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

[levimax]

In no way do they look like an expensive cable which does nothing whatsoever different than ordinary cable.

The other side of that argument is that MQA is WORSE than expensive cables because it actually does do something while providing no utility to the consumer and still costing the consumer money.

 

[danadam]

I wonder why you care. They also pay huge amounts of money to metadata providers that Roon shows. You are upset about that too? Or understand that they charge a lot more for their player than JRiver does because of such features?

I neither care nor am upset. I'm just curious. But ok, I'll stop now.

 

[amirm]

I don't think Apple publishes Hi res at the moment only acc so I don't really onderstand what you are saying here.

They have announced they are going to offer high-res and as such are ingesting it as we speak. It takes a long time to do that and catalog it before turning on the service. Amazon is there already by the way. No way did someone reach back into label archives to modify their bits that they send out because someone is distributing the MQA versions.

Don't companies have to sign a contract to licence MQA? Is that public? Somehow MQA does not really seem all that trustworthy to me as a simple consumer.

What "companies?" Tidal has signed such a contract but they don't own the original bits, the labels do. Major Labels have not licensed MQA since they are not releasing MQA content under their own name (they have agreement with MQA to "support" MQA but that is different than being a licensee). Even if they had licensed it, there is no universe under which they would agree to such terms.

The terms of such agreement is confidential which means whoever has started that rumor doesn't know it to be true either.

 

[amirm]

The other side of that argument is that MQA is WORSE than expensive cables because it actually does do something while providing no utility to the consumer and still costing the consumer money.

That is your non-technical opinion, and anti-MQA PR talking point which I have addressed repeatedly. Please don't waste time by repeating it.

 

[artburda]

Do we have any members in the Pro community that could facilitate providing the content and getting it converted by such a mastering house? We could cough up some money for the service if people value it enough. I will donate up to $250 toward it.

I will donate $20.

 

[DimitryZ]

$100 here.

Amir, when you setup payments, make them available to non-members as well? I am sure folks at PFM may want to contribute.

And a naive question. If the option to go to an MQA-inabled mastering lab and encode your own content (including test tones) was always available for reasonable money, how come it hasn't been done?

Or perhaps anti-MQA DAC makers have done that and just kept the results private?

 

[levimax]

That is your non-technical opinion, and anti-MQA PR talking point which I have addressed repeatedly. Please don't waste time by repeating it.

If this is a talking point I did not get the memo... I came to this conclusion myself. Please give one scientifically proven example of utility provided to the consumer by MQA. There is quite a list of proven negatives and outside of "might sound better" which is not proven I see no benefits.

 

[tmtomh]

I see the first point. I thought he was asking someone to repeat GO's effort but with test tones in the data space that MQA will encode.

On the second point, I think you misunderstood. MQA will encode test signals IN THE DATA SPACE they allocated for encoding - the lower Shannon Triangle.

Amir explained it many times.

No, I am not misunderstanding. I wasn’t saying it won’t encode it at all. The notion of an “illegal” signal in this context is not my term nor is it meant to suggest the encoder will simply fail.

 

[lucretius]

I almost wrote I hope someone doesn't repeat that argument and here you are. Once more, I said the playback is free to me, the consumer, the very people consuming MQA content.

.

Why wouldn't you think the subscription fees (to you or anyone else) are higher because of the costs (re MQA) that Roon is picking up?

 

[lucretius]

That is your non-technical opinion, and anti-MQA PR talking point which I have addressed repeatedly. Please don't waste time by repeating it.

I didn 't know that such a PR team or even talking points exists. Details?

 

[amirm]

If this is a talking point I did not get the memo... I came to this conclusion myself. Please give one scientifically proven example of utility provided to the consumer by MQA. There is quite a list of proven negatives and outside of "might sound better" which is not proven I see no benefits.

Fine. Now move along so that we can continue our technical discussion.

 

[lucretius]

He is a "blogger."

That was Bob Stuart's term, obviously meant in a deragatory way. Why do you feel the need to repeat it?

 

[amirm]

I didn 't know that such a PR team or even talking points exists. Details?

Are you new to this discussion?

 

[lucretius]

The outfit he used doesn't do custom encodings of MQA. For best effort, we need to go to a mastering house that does. Do we have any members in the Pro community that could facilitate providing the content and getting it converted by such a mastering house? We could cough up some money for the service if people value it enough. I will donate up to $250 toward it.

I find it hard to believe that Warner's back catalogue went through special mastering or processes before being encoded. It's MQA tracks from this back catalogue that most consumers will likely experience.

 

[amirm]

That was Bob Stuart's term, obviously meant in a deragatory way. Why do you feel the need to repeat it?

What else do we call him? It is not like he has given us his real name. What he has done is publish a video blog. He has no engineering or signal processing experience so it is not like we are taking away his qualifications.

 

[lucretius]

Are you new to this discussion?

I suppose I am. Do I need to read all 144 pages?

 

[Hai-Fri. Audio]

View attachment 132768
Amir, single handedly defending MQA objectivism vs hordes of ignorants. (ca 2021)

FTFY

 

[mtristand]

So I admit I don't know much about the whole MQA situation, which is why I sort of went in with fresh eyes here as an outsider and transcribed those conversations from earlier, to get a more clear outlook of what it is MQA is actually claiming and what value they are providing, if any.

