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

[Sir Sanders Zingmore]

I don't know why MQA thought "authentication" should be a thing. I see no value to it for consumers. It is not like they were complaining about that in other formats.

Pavlovian Marketing.
The blue light is on so it must be authentic. That feels good

 

[amirm]

A light that says MQA is playing is a good thing. But that it indicates something "authentic" is of no value that I can see. Maybe they were thinking content owners would like such naming. I have seen this in movie business where studios/talent sue companies that try to edit their movies. But with music, it is not something that happens.

 

[Zensō]

I bet everybody here do believe HD files sound better than Redbook.

Ahhh, nope.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/poll-hi-res-music.22637/

 

[Geert]

And https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=7037. 428 people not being able to identify high res audio...

"As the HD-Audio Challenge II clearly demonstrated, playing back music in “hi-res” audio — with sample rates higher than 44.1 kHz and word lengths longer than 16-bits — doesn’t provide any perceptible fidelity improvement over using Red Book standards".

(More details published in older articles on that site).

 

[Jimbob54]

IIRC, @mansr said it was all in the modulation of "noise" in the LSB. A DSP can just just keep track of the original LSB of each sample, make it's manipulations, and then replace the new LSB with the original before sending it to the DAC.

Roon just got MQA/Bob Stuart to agree to let them ship it in a licensed product even though it makes a mockery of their "authentication".

Do I recall correctly that Roon was in some way started by meridian? Or links to at least.

 

[mSpot]

Do I recall correctly that Roon was in some way started by meridian? Or links to at least.

Yes, there is a connection: https://www.residentialsystems.com/news/former-sooloos-team-launches-roon-labs

 

[guenthi_r]

A light that says MQA is playing is a good thing.

Yes, but the color should be RED, so anyone can see this as a warning "lossy codec is active"

EDIT: Better: A tiny OLED display with an MQA-Logo saying "INSERT COIN BEFORE PLAYING LOSSY"

 

[usersky]

Do I recall correctly that Roon was in some way started by meridian? Or links to at least.

That would pretty much explain their prices.

 

[pLudio]

Among the basic premises of MQA, one of the reasons why HD files (any high resolution file, not MQA only) sound better -if done properly-, is because that NF is displaced to a higher frequency. Then much gentler analog filters can be used to cut the incoming signal prior to quatization, without reaching the audible band, and so, preserving the phase coherence between fundamentals and harmonics in that audible band, while at the same time avoiding those aliasing problems of Redbook (at least, close to the audible region).

Oversampling DACs have been doing that for ages but MQA is using minimum phase filters so you're not getting your desired "phase coherence" (we seem to agree on preferring linear phase filters).

 

[11Parsecs]

Greetings from Sydney, Australia.

Newbie here.

Could some one please post The Perfect Hi Res track for comparing the superiority of Qobuz vs Tidal?

Preferably, House, Jazz, Classical or Soundtrack?

I ask because I just purchased the THX Onyx - primarily to add some 'oomph' beyond the 2013 Mac Pro's onboard sound, to drive Audeze LCD-X's (2020 revision). Not for the MQA stuff, mainly for the convenience of a small device with punch. fwiw: Onyx delivers in the "plug it in and go" oomph department ;-)

I tried a quick A/B test on an (allegedly) identical track from both Qobuz vs Tidal, using their Mac desktop app(s) - on maximum settings. I know the track was 44.1 on Qobuz, and Tidal is doing its 'treatment' of the same source material. Hardly a comprehensive critical listening session, enough though.

The Tidal 'treatment' - upsampling? and other voodoo - was... subtle. Probably my own biases? But Tidal... seemed to have some, Mmm?, ethereal qualities. Spaciousness? Slightly different flavour, which I liked.

Anyway, does someone have a link to the ultimate slam dunk sample music track demonstrating Qobuz's superiority? Thanks in advance.

 

[guenthi_r]

Anyway, does someone have a link to the ultimate slam dunk sample music track demonstrating Qobuz's superiority? Thanks in advance.

Not related to Qobuz, but maybe this helps?
2l Testbench

 

[awdeeoh]

Greetings from Sydney, Australia.

Newbie here.

