Have You MQA'd?

[artto]

1 hour ago, MerkinMuffley said:

"High Resolution" - - 

 

...is a special term applied to DIGITAL recording(s). Analog recordings are infinitely continuous, which is to say,  you can zoom in infinitely with no break in the slope.  The demon of analog is noise, not resolution.

Like so many others...........you sir, are quite wrong.

 

Analog recordings are not "infinitely" "continuous". That is the common misconception/perception of most "audiophiles"

[Khornukopia]

Interesting topic. I hope the product is commercially successful and leads to higher standards for all streaming music.

[MerkinMuffley]

Analog IS continuous. Maybe the whole world is wrong. But I really doubt it. 

 

http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_difference_between_analog_signals_and_continuous_signals

 

If there is going to be an effective rebuttal, it will need to me more than a simple declaration that it's wrong. There has to be a counter-argument.

 

[joshnich]

On 4/29/2018 at 12:30 PM, artto said:

I've talked with Mark on several occasions and attended his seminars at AXPONA many times. He's a great guy. And I agree with his snake oil point of view regarding the majority of high-end tweak products. I have several of his recordings and his book. He has an entire chapter devoted to MQA.

 

EDIT: On page 694 Waldrep writes about auditioning some MQA processed recordings at the 2015 CES show. These were presented by Robert Stuart of MQA. Bob Dylan:Don't Think Twice - "I can attest to the fact that I've never heard Bob Dylan sound that transparent and clear". Roberta Flack:Killing Me Softly - ""very present sounding, intimate and possessed the full frequency spectrum. The triangle and kick drum were especially precise and clear. The sound was really great."

 

BUT - he admits that he hasn't had the opportunity to compare the same audio recording with/without MQA. And I might add, he is also guilty of repeatedly referring to MQA as a "format".

 

However, much of his argument(s) against MQA has to do with re-releasing (again) existing (older) recordings that are not "hi-res" in the first place, similar to the HD downloads. And I agree with that (sorry analog guys, tape or disc, it ain't high resolution). Is MQA going to make that 1969 Led Zep album sound "better"? No. It's just going to give you what the stoned out of their mind producer/artist thought was best after 12+ hours a day of editing, mixing & mastering at ear blistering sound levels.

 

The point being, if it isn't a high resolution recording in the first place, it doesn't require anything more than 44.1Khz/16 bit (or less), steaming or otherwise. The dynamic range isn't there. The noise floor is much higher.

 

You can't restore what is not there. You can't alter what doesn't exist.

Im confused. Both Dylan's Dont think Twice and Roberta Flack's Killing Me Softly were as far as I know, recorded on tape. Wouldnt they fall into the "if it isnt a high resolution recording it doesnt require anything more than 44.1/16"?

 

[Audio Flynn]

23 hours ago, artto said:

MQA is a CODEC.

 

"CODEC" has two meanings that I know of.

 

1. Hardware based. Performs A/D and D/A conversion. Example: a modem (coder/decoder=co/dec=codec)

2. Software based. Process for encoding sound and/or video in digital form for broadcast or streaming. In this case it represents what is required for COmpression/DECompression.

Typically it is something that can be "encapsulated", then "decapsulated" at the receiving end. This can be used by/sent with any file format type

Artto;

 

I applaud your due diligence in the investigation.

16/44 has taken some years to sound pleasant and non fatiguing. I wish storage and CPUs would have moved faster and we could have been given 24 / 88 in the first place. Oh well.....

 

I did hear MQA at the AXPONA Meridian booth a couple of years ago. Tough to say much about a room at a show but Meridian did not disappoint. For me looking to head to Tidal when the weather gets cold in late 2018 I will start off with a Meridian Explorer. Right now I just use a AQ Dragonfly for low res streaming for convenience or to find new music.

 

I was impressed that NY put out his catalog temporarily free of charge for high res streaming. Neil can be a crazy person but his premise on quality has been solid.

 

Another thing you said needs to be reinforced. ROOM! Finally for two channel I have a long wall room with two back hallways that naturally reduce reflections. There are allot of framed pictures I need to keep the SPL moderated as to not get crazy vibrations.

 

I still get plenty loud but still like to talk without shouting. I am trying to go to a symphony every three months for reference.

 

https://www.neilyoungarchives.com/#/album?id=A_035&_k=k9c0bp

[joshnich]

On 4/27/2018 at 10:13 AM, artto said:

The Benchmark article is also about 2 years old. It demonstrates an even grosser misunderstanding of MQA. Right from the beginning it declares MQA DOA while comparing MQA to other (failed) "formats".

