MQA more answers, maybe too many for some people.

[NorthSky]

Is this for the underground audiophiles? What are our children going to do with it, if ever they can access it?

 

[DonH56]

End User Marketing:

<elided>

My Bad Idea for the day:

How about distributing some gussied up (excuse me: Master Quality Authenticated) 96/24 files we can actually play, and maybe get a taste of what they're up to?

Note it is not the HF signal amplitude that's important, but rather the greater time resolution, i.e. the ability to resolve smaller time "steps" and thus provide more realistic time cues in the music and less "temporal smearing". At least as I understand the article.

I like your bad idea. Perhaps they could distribute an executable that decodes a specific musical selection or two that we could run on a PC to compare the difference. The output could be streamed to our systems, or sent out the PC's analog outputs, or whatever for playback. The executable would be locked to the embedded files so would only be useful as a demo.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Finally made time to read through the original article. Quite the dissertation. Very interesting approach and IMO very hard to explain without delving rather deeply into technical details that most audiophiles (and reviewers) will fail to follow. What I did not have time to do was to try to find the references explaining the need for much greater time resolution than in current schemes, and that seems to be the primary basis for MQA. It's an interesting argument but one I am not competent to debate. A few years ago I was able to calculate the difference in time we (humans) can distinguish and it was much, much lower than I would have guessed but IIRC still well above the aperture time of a 16-bit converter. And there is always the debate about how much it matters in the real world, with real musical signals and such. The fact that a cymbal crash contains signal content above 20 kHz does not mean that I can hear it, which is acknowledged in the paper, but how the lack of time resolution degrades the sound is unclear to me. I do not know how important the temporal smearing described in the paper is in the real world, i.e. how well I can hear it. Be interesting to test with and without MQA to see, but perhaps my ears aren't up to the task. The claim is most anybody can hear the differences so I wonder (do not know) how much of the debate is based upon "blind" rejection without actually listening tests.

As for MQA being DOA, I suppose it depends upon how well they can market it. I am a little surprised at the apparent level of resistance, but suspect a lot of that is from a combination of misunderstanding of the technology and inbred rejection of anything that appears to make assumptions about what we can and cannot hear. The latter I base upon the high level of concern related to the use of bits below the noise floor. Nobody wants to be told something is below their noise floor and people continue to reject studies showing e.g. two cables can sound the same; "not in my system!" That said, I do not claim to have the hearing many reviewers and others claim to have achieved, it is quite clear others hear what I cannot, and it is impossible to resolve a debate that takes on the nature of a religious war wherein beliefs and science collide.

IMO - Don

I don't know if any of the references are of good quality that point to the need for better time resolution. Meridian's test involved resampling carefully recorded 192/24 material, using listeners trained to hear this particular artefact when it was presented in an extreme, and played over a system with genuine response to 40 khz. They found something like 61% of the time listeners could hear the difference between 192/24 and 44 k hz or 48 khz sampling with very short transition bands of 430 hz and 500 hz respectively, and with sub-standard dither or no dither. I don't believe they revealed the details of the filter used. It may have been a low tap filter with exceptionally steep filtering interacting with poor dither producing artefacts. Also we don't know what resampler they used. Some of those are of poor quality even in some current DAW software. They may have picked one of those resamplers as being typical of popular music or something. Also I believe they mentioned training involved filtering with a transition band of only 100 hz to make it more clearly audible. Lots of the design of the test seemed self serving for their soon to come release of MQA. Does a transition band of 600 hz make the audibility go away? Or 1000 hz? Did they test at 100 hz and go until the results just barely, barely passed the p=.05 criteria? These results were just barely over the number needed for p=.05 (fell just short in one of the tests). Research saying be careful and keep your transition band at least 1000 hz wide in filtering or it will be audible isn't going to help in promoting your own deblurring process is it?

 

[NorthSky]

Listening to MQA - by John Atkinson

 

[Blumlein 88]

Listening to MQA - by John Atkinson

4 out of 7 correct with the usual excuse making afterwards. Ha!

 

[RayDunzl]

4 out of 7 correct with the usual excuse making afterwards. Ha!

Is there a requirement for the number of tests to be an odd value?

Do you think after the eighth try he said "Well, seven was enough. I'll go with seven." ?

 

[Blumlein 88]

Is there a requirement for the number of tests to be an odd value?

Do you think after the eighth try he said "Well, seven was enough. I'll go with seven." ?

My first thought too, why not 8.

The excuse was two tracks were Steely Dan both of which he missed. Otherwise 4 of 5. Like I said, the usual excuse making.

 

[NorthSky]

"I scored four out of seven correct; though this is insufficient to prove formal identification, I feel that it is relevant information."

If he "feels" that it's relevant information, then it's good enough...no need for further experiments and scientific approach...yes, no?
Let the manufacturers engage the machine now, and us depart of our saving economies...pensions.

I wish MQA the best of luck...like DVD-Audio with MLP. They still make some by the way, but not sure if they use MLP.
And Warner Bros is going ahead with the new MQA. Way to go WB!