Could some one please post The Perfect Hi Res track for comparing the superiority of Qobuz vs Tidal?

Preferably, House, Jazz, Classical or Soundtrack?

I ask because I just purchased the THX Onyx - primarily to add some 'oomph' beyond the 2013 Mac Pro's onboard sound, to drive Audeze LCD-X's (2020 revision). Not for the MQA stuff, mainly for the convenience of a small device with punch. fwiw: Onyx delivers in the "plug it in and go" oomph department ;-)

View attachment 125145

I tried a quick A/B test on an (allegedly) identical track from both Qobuz vs Tidal, using their Mac desktop app(s) - on maximum settings. I know the track was 44.1 on Qobuz, and Tidal is doing its 'treatment' of the same source material.

The Tidal 'treatment' - upsampling? and other voodoo - was... subtle. Probably my own biases? But Tidal... seemed to have some, Mmm?, ethereal qualities. Spaciousness? Slightly different flavour, which I liked.

Anyway, does someone have a link to the ultimate slam dunk sample music track demonstrating Qobuz's superiority? Thanks in advance.

Try the Paul McCartney RAM (the one with 20 tracks - the Special Edition).

 

[bidn]

I don't know that this kind of "noise" is what we mean by noise. Correlated noise with music is no longer noise and their analysis should detect that as such. How does the noise sound to you in those youtube videos relative to uncompressed version?

But what is music? Here it is mainly real noise.
Even if we can hear some patterns, I wonder why the noise would be always correlated with it (in most cases it is not).

Often here the noise is spurious, grainy.
Typically noise could be detected (and removed) by determining a magnitude threshold in a frequency-magnitude representation (in a transformed domain),
but this would remove all the low-level texture, noise in these examples of noise music.
Or what special algorithm do they use?
Moreover in some of these examples the noise is the loudest thing... → everything or nearly everything would be erased.

Re. the lossless versions, I do have them, but I think there is prima facie not much difference with youtube, as long as one clearly feels the intended effect of the abundance of noise. Even if youtube cuts a bit of noise, noise is still very strongly present in these examples on youtube.

My point is:
A. In these examples, for at least most of the noise, there no difference between intended and unintended noise.

B. We humans can understand this, because we have use some context (making us know that it is intended noise music).

C. For an algorithm to detect this, it would have to train a machine learning technique on a large corpus of music together with contextual clues to be extracted from the context (e.g. youtube words indicated a noise based musical genre) : something way too heavy to be run afterwards by a compressor like MQA --> it is extremely doubtful, and almost certain, that MQA does not do that. . Moreover given how many exaggerated and false claims they have been using to boost their marketing, if their was some "artificial intelligence"in the process, they would claim it hard and loud... So we have no reason to go into this direction, which leads to the dilemma:

D If MQA would remove the noise, then it would remove most (at least all the fine grained) of the contents of these musics but then that would be really wrong, messing up way too much.

E. If MQA would not remove the noise, then their claim would be false.


My impression:
it is that there is nothing behind their claims of detecting and erasing the noise except a marketing ploy to help people swallow the backwards idea of cutting the 3 LSB of Redbook's 16 bits of audio data, to use the freed space to put instead their DRMs.
In this manner they can not only hide they negative features but also turn them into things falsely looking good, appealing.
So just (misleading) marketing, like their original claims of lossless coding and of not having any DRMs.

 

[mansr]

IIRC, @mansr said it was all in the modulation of "noise" in the LSB. A DSP can just just keep track of the original LSB of each sample, make it's manipulations, and then replace the new LSB with the original before sending it to the DAC.

That is exactly how Bluesound/NAD do it. They take the output of the "core" decoder, save the LSB, do some processing, then put the LSB back.

 

[mansr]

You’re making a huge assumption. You are assuming that ADCs don’t follow basic Nyquist-Shannon sampling good enough to have a proper filter implementation. Filtering at both ADC and DAC level should be straightforward if following basic theory. Filter design has to be only reduced to the most effective brickwall filter at outside the wanted passband in order to limit out-of-band interactions that occur when not following the sampling theorem. I don’t see ADCs struggling with this nowadays.

