MQA Deep Dive - I published music on tidal to test MQA

[amirm]

Hereyou can find the list of MQA albums on tidal, which includes track count. So something like 1.5M tracks.

Tidal says they have 70 mullion tracks. If that 1.5 M is correct, then 2% of content on Tidal is MQA which is negligible. Hence my experience of hardly ever seeing MQA content unless I seek it out.

 

[Jimbob54]

Tidal says they have 70 mullion tracks. If that 1.5 M is correct, then 2% of content on Tidal is MQA which is negligible. Hence my experience of hardly ever seeing MQA content unless I seek it out.

Its very dependent on music styles / popularity/ label source. Just had a quick browse of the new release pop recommendations (explore- pop- new albums) and a quick guesstimate would be round 40% are badged as "master"/MQA. When you move away from the major label / mass popularity stuff it drops quite a bit. Until you go into the back catalogs of major artists on major labels.

The point being, its not 2% pot luck of encountering MQA. I imagine many listeners using the pre made popular playlists will encounter far more.

Tidal Rising MAy 21 (all genres) playlist- 26/120 MQA 22% so less than my very quick 40% figure

Rising: Folk- way less
Rising Hip Hop- 24%

 

[raistlin65]

Its very dependent on music styles / popularity/ label source. Just had a quick browse of the new release pop recommendations (explore- pop- new albums) and a quick guesstimate would be round 40% are badged as "master"/MQA. When you move away from the major label / mass popularity stuff it drops quite a bit. Until you go into the back catalogs of major artists on major labels.

The point being, its not 2% pot luck of encountering MQA. I imagine many listeners using the pre made popular playlists will encounter far more.

It's going to be interesting to see when the 1000 lb streaming gorilla enters the lossless market. From what I've read, it seems like Spotify Hifi is projected to be lossless red book CD quality. And if Spotify says they don't want no freaking MQA-CD, but they want traditional 16-bit CD mastered audio, the pop artists will do what they say. lol

 

[pjug]

Tidal says they have 70 mullion tracks. If that 1.5 M is correct, then 2% of content on Tidal is MQA which is negligible. Hence my experience of hardly ever seeing MQA content unless I seek it out.

Yes I think this is about right. I don't think this is extremely rare. Anyway this began we me trying to make the point that MQA-CD is not a few oddball disks produced in Japan. MQA-CD is becoming MQA and 24-bit MQA is the real rarity.

 

[DimitryZ]

Hereyou can find the list of MQA albums on tidal, which includes track count. So something like 1.5M tracks. Most of them are 16 bits. Sure to be expanding rapidly.

https://www.meridianunplugged.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=268318

I see 70 million total, so only 2% MQA. Doesn't seem to be a concern to me, but if it does to you, there are now three non-MQA subscription services.

Lot's of good choices!

 

[DimitryZ]

Yes I think this is about right. I don't think this is extremely rare. Anyway this began we me trying to make the point that MQA-CD is not a few oddball disks produced in Japan. MQA-CD is becoming MQA and 24-bit MQA is the real rarity.

Is it easy to differentiate MQA-CD from MQA on Tidal? I will look but it seems the jazz MQA albums are no different than before.

 

[levimax]

Its very dependent on music styles / popularity/ label source. Just had a quick browse of the new release pop recommendations (explore- pop- new albums) and a quick guesstimate would be round 40% are badged as "master"/MQA. When you move away from the major label / mass popularity stuff it drops quite a bit. Until you go into the back catalogs of major artists on major labels.

The point being, its not 2% pot luck of encountering MQA. I imagine many listeners using the pre made popular playlists will encounter far more.

Tidal Rising MAy 21 (all genres) playlist- 26/120 MQA 22% so less than my very quick 40% figure

Rising: Folk- way less
Rising Hip Hop- 24%

2% of tracks listed is one thing but since MQA is a much higher percentage of "new popular music" and a much higher percentage of "famous old popular music" (Warner back catalog and more) I would be curious to know what percentage of tracks served by Tidal are MQA.... it is WAY more than 2%. It really does make a lot of sense for the labels and streamers to just use one file that can be both "CD quality" and "Hi-res" with an added bonus of being watermarked while saving a little bandwidth. I hope @amirm is correct and it will die but to me it seems to be going the opposite direction. Time will tell and it seems like it is "do or die" for MQA right now which is probably why so much is being written about it.

 

[earlevel]

https://gearspace.com/board/mastering-forum/1171365-mqa-discussion-denver-rmaf-24.html#post15479024


View attachment 133393

"as an aside, i’ve been listening to MQA-encoded music for over 3 years, and i’m very enthusiastic — among other things, i find listening to MQA-encoded streams & files with a good D/A much less stressful for extended listening."—dang, I wish he'd made it clear what he's comparing it to for "much less stressful". Regular compression audio, CD-quality, regular hi-res?

To be clear, I'm not complaining, just left curious. I'm inclined to consider his opinion. I'm often not terribly outgoing, so it was nice of him to introduce himself a few years back (randomly while walking through the NAMM Show) and chat a little. Seemed like a very down to earth guy. Anyone have the context of what he's comparing stress levels with?

 

[goldenears]

I prefer the stress to be lossless in my music.

 

[earlevel]

eg, by convoluting with a FIR...

LMAO at myself for being math-grammar police, but "convolving"

I apologize profusely...

 

[DimitryZ]

See my explanation with one of my own 2Fs recordings how audio information with frequencies higher than half the the 1Fs sample rate can be packed into the low bits of a 24-bit file sampled at 1Fs without compromising the recording's analog noise floor:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/post-759747
and
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/post-760938

This is a technique called "steganography" - see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45949372_Steganography-The_Art_of_Hiding_Data

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

Thank you, very informative.