To my understanding, MQA is claiming that their transformation is "better than lossless," arguing that the data contained in lossless is wasteful to begin with, and that the data gets tarnished anyway from time-based "blurring" errors as a result of the analog-to-digital-back-to-analog conversions throughout the whole chain between what you hear in the studio and what you hear on your end as a consumer. And this de-blurring process is done on "the music" (as opposed to the noise), which is identified statistically from what they define as "natural" sounds.

The end result is a smaller filesize containing "relevant" data that has this "de-blurring correction," and presumably sounds much more "natural" with the intent being that you get "what was heard in the studio." This is why MQA tries to insert itself at every step of the chain here, to have that control over how the content is transformed and delivered, with the little light at the very end telling you that the whole process worked and you're hearing "what the artist intended."

So my concerns would be as follows:

1. MQA is not lossless, but they seemingly try to use the term anyway to mislead people into thinking that it's one of their advantages, using careful wording to give themselves plausible deniability if questioned.

There is of course the "music origami" video I posted earlier:

The next step, using [an] advanced digital resampling process, we fold it again and we bury the region B in the noise -- way down in the noise, under A. By doing this, we've taken C, put it under B, and then -- a lossless process, completely reversibly, lossless process -- we've buried B under A.
...
The decoder will unwrap this perfectly, give you exactly what was heard in the studio. Once it's unwrapped, then we put the sample rate back to where it was, we put the bitrate back to where it was, and you get the original sound restored.

Sure seems to imply that they are doing a lossless encoding here by "restoring the original sound" and "unwrapping this perfectly" and "a completely reversibly, lossless process," etc.

MQA comes in a lossless file from the rights owner, most often the music label, so you get exactly what was intended.

An initial reading makes it sound like "you get the lossless file, which is what the rights owner intended," but technically it's saying that MQA gets it, which says nothing about what they do with the file after the fact.

Using a unique ‘origami’ folding technique, the information is packaged efficiently to retain all the detail from the studio recording. While MQA retains 100% of the original recording, an MP3 file keeps just 10% of the data.

This one is mad shady to me. Again, an initial reading makes it seem like they're claiming MQA is lossless because it "retains all the detail of the studio recording," which is not technically the same thing as "retaining 100% of the data" if they're implicitly assuming that "detail" is not the same as "data." And "MQA retains 100% of the original recording" implies a different context than "an MP3 keeps just 10% of the data" and yet they're put in contrast within the same sentence despite being an apples-and-oranges thing. They're saying they retain the original recording, and by-the-way MP3 only retains 10% of the data. But again, it's worded carefully to give the impression that they're giving you lossless, making you think they are giving you 100% of the data without specifically saying it.

MQA has never made false claims about ‘losslessness’. MQA has been clear from the outset that our process operates in a wider frame of reference that includes the whole chain including A/D and D/A converters.

More careful wording, saying they never technically made any false claims about losslessness (but this is different than making technically-true-but-misleading claims). That said, even on their previous FAQ page, they had "Yes, MQA is lossless," so I'd argue that they technically have made false claims in the past (which would explain the recent edits to "better than lossless"). On that page they try to justify what they mean by this:

But a lossless file is just a digital container, a box for data, and what really matters is the content!

Just because I put on a batsuit doesn't make me Batman. Putting lossy data inside a FLAC container and then calling it lossless is really misleading to me.

FLAC is a lossless file format, a container for audio data. MQA is an advanced method for coding audio contents. MQA is normally delivered (losslessly) in a FLAC container from the music label. PCM is another type of audio that can be delivered by FLAC. Suggesting FLAC is better than MQA is like saying ‘bottles are better than wine’!

FLAC is the name of a lossless compression codec, and FLAC also happens to be the name of the container. I mean, it's literally in the name: FLAC = "Free Lossless Audio Codec." Just because you store data in a FLAC container doesn't mean you get to call your data "lossless" compared to the original.

Provenance: MQA files are delivered losslessly and reconstruct exactly the sound that an artist, studio or label approves.

"Delivered losslessly" to me sounds like they're just trying to rely on the ambiguity of "delivery" in context. Are they talking about internet protocols and file transfer integrity? Because that's a different claim entirely than whether the content itself is lossless. Technically this sentence is saying "the file is delivered to you in a format that has been approved." That's it. It's not technically saying the file itself is lossless - but it sure tries to come off that way, in my opinion.

-----------------------------------

Anyway, all of these statements are enough to make me distrust MQA from the getgo. To my eye, they are frequently going out of their way to make carefully-worded, misleading statements to make you think they're saying one thing when ah-ah-ah-they're-not-saying-that. In the interview I partially transcribed earlier, Bob Stuart expresses some dismay at how people are confused about MQA and what it does, but I am not at all surprised when they seem to be causing this confusion intentionally.

