Wait till Spotify hires tier is up and running and it's MQA,head are gonna explode, they do know the three major label are heavily invested in Spotify.
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MQA Deep Dive - I published music on tidal to test MQA
- Thread starter GoldenOne
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I speculated this a while ago on here somewhere. I just dont see why they would bother though.
So you agree that MQA is a lossy codec? Has the definition of "lossy" been codified by some official governing body, or is the definition of "lossy" somewhat open to interpretation?
Spotify has a storied past in failed attempts to launch a HD tier. They made several announcements and attempted launches, resulting in maintaining the status-quo. So I will believe it when I see it.
On the flip side. If Spotify does indeed launch an HD tier with CD quality streams, it will be game over for not just Tidal. We can only hope this does happen this time. It would transform the streaming landscape to CD quality as the new Standard.
So what do you make of his 1kHz sine tone @ -60dB 24/88.2 test? Whence the massive amount of noise above 10kHz and how is that reasonable behavior in a system that supposedly maintains backwards-compatibility with baseband audio?
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I reckon this one will happen. But if they dont open up their API for the likes of Roon and the Android apps that play nice with USB DACs- its useless to me . They wont, and they wont care that I dont like that.
OK now I got it. First CSS copy protection on DVD video was hacked so then DVD-A used CPPM copy protection which was hacked, and MLP is a closed source lossless compression scheme which was reverse engineered. Not easy to keep your original master tapes "safe" in the digital world which I guess is what MQA is selling to the record labels.
symphara
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“Lossy” as in take a track, run it through the MQA encoder, run the result through the MQA decoder, you don’t get the original thing.
”Losless” as in ZIP, or FLAC, or BMP (bitmap). “Lossy” as in MP3, JPG, any video codec in consumer use (lossless would have horrific data rates). That’s my understanding anyway.
danadam
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FTFY
It seems it doesn't matter how this issue of the "lossyness" of MQA is explained to you. You want Jean D'arc in the bonfire anyway.
Raindog123
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Back to the beginning then... (1) What is the MQA advantage (compared to Redbook)? (2) What are the test signals to emphasize this advantage? (3) Where are the “acceptance test” results, expected in any decent industry to validate that a product meets its [claimed] performance?
Tks
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There's a few things I simply cannot understand about you specifically. The first, is the vaccuous claims about DSD's superiority or inferiority compared to MQA. When you do a comparison. What is the benchmark metric being used here? Your subjective listening, or are you using some performance accepted metric like noise or frequency response observation or what?
The second, and more puzzling, is you admit MQA dun goofed about the lossless claim (only a doormat would grant them the benefit of doubt by allowing them to co-opt the widely held understood meaning of "lossless" and chalking the incident up as a mistake where they didn't properly define the term). I don't want their definition, and the fact that they absorbed the word into their earlier statements and used it in a similar context as everyone else does, but with the hidden intent of supposedly "meaning something else" -- that sort of behavior isn't something you see amongst adolescence beyond comedic attempts. Certainly not the behavior you expect for adults, or purported specialists in the field of audio. Like imagine me co-opting the word lossy for years, but in the end saying "oh well I meant simply high amounts of bit rate bloat this whole time". It's ridiculous at face value, and quite frankly an insult to most sensibilities.
The third issue is, while they have dropped the lossless lingo (though not really as Tidal hasn't when I looked). They still hold to this equally as troubling claim of "original" and "true to the original source" and things of that nature. I'm just not see how this is actually being delivered. I'm not saying I don't see how they CAN deliver -- I'm saying I cannot see how they're actually DOING SO with their current product offering. I don't want to be pointed to patents, and their claims of ADC profiling, as none of that proves that's what MQA IS CURRENTLY doing, since MQA can't be evaluated for the most part (both literally, and also according to you personally, since it seems all probing instances are riddled with falsity in your view).
If this is actually the case, then beyond the realm of psychologically troublesome (by way of placebo and such), what could you yourself be possibly doing that warrants the idea that allows to to assume you're taking a rational position in the assertion that MQA is superior above something actually lossless for example if the goal is to listen to music as intended by the publisher? If we know less in virtue of the claims you make about how we're getting the evaluation wrong by the means we've gone about exploring; why would anything but pure agnosticism with respect to objectively verifiable means not be the default position, and then hard-skepticism, due to MQA's nonsensical behavior and history? I still haven't seen the inference structure that gets anyone out of this ordeal. Beyond of course the aforementioned appeal to anecdotes about end-user experiences as a consumer of MQA.
