No problem. Let's start with one of them:
"Meanwhile on APS there has also been some information posted which might hint as to why Amir is so defensive of MQA. Obviously his ties to SMSL/Topping who have MQA in everything likely play a part, but also while at microsoft he was trying to push DRM schemes anyway. "
You say "obviously his ties to SMSL/Topping." What ties? What evidence do you have of that?
Second, you say "who [SMSL/Topping] who have MQA in everything." What survey of their products you performed that led you to this?
Both of these are related to the topic at hand. So let's see your response.
And note that you have not only made a serious accusation about me, but also about the above two companies. So do your best to respond properly.
Firstly, I'd just like to say that it's a damn shame that this discussion has gone like this.
I'm going to try to respond to everything at once rather than piece by piece. So this might be a long one.
1) Topping/SMSL
So firstly, my comment regarding your connection on sbaf shouldn't have been said, and I apologise. I said this simply because given how you've so often sought to weed out snake oil and defend good objective performance in the past, that your defense of MQA seemed....well confusing to say the least. I genuinely could not understand why from an objective standpoint you were making the statments you were making. And so I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that there may be a relationship between yourself and a company that utilises MQA heavily. Or MQA directly.
As mentioned previously, MQA HAS approached other forum owners to enquire about censoring or "steering" mqa related discussions in certain ways. And the heavy involvement between yourself and what was previously
http://www.smsl-topping.com/blog/ suggested that you had a relationship with Aoshida (topping/smsl/aune and others' parent company) that may go some way toward explaining the need to defend MQA. Though this URL is seemingly no longer active so I can't go and get specific context.
My personal feelings were further reinforced by the subsequent reactions of others including long-time ASR members that were equally as confused and perhaps concerned about why you might be defending MQA.
But, as said, I did not make this statement based on solid evidence, and so I apologise for this and it should not have been said.
In regards to the "MQA in everything" comment. Obviously this was hyperbole and not intended to be taken literally. They do not have MQA in every single product they produce, but they incorporate MQA in many of their products. D70s, D90, M500, M400, VMV D1se, SU-9 are the ones that come to mind but I'm not sure what percentage of aoshida products overall contain it.
The point of the statement was that a company which incorporates MQA is going to be more defensive of it. Including representatives of said company, who are active on this forum, and those with friendly ties to said company.
I suppose the easiest option would be to simply ask you straight. Do you or any of your companies have any relationships or ties to Aoshida or any of its sub-brands?
If not, I sincerely apologise and should not have said what I did. And will edit the posts if you wish me to do so.
2) The Phone Call
You implied that I put 'spin' on the phone call in order to make ASR look bad.
I did not. I do not know what your moderator has told you about the content of that call but I am not 'spinning' things in the slightest when I say that the phone call was made specifically to request that I make a new thread on MQA so that the old one could be closed and criticism of you censored.
The moderator said that you were receiving extensive criticism for your pro-MQA statements and that he wanted both you and ASR to move to a more neutral position. I agreed, I think that the discussion platform and its owner remaining neutral would be a good thing.
He then said that in the new thread, any comments criticising you would be removed and that people would not be allowed to discuss your past comments.
I said that I did not agree with this. If you do not want to be criticised, you should not make public statements about something, especially a seemingly quite controversial issue like MQA. No one should be immune from criticism regardless of position.
I suggested that if criticism of yourself was the issue, then censoring it was not a good way to go, and that the best approach would simply be to be neutral and not say anything further on the matter. Let the discussion of your past posts fizzle out.
I was not going to help participate in censorship simply because the forum owner was being criticised and make a new thread in order to make it look like I'd given the thumbs up to changing the discussion. If that was going to happen then they'd need to do it alone.
I was told "I'm not censoring, I'm shutting the discussion down".
Absolutely none of the above is embellished or falsified, in fact there is more in that call which I'm sure you'd accuse me of just being despicable if I were to bring up. Hence I will not do so.