 

Repeat: MQA is NOT a "format". MQA can be "packed" with any of the mentioned "formats".

 

EDIT: perhaps "encapsulated" is a better description than "packed".

I am sorry, but neither schiit nor benchmark are the idiots you make them out to be. In the case of benchmark, they manufacture equipment used in a great number of recording studios and certainly would have more than a "gross misunderstanding" of MQA. Your intimation  that John Siau does not know what he is writing about only proves your ignorance.

I encourage others to read John's application notes on all things audio - all are available on the Benchmark website - and you will quickly understand why he is so respected in professional audio and recording arts.

The fact that this application notes is two years old means absolutely nothing. If the science doesnt make sense two years ago it will not make sense today.

Chris...I believe that you are a big fan of digital crossovers. I am not sure you read this portion of Johns notes on MQA

 

"MQA Compatibility Issues

MQA requires a lossless transmission system from the file source to the final D/A converter. Benign DSP processes such as a digital volume control (used in moderation) immediately defeat the MQA decoding. The same is true for digital crossovers, digital EQ, and room correction. The MQA stream will be corrupted if any of these common processes are encountered. These common forms of digital processing will shut down the MQA decoder and revert the system to a 44.1 or 48 kHz sample rate and an effective bit depth of 13 to 15 bits."

[Chris A]

On 5/2/2018 at 12:46 AM, joshnich said:

Chris...I believe that you are a big fan of digital crossovers. I am not sure you read this portion of Johns notes on MQA

 

"MQA Compatibility Issues

MQA requires a lossless transmission system from the file source to the final D/A converter. Benign DSP processes such as a digital volume control (used in moderation) immediately defeat the MQA decoding. The same is true for digital crossovers, digital EQ, and room correction. The MQA stream will be corrupted if any of these common processes are encountered. These common forms of digital processing will shut down the MQA decoder and revert the system to a 44.1 or 48 kHz sample rate and an effective bit depth of 13 to 15 bits."

I really don't wish to throw fuel on the fire of this subject, but I will say that the above quote is a real problem for MQA individuals if true.  It says that these men are trying to lock up the reproduction chain and all the components in between with a proprietary format for monetary gain.  It also appears that the inventors are trying to do that deliberately--so demerits to them...if true.  I've personally found that anyone trying to sell the idea of doing something proprietary (i.e., for profit) to "make the sound better than its source" is always selling snake oil.

 

What baffles me is the number of people that seem to want to defend this kind of thing.  That's what I believe we should be looking at more closely: why someone would choose to believe in something that they clearly don't understand in depth. 

 

What I do know first hand is that even small attempts to rescue fidelity from our recordings in the form of reversing the ubiquitous mastering practices that actually degrade fidelity can lead to significant increases in perceived fidelity over what we usually get to buy.  Perhaps this is what Art is experiencing.  A very small restraint of the human cultural processes that serve to degrade recorded music fidelity leads to much better sounding music--because most of it is pretty bad as bought (IMO).  Even very small amounts of restraint in these widespread mastering processes that damage music fidelity leads to disproportionate perception of increased fidelity.

 

I've come to the conclusion that many of those people that claim to be "mastering engineers" (in the very loose sense of the term "engineer") really don't know what real hi-fi sounds like, and tend to discount any complaints from those consumers that do spend time and resources building up their setups to hear higher fidelity.  I've found that the individuals that do this to our music have a predictable mea culpa: "if I don't do this to the music, I won't get paid to do it anymore." 

 

How odd it is...indeed.

 

Chris

 

[MerkinMuffley]

And then there is the never ending loudness problem in streaming.

 

http://productionadvice.co.uk/online-loudness/

[Dawson's Ridge]

On 4/27/2018 at 6:36 PM, Kevin S said:

I am curious. When comparing the original master recording to the MQA recording, wouldn’t the goal be for the MQA recording to sound identical, as opposed to better, different or worse?

 

Don't be deceived by members of the brain trust. MQA is compressed music. PCM = original.

 

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6098

 

http://secure.campaigner.com/csb/Public/show/566i-oycmq--fj2md-1oai7pr0

 

[codewritinfool]

On 4/28/2018 at 9:54 AM, artto said:

AGAIN, more gibberish from someone who doesn't have a clue. He (who ever he/it is) still can't get past the concept that MQA is NOT a "FORMAT".