The reason you're being called a troll by some, is because you subscribe to this perplexing, and needlessly more complexity forming position of some sort of revisionist of diction. Like when you say things like "When the thing is, it transforms noise, but leave music untouched, imho." Even if it were true that it left music "untouched", I don't understand why you feel a transformation of noise (whatever the heck that actually means) is somehow mutually exclusive to such an operation as to somehow now not have an effect on "the music". OP already showed in his example (as flawed as you percieve it to be), his entire file, along with parts that had music in it, were all polluted, and done so in a predictable manner to some degree based on the level of ultrasonic content present.
It's supremely irritating to have to deal with someone where you need to ask him what they take every single word of their statements to actually mean definitionally. "Transformation of noise", that could literally mean anything at the end of the day for example.
Likewise when you make either the ignorant or simply unconventionally put claim about how MQA isn't "lossy" processing. See, for this, the main frustration is that you seem to not understand why the claim is irrelevant. EVEN IF the encoder was doing a lossless process, for whatever reason, the end-result it ends up spitting out a file that isn't identical. Now you claim "that's what happens when you plop in a test tone". But the normal person wouldn't care, as I could plop in test tones all day in lossless formats, and there wouldn't be an issue beyond perhaps with something that rubs up against the idea of encoders and decoders themselves. Why is it that MQA can purport "original true to source" claims, yet their encoder shits itself if a test tone of any kind is present? What is it about this clearly stated issue do you seem to actually protest particularly?
You then talk about "try MQA folks, and see if you like it, instead of throwing stones because you were told it losses information". That's not why stones are being hurled, and if you truly take this to be the reason why, then there is a concerning lack of observational power on your end. MQA could sound wonderful for multiple reasons, likewise it could sound like nothing different (I actually asked if anyone is able to blind test any MQA content folded vs fully unfolded because I wasn't able to blind test a difference in the few albums I realized I had). But none of this has anything to actually do with why stones are being hurled as you characterize. The reason the stones are being hurled, is because corporations swapping in and out of shadows, making claims that can be falsified currently, and not opening themselves up to proper scrutiny that could lay their entire ordeal to rest. Instead they proceed on, like some deranged maniac that believes all Press is good Press. How MQA content is perceived by someone is entirely irrelevant to the history of critique about the company and it's offering. EVEN IF some people can enjoy MQA content because it perhaps offers a version of an album never seen before or something. That has nothing to do with invalidating the claims OP made. The company still flees and works from the shadows as it sees fit, and that will forever keep it in everyone's bad graces.
I urge you to read your post. Virtually every premise you posit, is an assumption of some sort. You're careful not to make any seriously hard-claim, and keep stating on how you're just presenting opinion based loosely on the brute-force acceptance of the company's assertions when referenced technical claims they've purported outside of MQA strictly speaking through extrapolations from patents for example. Or when you say: Also things like: "I think it is obvious: the MQA process probably define conversion parameters in advance". How can something be obvious, but then conclude "well it's probable", and is simply asserted with an explanation that is definitionally the only option available as an explanation (yet not at all elaborated on, as to how such a thing is possible, or why this needs to be presumed). This is a claim you make, that isn't even positted by MQA themselves. Not that it would matter, because if they can't demonstrate how they're doing it, it would be as good as claiming they're magically doing it somehow... All I see in the entire post is a constant stream of "I guess" "I think" "it wouldn't be hard to envision" etc... Like goodness, so much hip fire. The amount of plausibility one would have to grant is staggering.
Lastly, you claim there is personally audible benefit you experience from MQA files. I am willing to actually grant this possibility, if it is merrited by the file being MQA as the reason for the benefit. And not that you have a glass of wine before engaging. Can you please show me (since everyone outside of MQA isn't privy to the entire technical picture) the results that prove conclusively the aspect present within MQA files, that accounts for your preference for them from an audible perspective? Keep in mind, this has to be something that isn't possible with any other format (lossless files run through DSP can't emulate this, otherwise MQA loses it's exclusive beneficial property). What is this thing you are hearing precisely, and where is the evidence you can actually discern it. I would like the results of studies for a preference ideally that matches to MQA as statistically significant, since I have issues with MQA inherently since it's not really based on any psychoaccoustic model. I need to be shown all these beneficial results by means of something like double/tripple blind tested individuals. Lossless files for example are all virtually the same, but I can still demonstrate the benefit of one versus the other in other metrics. Since MQA is lossy, it has it's work cut out for it.