And if you believe it is false then as said I'd be happy to post the call. That is not a 'threat'. I will NOT post the call unless you/Adam explicitly ask me to do so (doing so would be illegal anyway). I am simply offering to do so because you've accused me of lying about the contents of said call. You not wanting me to post it demonstrates that I'm being truthful just as much as actually posting it does. So I don't mind either way.
3) Defense of MQA
I've said before both here and in my videos that I have absolutely no issue with people liking MQA. But what I cannot understand especially in a forum such as this is how MQA is being defended so strongly from an objective stance despite a complete lack of evidence backing up any of MQA's claims. Everything seems focused on fighting evidence that MQA ISN'T doing what it says it's doing. Not seeking to test or prove it.
If we were to have this discussion about a hugely expensive dac that didn't perform well, it'd be strange to see people in this forum defending it with arguments that the dac wasn't being used correctly and that the dac manufacturer CLEARLY states you have to use isolation feet and a specific type of power cable.
My testing showed that MQA was not lossless. The counter argument is that because my tests didn't represent natural sound they unfair to MQA.
Unfortunately this is often accompanied with insults and accusations of some conspiracy to make MQA look bad, both from yourself and others. Seeking to try to discredit my test and describing it as malicious rather than actually performing tests that show something different.
It is not. It is simply to call out misleading marketing. MQA claimed to be lossless.
It is not. We don't need my tests to know that it isn't mathematically lossless for normal tracks, we can use any track for which a native version is available to do that, as I've demonstrated previously, and as you yourself demonstrated in your video.
Furthermore you accept that MQA is not mathematically lossless, which is exactly what I was intending to demonstrate.
So we have practical demonstration that MQA is not lossless for either artificial tests like mine or natural sound in various tracks.
I do not accept the 'perceptual lossless' argument. I've made that clear. If we want to discuss 'perceptual lossless' then firstly we'd need to see a study to confirm MQA is perceptually lossless which we do not have. We STILL have to take them at their word for that. And secondly I fail to see why it's different from MP3 or the 20 bit FLAC resampling method someone posted a few pages back. Those will likely be as if not more audibly indistinguishable as MQA, and they are more space efficient, and don't cost anything to use.
If MQA were to market itself simply as a space-saving high quality compression method that'd be great and we could judge it as that. But they don't, they claim to be lossless or better than lossless and therefore must be judged on those claims instead.
MQA is creating confusion via misleading marketing. It's not about the actual audible quality of the result. It's about whether the claims are true.
If you're concerned about the understanding of what lossless is/isn't for people here, think about the average consumer and how misleading many of MQA's claims will be to them.
I don't limit this to MQA. Denafrips claims their DACs are NOS. They aren't.
They're still good DACs, they measure very well for an R2R design, and to me they sound very good. But that doesn't change the fact that they are being dishonest about the fact that it is NOS and many people will have purchased them with the promise of NOS (rightly or wrongly) being a large factor. And I will discuss this in my review.
I have no distaste for MQA specifically. I have distaste for dishonest marketing and false promises.
But I find it concerning and disappointing that you vigorously defend MQA, seeking to discredit me as "a blogger with no technical understanding of testing lossy compression schemes" and ignoring the key point I've said over and over which is that I and others do not want to know how good of a lossy encoder MQA is. We wanted to know if it was lossy or lossless. Because if it is the former, then I, and I'd imagine many others, do not want it. And are concerned about how prevalent it is becoming to the point of being the only option for a fair amount of hardware, and music. Why spend so much on licensed hardware and software just to save a few mb and HOPEFULLY not have a degredation in quality.
The price jump on the d90 vs d90 mqa is $100 iirc. For that you could buy a several tb hard drive and keep as many tracks as you can get your hands on.
If you NEED to save space, use MP3. LAME compression is extraordinarily good for the amount of space it saves. And if you can live with using an extra couple mb, then use lossless and save yourself the money that would otherwise be spent on MQA hardware/software.
EDIT: Also, I want to be clear that my posting here is in no way anything to do with getting more attention/traffic to the video.
In fact of the 60,087 views on the original video that came from an "external" source to youtube, only 169 of them are from ASR (see attached image)