Modern sigma-delta ADCs sample at several MHz, then apply a digital low-pass filter to produce the selected output sample rate. A choice of linear or minimum phase is sometimes available. There are no issues with aliasing or phase shifts.

 

[11Parsecs]

Try the Paul McCartney RAM (the one with 20 tracks - the Special Edition).

Thank you.

 

[11Parsecs]

Not related to Qobuz, but maybe this helps?
2l Testbench

Woah. Motherlode. Thank you.

 

[voodooless]

About Improved soundstage? interesting question, since it is very true in my experience, very noticeable.

My guess: as sounds coming from each channel are more in "focus" due to time domain corrections, the definition about positioning and depth is enhanced (a lot, in fact), as the signals that are split between both channels become better "coordinated". Also given a better resolution of micro-detail (ahh... those tiny percusion sounds in the background, so precisely positioned...), things sounding softer lead to a better reshaping of that sensation of depth.

He asked for proof, not word salad. How would any of your claims work, physics wise?

I think MQA's "deblurring" (ie: fixing time domain issues) refers mainly to two subjects: Each note with its harmonics in phase with the fundamental (by means of higher sampling rate, ideally from analog sources) a thing that Redbook just can't have;

More word salad. Why would the harmonics not be in phase? Modern ADC's don't have any phase distortion, nor do decent sample rate converters to sample down to Redbook. And fundamentals above 20 Khz, you can't hear...

and much better impulse response (down from 200 to 500 uS to as much as 3uS according MQA; allegedly achieved with a battery of convolutional filters).

Convolutional filters are nothing special, just about all DAC's and ADC's have them. Funny thing is that MQA employs a minimum phase filter, which does NOT preserve phase, while you also claim that preserving phase is so important. You can't have both. You either have a phase linear filter with pre-ringing, or you have a minimum that does not preserve phase. What kind of black magic do they employ to fix this?

They also talk a lot about eliminating aliasing artifacts, but I'm not sure if any HR file would have that already fixed.

They can talk all they want, but it has been clearly proven that if they do one thing, it's not eliminating aliasing. Spectrums clearly show multiple images reflected into the HF.

 

[bidn]

He asked for proof, not word salad. How would any of your claims work, physics wise?



More word salad. Why would the harmonics not be in phase? Modern ADC's don't have any phase distortion, nor do decent sample rate converters to sample down to Redbook. And fundamentals above 20 Khz, you can't hear...



Convolutional filters are nothing special, just about all DAC's and ADC's have them. Funny thing is that MQA employs a minimum phase filter, which does NOT preserve phase, while you also claim that preserving phase is so important. You can't have both. You either have a phase linear filter with pre-ringing, or you have a minimum that does not preserve phase. What kind of black magic do they employ to fix this?



They can talk all they want, but it has been clearly proven that if they do one thing, it's not eliminating aliasing. Spectrums clearly show multiple images reflected into the HF.

I admire you, you have a lot of patience to keep answering all this ongoing nonsense!
For me this kind of person you are replying to is clearly not technical, but someone like a manager or marketing guy, and working directly or indirectly for MQA. He uses technical concepts without any understanding of them, just to make things look good, just like marketing people and managers use fashionable "buzz-words".
He could be the MQA sales manager who was behind the marketing statements that MQA coding is lossless, that it detects and erases the noise, the misleading blue light about data integrity, etc.

It would be better if he would honestly say that he understands nothing about technical aspects, but he keeps polluting the thread with long and meaningless posts. I see this as trolling.
In this case, what he probably wants to achieve, with these many long posts is to impersonate an expert, so that MQA or Tidal customers ( the vast majority being unable to discern between meaningful technical talk and technical gibberish) looking at the thread will think that there is no agreement between "experts", so they can go on believing in MQA's claims (even if actually debunked):
One guy wrote , I think yesterday, something like: we are back at the beginning, nothing conclusive has been reached (thanks to Mieswall 's "technical arguments")...

 

[symphara]

All these mentions about the blue light and how it’s the main “advantage” of MQA. My streamer/DAC doesn’t have a blue light. It has no light at all, it just displays “MQA” on the screen. I feel cheated.