Actually one more thing I have to get on record at the very least. Do you have any vested financial interest with MQA or any friendships among the staff or something? I don't take people to be shills very often at all, but it's getting so bad that for the leaps you take into asserting the things you do, with quite ambiguous wording (generalized and vague on purpose it seems to me), so I just have to ask if you have any affiliation with anyone from the company or anyone involved with business with the company? You are obviously aware of how much presupposing you're actually doing about MQA itself. Surly someone knee deep into it's purported benefits, would be troubled by all the holes in their stories and explanations - by now must have requested a ton of answers from MQA themselves so that you have the technical and objective backing of the knowledge to argue properly for MQA's defence beyond "well it sounds good to me, and I don't see a reason to assume they're lying/false about much of anything". Or is it truly your position that MQA is not something that warrant skepticism at this junction of the strongest kind?
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Quote from Amir "
Any system that operates in a backward compatible way with baseband audio (i.e. 16 bit/44.1) but wants to encode high resolution audio, MUST by definition assume there is not a lot of useful information in ultrasonic to represent. There is just no way to pack 2X data in 1X space.
MQA follows the same scheme, assuming that not much useful info is above audible band. As noted by @mieswall, artificial signals that violate this practical consideration violate this assumption and hence cannot be encoded by MQA. It likely throws its hand up as the OP found in one case, and encodes something screwy otherwise."
If you read the two paragraphs correctly, Amir is stating that on principle MQA will not interpret and encode any data such as the extra sine wave or signal encoded into a track as illustrated in the experiment by @GoldenOne. I maybe wrong but i think this makes sense as to why MQA did not interpret the data.
I understand your explanation that MQA is lossy, but we shouldn't care about what we lose because it is not relevant to the actual music that MQA "packages" and then unfolds. However, I don't care because MQA and Tidal market MQA tracks as lossless, and it is completely unreasonable to expect the average consumer to understand this nuance. What I'm interested in is if MQA & Tidal can make the lossless claim without fear of repercussion because there is no codified definition of lossless.
I have no idea how your post answers my question.
Raindog123
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To understand, are you offering/pledging collaboration by MQA Inc? Because that’s exactly what @GoldenOne and many others were asking for. Or are you being traditionally-rhetorical here? As there are two of us regarding “never too late”, but only one side does not seem to budge.
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Tks
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I just want to know on top of that, how they can deliver on guarantee of the "orignal true to source as intended by the artist" claim, if Tidal content is present with anyone uploading content they wish to have MQA encoded. And on top of that, supposedly the encoder failed and YET STILL the content was up and running. How does that satisfies provenance, or how does the the Blue Light on DACs itself at all show this to be the case, or how any of this demonstrates the auxillary supporting claims by proxy like: "But MQA knows basically almost every ADC ever used and profiles for it". -- is beyond me..
Still waiting to hear how this supposedly rigorous attention to maintaining authenticity is satisfied when instances like OP's published work can go through so easily, and without any consultation of the problems encountered before publishing by the publisher or MQA, or whoever has that damn encoder.
Of course. The definition of a lossless codec is that it can mathematically be converted back to the source with not a single bit out of place. MQA does not at all qualify for this. I remember going to first audio show where the MQA team had just rolled out the format and them asking me, "do you know what MQA is?" I said, "yes, it is a lossy format to encode high-res music." They were horrified at me saying this but this is what it is. With flac encoding, the baseband is already very near where information theory predicts. You can't pile on the full ultrasonic spectrum on top of that.
I'm with you there, but where is that definition of lossy derived from? Like is there an AES official definition of "lossy" ?
LightninBoy
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So if I, as an artist, decide to include a test tone in my song, or something similar to a test tone for a specific effect, MQA will decide it isn't music and barf all over the track. How is that h-fi? How is that the "original true to source as intended by the artist" ?
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