should make an interesting read.

You said, in the post I quoted, we needed higher sample rates to capture musical transients. You have been shown this to be wrong.

Now you want to claim that 16/44 is not beyond the limit of human hearing - so changing the goalposts, but ok, nobody has claimed here that 16/44 is beyond the limit of human hearing. We can only hear to 20KHz on a good (very good) day. We are not sensitive to anything beyond that (please don't trot out the old BS paper that has been proven false). While 16 bits only give us 96dB dynamic range, 24bit gives us 144dB, and a recording produced with 24bit files and properly dithered to 16bit will give almost 120dB of dynamic range - it is impossible to argue that more is needed for a commercial distribution format.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Having watched this video, I must say it is a good video and very illustrative.


Watched this. This is a great video and nicely illustrated. Stair stepping, dithering, noise floor shaping, band limiting, continuous to discrete to continuous signal reconstruction etc is covered. But that is not what we have been discussing here.

the video doesn’t talk anything about 16/44 CD quality being the limit of human hearing. Or the need and evolution of high-res standards. Obviously it also begs the question why over sample and need for interpolation in a DAC also especially when supposedly the anti aliasing filter is not causing artifacts?

Also the article by Monty (why 24/192 music downloads are silly) is deleted and redacted at so many sites referred by google search. I can’t find it.

Can somebody link the article please, it should make an interesting read.

The reason I linked the video was not about 16/44 being the limits of human hearing. It was specifically about the timing. You assumed, as many before have, that the timing is limited by the length of time between samples. Monty showed you clearly that isn't the case. You can see how to determine how finely 16/44 can be timed in the article I linked from mansr. And the answer was 110 picoseconds. Orders of magnitude finer than the 4 milliseconds you mentioned.

As for the quality limit of hearing, you can't hear ultrasonics. Physics prevents us from getting to 24 bit noise levels. You could argue for a little bit more bandwidth than 44 khz sampling allows, and maybe for more than 16 bit depths. But only a little. And in fact it is doubtful those limit extensions are audible. If they are it is very, very rarely on very few sounds by only a very few of the finest hearing humans on the planet. It is close to a non-factor. Maybe 16/44 done well gets us 99% of what is within human hearing limits. Maybe 98%. There simply isn't enough of a deficit for big impressive quality differences to emerge with MQA, 192/24 or whatever. Almost any actual factor related to music reproduction makes more difference by far.

 

[danadam]

Also the article by Monty (why 24/192 music downloads are silly) is deleted and redacted at so many sites referred by google search. I can’t find it.

Can somebody link the article please, it should make an interesting read.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200426202431/https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

 

[Julf]

near about 22 milli seconds.

I hope you realize by now that that is completely wrong. If not, please re-read https://troll-audio.com/articles/time-resolution-of-digital-audio/

 

[Frank Dernie]

I know this can be an interesting debate but is actually besides the point. Also listening degrades with age and other factors but more importantly you don’t know what you need till you experience it. (8K vs 1080p Logic)

What I was trying to illustrate, is the need to progress. 44 kHz is a 1979 CD technology. It’s been 40 years. Even the microphones and speaker technologies have drastically improved. Storage and transmission was a yesteryear concern which is no longer the Achilles heel now.

I am not convinced by what you write.
Back in early digital days we were hearing of recording engineers being amazed by the dynamic range and flat frequency response of digital recording, it was way too expensive for an amateur recordist like me at first but eventually I bought a StellaDAT and, for the first time since I had started recording music myself I could hear no difference between the microphone feed and the recorder output.
This is at 16/48.
16-bit is way better than tape but if you are lazy and don't want to get caught out because you didn't set levels correctly 24- bit is excellent for recording, unnecessary for music distribution. My current recorder can record 24/192 but I use 24/96. The recorder output and microphone feed both still sound the same, what has chaanged is that it is much easier to get a good recording, level wise, compared to early digital which was itself much easier to get a good recording from that a tape recorder (I used a Revox B77).

As far as microphones are concerned I am not sure how much they have advanced. I tried recording with instrumentation microphones borrowed from work which had a higher top frequency than the audio ones I was used to (40k rather than 16k) and the only difference one could hear was more noise since they were so much less sensitive. Exchanging an inaudible potential advantage for an actual obviously audible shortcoming was not worth it.

The fact that it is old technology is not bad in itself. Audio electronics is a relatively simple technology and audibly transparent components have been available for decades.
Changing is a bit pointless/stupid when we already have recorders where the output sounds the same as the microphone feed. After that it will be degraded by compression and filtering (in terms of being audibly like the source) anyway.

The only thing you are right about is that speakers have got much better IME.

 

[Frank Dernie]

Hopefully next 10 years will see some ground breaking stuff. I for one am excited to know more on new developments.

There is a difference here between the intellectual and engineering aspects IMHO.
We already have hardware and software developers getting wider and wider dynamic range. Already the only engineering use for this would be to produce a recorder which could record all audible sounds without adjusting levels. In practical terms the likelihood of a human perceiving a 0dB tone after just listening to 120dB is zero. IE, technically intriguing but pointless.
There may be fun in developing technology for the numbers race.
For engineering audibly transparent electronics for recording and playing back music, no need.

The thing which still amazes me about hifi enthusiasts is much continued debate about recording above 20kHz, which no credible research has shown to be worthwhile to me, yet persist in being happy to listen to systems which miss the lower audio octave, which is very definitely audible, altogether or simply get it very wrong.

The whole debate seems upside down to me.

 

[Thomas savage]

There really isn't anything required. The analog electronics and filters have to be made correctly, in order to reach the limits of the format. That isn't really possible for 24 bit formats. So the analog world (and the physics that rule it) limit how much information can get thru the digital channels. The digital formats aren't the limiting factor (or bottleneck).

Weird how this matter of fact seems so rarely voiced .

 

[Chrispy]

I am new to ASR, but based on what little I read so far, can’t help but notice the purveying of misinformation that is rampant here.

We need to not only help raise the standards of audiophile technology but also the standard of debates.

As the Doctor told Tommy, go to the mirror boy! Thanks for the entertainment, tho.

 

[BDWoody]

I’m having a hunch, that some of you stalwarts and professors are teaching me wrong

It can be explained to you, but it can't be understood for you . That's up to you.