Grooved
Addicted to Fun and Learning
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This is very interesting, GoldenOne.
From the cynical perspective of a company having no qualms about lying about their very core service (like pretending to stream lossless),
I could see several reasons to provide the same MQA files as non-MQA files...
It's another example on which we need to not make a global conclusion. Yes it's a big problem to not know what the file is, to even lied about that, but this one is not a good example, it doesn't reflect the majority of what happens on Tidal tracks.
I checked it and Porcelaine from Moby has indeed the same file for Hifi and Master (so problem of replacing the FLAC in Hifi option) but both are 16bit MQA, and it's not much common at this moment. The strange part is that Qobuz has FLAC in 16/44.1 and 24/96.
This one is a problem, but remember that when you find a problem, on Tidal in this case, to not conclude that it's the same for all tracks ;-)
But it would be important to keep each one in a list (not each track found with a problem, but each kind of problem)
D- They can't be lossless when unfolded: to be "lossless" in these Taliban terms, both noise floors must be identical, and by definition that noise floor doesn't exist anymore in MQA, as it was replaced with useful information, that a normal DAC still sees as noise, but a MQA DAC knows to decode as information.
What is “relevant”? How do you know this inclusion of data is even statistically significant? What do you gain from that extra data? Just want to know more.
It seems that folded, it's an artificial noise floor as there are the MQA informations (data and frequencies of above 22.05 or 24kHz), and once unfolded, you get the real noise floor, to be exact, the noise real noise floor from the MQA encoding, not the best you can get.
It's statically significant because on the measures from different versions of the same track that I posted in a previous message, we see that the 24bit MQA folded has a minimum level of -76dB, and once unfolded (first and last unfold as it's a 24/96 master, and following unfolding don't use data but only upsampling), the minimum level goes to -96dB. So it statically made a change.
Now, if we look at the Qobuz 24/96 FLAC, the minimum level is -138dB...
I thought about the impact as it is today. Now, you're right to think that potentially, it can be even bigger in the future.I find this issue actually much more important and worrisome than the one with Tidal.
That 2L has converted their tracks to MQA was also already reported several days ago (maybe also by you, or someone else),
as well that the tracks from 2L catalogue on Qobuz are since then MQA.
Qobuz probably has no choice, it has to take over the catalog a right-owning company dictates.
2L is not alone, it has been said several times that Warner will converts its masters to MQA. And many other recording companies could follow.
Right, there were also some streaming services using WMA with DRM, I think it stopped about 9 years ago.This is a statement from 20 years ago and is completely wrong. Labels stopped caring about control when they decided to give Steve Jobs permission to distribute MP3/AACs with no Fairplay (Apple DRM). That then led to outfits like HDTracks and their competitors to distribute even high-resolution content without copy protection. All the people in the labels that used to care about this were fired years ago (after failure of SACD/DVD-A).
...
I don't even know of an article about labels wanting to control content in the last 10+ years. Who is spreading this kind of propaganda???
As I have explained many times, the authentication is no different than Windows activation with a key. They use it to control licensing of the decoder. It has no benefit or use whatsoever to the labels since it controls nothing anyway.
But it could still appear again... Amazon Music is using Widevine DRM for streaming, but I don't know what happen when you buy a track, never did it with Amazon
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