 

[Sal1950]

I am a little surprised at the apparent level of resistance, but suspect a lot of that is from a combination of misunderstanding of the technology and inbred rejection of anything that appears to make assumptions about what we can and cannot hear.

I think for many including myself it's more about the DRM like closed loop aspects.

 

[Werner]

Yes. MQA is a closed system. You have to buy new hardware to get into it.

In the past decades such was not much of a problem. It was obvious that one had to invest
in a new player in order to play CDs. This required just the substitution of one component. People accepted this.

Nowadays it is a bit more complex. What if your DAC is in your amplifier? In your speakers?
What if you don't have a DAC proper (true digital amp)? What if you perform signal processing (equalisation or
crossovers)? MQA breaks all of this.

Moreover, fairly recent developments in open source and freeware software and cheap computing have moved a portion of audio away from the audio industry. Something like Volumio or Moode running on a RPi makes an excellent streamer, often superior to much more expensive offerings from 'real' audio manufacturers, at near-zero cost. MQA breaks all of this.

To me it is a ploy to get control back in the hands of a few hardware and music providers. If it really was about sound quality then the MQA encapsulation strategy could easily be set up to operate with existing components: making it a recording and mastering standard, making the decoder open-source or provide low-cost licenses. Even the fabled 'MQA playback is tailored to the actual DAC' can be implemented at a modest cost: after all there are only so many reconstruction approaches used in today's DACs, you only have to tell the system the maximum input rate to your DAC, and whether its filter at that rate is linear phase or minimum phase, half-band or sub-Nyquist. Or NOS (grin).

 

[NorthSky]

MQA is an audio business. Like MLP, like Hi-Res Audio, like UHD Blu-ray, like Dolby Atmos, like HDR, like 3D, like DSD, like EQ, like HDCD, like ...
It is the audio business evolution to the benefit of the customers, us.

To get in with that evolution we have to pay someone...it's not free. I will check MQA when I see there is a good reason enough to do so.
Right now others are doing it for me...I am reading their findings. What did they find? ...Subtle differences, and takes less storage space. So that's a small +

I am waiting for the next best thing.

 

[amirm]

Listening to MQA - by John Atkinson

Very good find Bob. Had not seen that before. Shame you have to send files to Bob Stuart to get anything encoded in MQA.

On the results of his blind tests (4 out of 7), I have gotten that in blind tests only to be completely wrong as I kept testing. With 7 trials, you have to get 6 right to achieve 95% confidence. There is a big difference between 4 right and 6 right out of 7. I usually don't count my blind test results valid unless I can nail it every time with a rare exception.

 

[NorthSky]

How much is that little MQA gadget?

 

[amirm]

How much is that little MQA gadget?

I don't recall what JA used but Meridian Explorer2 is just $300: https://www.amazon.com/Meridian-Explorer2-Digital-Analog-Converter/dp/B00Q6VQGS2

 

[NorthSky]

Yes, that's it; that was what I was looking for (it's just over $400 in Canada + stocking and shipping fee and taxes...roughly $460 total):

It has a small LED light that glows Blue or Green You want the green light.
• http://www.stereophile.com/content/meridian-explorer2-da-headphone-amplifier#8wfvHUvcSkPJReyj.97
_______

* Bonus 1) http://www.digitalaudioreview.net/2016/06/an-inconvenient-truth-mqa-sounds-better/
2) http://archimago.blogspot.ca/2016/01/measurements-mqa-master-quality.html

 

[Cosmik]

Yes, that's it; that was what I was looking for

I hope that power cable is up to the job - looks a little flimsy.

 

[RayDunzl]

22 pages of MQA promotion from The Absolute Sound

https://mqa-production.s3.amazonaws.com/default/0001/01/6a10f3ba2385770ac3658df2cadc537ffcd09cd3.pdf

 

[ceedee]

Note it is not the HF signal amplitude that's important, but rather the greater time resolution, i.e. the ability to resolve smaller time "steps" and thus provide more realistic time cues in the music and less "temporal smearing". At least as I understand the article.

I'm not sure what you mean by "HF signal amplitude". Are you talking about bandwidth, or something else?

 

[NorthSky]

http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/acoustics/amplitude.htm

 

[Sal1950]

To me it is a ploy to get control back in the hands of a few hardware and music providers. If it really was about sound quality then the MQA encapsulation strategy could easily be set up to operate with existing components: making it a recording and mastering standard, making the decoder open-source or provide low-cost licenses.

22 pages of MQA promotion from The Absolute Sound
https://mqa-production.s3.amazonaws.com/default/0001/01/6a10f3ba2385770ac3658df2cadc537ffcd09cd3.pdf

Exactly Werner!
Click Rays link, and Harley's hit's it right on the money in the very beginning. The eight paragraph beginning with,
"That development was both a blessing and a curse"
he brings forward the most important aspect of MQA beyond making a fortune for Meridian, the DRM like design of MQA and once again being able to lock out consumers from usable access of the digital stream.
Read that one paragraph and you'll understand why so many of the industry people are trying to shove this down our throats.