 

[Newman]

...The lossy codec is actively shedding musical data, while MQA is trying to hold on to it. These are dramatically different design intents.

With such different design intents, implementation is vastly different. Perceptual codec has a complex psychoacoustic engine that looks for and discards musical detail that is judged to be masked to the listener. MQA is much simpler - it identfies the ultrasonic music limits and encodes it into the baseband LPCM, with a bit of bit-shifting. That's it (if you remove the "deblurring" step). Outside of the ultrasonic limit and noise floor, MQA makes no decisions about music or it's perception by the listener. Perceptual codec makes decisions about music audibility thousand times every second...

And how would we test to be sure that this isn’t happening. Taking a white paper on faith is not my MO. How can we be sure?

 

[Newman]

(to @tmtomh ) ...In your second section you disagree that DXD is a modern hires master format. I do see these files offered on sale as "masters" and I read others describe them in these terms. I am sure there are competing mastering formats, but DXD does seem popular....

Hang on, you have misrepresented your own statement and his. You said, “it is the modern lossless master from which all consumer destributions originate” (my emphasis)

He was right to disagree with you there. You misrepresent him above when you say he, “disagrees that DXD is a modern hires master format”.

You now seem to have softened your claim to the point where it no longer is much of a reason to constantly compare only to DXD.

cheers

 

[DimitryZ]

And how would we test to be sure that this isn’t happening. Taking a white paper on faith is not my MO. How can we be sure?

Well, I found @Archimago end-to-end tests from 2017 well done and easy to understand.

https://archimago.blogspot.com/2017/02/comparison-hardware-decoded-mqa-using.html?m=1

MQA design intent and most of design execution hasn't really been much of a mystery for quite some time.

As far as difference between a perceptual LOSSY codecs and MQA, I found @amirm explanation convincing. They are very different things

I guess people really don't like MQA hyperbole-filled advertising, but I never pay attention to any advertising.

Other than that, it seems uncontroversial to me. But I am an early adopter.

 

[DimitryZ]

Hang on, you have misrepresented your own statement and his. You said, “it is the modern lossless master from which all consumer destributions originate” (my emphasis)

He was right to disagree with you there. You misrepresent him above when you say he, “disagrees that DXD is a modern hires master format”.

You now seem to have softened your claim to the point where it no longer is much of a reason to constantly compare only to DXD.

cheers

Absolutely, I should have sad "many" or "most," not "all.* I am sure I will make such mistakes in the future. I still do have some ESL issues from time to time.

My point was and is that DXD is a popular modern hires mastering format that can be used to generate various consumer distributions. And I was struck how much shaped ultrasonic noise it had, from the ASR hires explainer video. It seemed to me that starting with this very specialized format and making CD and MQA distributions would require some compromises in either case.

That seems like it should be a reasonably uncontroversial position. Unfortunately, it generated a lot of disagreements.

Thoughts?

 

[DimitryZ]

"as an aside, i’ve been listening to MQA-encoded music for over 3 years, and i’m very enthusiastic — among other things, i find listening to MQA-encoded streams & files with a good D/A much less stressful for extended listening."—dang, I wish he'd made it clear what he's comparing it to for "much less stressful". Regular compression audio, CD-quality, regular hi-res?

To be clear, I'm not complaining, just left curious. I'm inclined to consider his opinion. I'm often not terribly outgoing, so it was nice of him to introduce himself a few years back (randomly while walking through the NAMM Show) and chat a little. Seemed like a very down to earth guy. Anyone have the context of what he's comparing stress levels with?

Interesting.

I have also read opposite observations, with people finding MQA sounding "wrong."

Now, I find beets to taste sweet, but my wife hates them because she finds it bitter. It turns out to be a genetic predisposition in our taste buds.

Perhaps in the future we will learn that LPCM people and MQA people are just "Born that Way!"

 

[krabapple]

it's like we're reinventing the history of lossy audio codecs here....

mp3 was released in 1993!

I'm glad people are finally realizing how lossy audio codecs were designed (i.e. , using psymodels of human hearing...with tradeoffs between file size and perceptual transparency) . But disturbed that it's news to so many. It does explain the irrational and ignorant dismissal of them among so many 'audiophiles' though.

 

[krabapple]

from the 'papers' i have read on AES, they're borderline a predatory journal.

the papers' transcripts follow no real academic structure, their language is intentionally difficult to understand, and their abstracts have no real meaningful information and is there to look 'sciency'

At least the name of the journal represents that, they're a bunch of engineers who wanted to do 'science'.

He asked if anyone did any research and there are two papers on AES about it, I'm a biologist so i can't really critique the audio science in the paper.

I'm a biologist too and I've been reading JAES papers for a few decades. I don't agree. As with even the most reputable bioscience journals, the actual quality of work varies , and certain 'wrong' results get published, but I don't see the phenomena you cite.

(The word among some is that JAES has changed in the last few decades, and that's another debate.)

 

[krabapple]

A bit of a tangent here - this MQA debate has inspired me to try and learn a bit more about the inherent limitations and challenges of PCM when it comes to recording and digitizing real-life audio sources.

there aren't any that are due to 'PCM' rather than the usual limits of recording with microphones

 

[krabapple]

Nothing to be offended by in my view. Scientists are theory and the engineers actually figure out how to get things done based on that science. Without engineers there would be very little practical application for scientific research. We are the 'get stuff done' people.

Given how many scientists have gone on to start businesses, not to mention designed hardware, that's simplistic nonsense.