2. What's up with ringing / blurring exactly?

If I am understanding them correctly, MQA says that due to the whole analog-to-digital-then-back-to-analog conversions throughout the chain, certain "ringing" and "blurring" effects get introduced. I have never heard of this being some kind of issue that everyone has been scratching their heads over for decades.

The technical guys will be able to say more on this of course since I know nothing about it, but I'd want to see exactly how big of a problem this is to begin with, and be able to transparently compare files / listening experiences in order to see what value MQA's transformations are providing.

I would have assumed that this "issue" (if it exists in any meaningful way) is handled in any quality DAC that tries to faithfully recreate the original analog sound from the digital samples, and I do know that there exists the whole Shannon-Nyquist theorem and all, so I was under the impression that this was a done deal already. I don't claim to know what I'm talking about here, but I think one of the points GoldenSound was making was that MQA makes it difficult to make such a comparison.

From what I can tell, all in all, MQA is offering a lossy compression with their own transformations applied to the sound, getting the rights owner to approve it, and then delivering this content as the "master" under the assumption that "this is was was heard in the studio according to the artist."

But this is not the same as "you're getting the original" or "you're getting the lossless file."

For example, Neil Young pulled out of Tidal, saying as much: https://neilyoungarchives.com/news/1/article?id=Tidal-Misleading-Listeners

WHY I’M NOT ON TIDAL

TIDAL is calling their files of my songs Masters. But Tidal’s MQA files are not my masters. I make my masters - not TIDAL. I don’t need some hocus-pocus file manipulation that claims to improve my work. I made my masters the way I wanted them to sound. If TIDAL referred to their titles as TIDAL MASTERS, I would have no problem, but they don’t. They call them Masters. I had my music removed from that platform. They are not my masters.

TIDAL FALSELY LABELING MY RECORDINGS AS MASTERS

Tidal’s master is a degradation of the original to make it fit in a box that collects royalties. That money ultimately is paid by listeners. I am not behind it. I am out of there. Gone. My masters are the original.

AMAZON HD and Qobuz are good alternatives to TIDAL where the real music - exactly as made by the artists and producers - is played. They play my masters. I don’t care if I am the last of a dying breed. I am proud to stand up for the work I did with my friends over the last 55 years. I don’t need or want Tidal’s so called improvements. I have heard them. They are degraded from my masters. They are manipulated and not our original work. I don’t buy the TIDAL hype.

MQA is the company supplying technology to TIDAL. In their own official descriptions they go into what they did to my original files. They altered them and charge a royalty. I feel that my master files are in no way improved. They are degraded and manipulated. I made them. I know the difference. I can hear it.

Neil Young

3. "If you don't like it, don't pay for it."

That's all fine and well for the individual, but I guess my concern would be more systemic, if enough demand is drummed up over misleading claims and questionable benefits that allow MQA to gain a large amount of penetration and market control, leading to equipment costs going up or even just perpetuating more possible snake oil in an industry that already has plenty of it. In general I am already distrustful of MQA simply due to the way they throw around the word "lossless."

Anyways, would appreciate any responses to these specific points, any clarifications to errors you think I am making here, any elaborations on MQA claims, all that jazz. I'm just an outsider here offering my initial impressions after looking at some MQA content. I did have a subscription to Tidal for a while, but don't any longer because I wasn't a fan of the UI, couldn't find most of the stuff I was looking for, and didn't find there to be any significant benefit to MQA over other formats anyway.

Thanks.

 

[DimitryZ]

No, I am not misunderstanding. I wasn’t saying it won’t encode it at all. The notion of an “illegal” signal in this context is not my term nor is it meant to suggest the encoder will simply fail.

So what does it mean to suggest? I don't think any signal is illegal for MQA. It just needs to be in the encodable space, which OP failed to conform to. That's why the decoder spat out 11 of his 13 files.

 

[amirm]

I find it hard to believe that Warner's back catalogue went through special mastering or processes before being encoded. It's MQA tracks from this back catalogue that most consumers will likely experience.

Why? MQA encoding tools have tunable parameters and likely informative information they spit out. A mastering house has the option to modify such parameters in the process of encoding. MQA itself is doing a lot of encoding and they could be modifying/optimizing them as well. Here is one of the MQA mastering shops: https://airshowmastering.com/what-we-like-about-mqa-high-res-format/

"What does Airshow Mastering offer?
Airshow has MQA encoding capabilities, and we can tailor the MQA encoder settings specifically for your project, and deliver MQA files for download and streaming. "

Bob Stuart in his blog response says something similar:

"“To help young artists and small labels get their music encoded in MQA and on to TIDAL, we recently enabled the service you used. However, that service is limited in flexibility and places obligations on the user. First, the encoder is fully automatic, which means it will use analysis to set parameters for each song as a whole; "

The statistical nature of their encoder would need some checking to see if it is determining the right things. If I have DSD noise for example, I may opt to not encode that even if the encoder things that is useful info. I may also listen to the baseband and if I hear degradations there, change the amount of information that it encoded from ultrasonic range.

Anyway, if we are going to repeat this experiment we better do it right. And that calls for going to a proper mastering house and have them encode files for us. Such files need to be music by the way, or harmless test signals that could not be argued to be impossible to find in music.