 

Someone had better tell Mytek Digital that it isn't a format:

https://mytekdigital.com/hifi/mqa/

 

Also, this article from Computer Audiophile is long but interesting:

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/reviews/mqa-a-review-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/

 

[codewritinfool]

On 4/29/2018 at 9:34 PM, MerkinMuffley said:

Analog IS continuous. Maybe the whole world is wrong. But I really doubt it. 

 

http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_difference_between_analog_signals_and_continuous_signals

 

If there is going to be an effective rebuttal, it will need to me more than a simple declaration that it's wrong. There has to be a counter-argument.

 

I think this is correct.  If you could see and analyze the waveform coming from, say, a live cello, it is indeed continuous.  Audio is not emitted in quanta.  

[artto]

On 5/8/2018 at 8:27 AM, codewritinfool said:

I think this is correct.  If you could see and analyze the waveform coming from, say, a live cello, it is indeed continuous.  Audio is not emitted in quanta.  

Time & space are now known to not be "continuous". Time itself comes in "bits". And therefore, so does "analog". In fact the flat piece of pressed plastic vinyl is actually made of very small "bits" of matter. Not really "solid" at all. More space than mass, just like us. The "continuous" flowing of a river - is just an illusion to us as being continuous. It's really just one damn molecule after another bumping into the next one.

[jjptkd]

I'll copy this here too since this seems to be where all the discussion is happening:

 

Have you seen this from the man Bob Carver:

 

From the BobFather

The Emperor’s New Encoding:

My Futile Quest to Authenticate MQA

Human perception is easily fooled into imagining differences that don’t stand up to empirical proof. MQA (Master Quality Authenticated), a new Tidal Music streaming audio format, takes its place alongside
mystic resonating aura crystals, magnetic bracelets and countless other miracle schemes: It is much ado about nothing…for fifty cents extra per download! It’s not what reviewers heard several years ago. It is provably smoke and mirrors.

I assert that MQA is perhaps the biggest hoax, the biggest prevarication, the biggest deceit ever foisted off on the music listening public. To prove it, I set out to use science instead of subjective listening to determine the extent of differences between MQA and a standard CD of the same song. The results were beyond disappointing to anyone hoping for, as Robert Harley extolled in a recent The Absolute Sound editorial, a “paradigm shift”.

First a Bit of Background. Late in 2014, following an Audio Engineering Society convention, Bob Stuart, co-founder of Meridian Audio, demonstrated a new lossless format called MQA to key audio journalists, using specific musical tracks and equipment in controlled listening sessions. Writers were told that MQA was a new digital system that eliminated “time smear,” increased clarity, encoded signals better than the Nyquist-Shannon Theorem (which is indisputably the fundamental underpinning of all of digital audio) and could stream songs using a slow roll-off filter that let through important ultrasonic frequencies, allowing
music to sound better. There was some consensus among journalists that it sounded better than conventional CD tracks

(see the Original Flavor MQA Was Tastier sidebar at right).

At the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show, Tidal officially unveiled Tidal Master with MQA, a new “tier” above Tidal Hi-Fi, which they claimed would “fundamentally change the way we all enjoy music”. I personally
applaud Tidal’s efforts to wean listeners off MP3… as well as offer a more generous artists’ royalty policy (Tidal is partially owned by rapper Jay Z). But getting involved with MQA I’m not so sure about.

Learning About MQA.

As an amplifier and speaker designer, I am often asked to address audio clubs. A dealer asked if I would be including an MQA decoder in a future preamp. I had heard of MQA, primarily due to Robert Harley’s The Absolute Sound editorials, but paid little, if any, serious attention. But now I wanted to learn more. My first thought was to contact Robert E. Greene, a reviewer who had written about my new loudspeaker, and a seasoned veteran of things audio. Surprisingly, Robert had no specific technical knowledge of the MQA process that he could pass on: I was left to my own devices. So, I read reviewers’ and tech writers’ blogs,
watched several videos on MQA and even waded through the 2014 AES Convention Paper 9178 that had launched the “new” technology. It claimed “improved time/frequency balance” using “loss-less buried-data signaling within the channel to carry instructions, metadata and authentication” and “innovation-rate concepts” for reducing temporal blur. What gobbledygook, I thought. The patents that had been filed were of little additional help (see the Patent Medicine sidebar on the next page). It was time for some
serious testing. The Null Test. She Don’t Lie. Now, it’s difficult to view an audio waveform on even the finest electronic test equipment and know much about the music it represents. Beethoven looks the same on an oscilloscope as Mozart. Making mean assertions about MQA using standard tests would immediately get batted down by cynics. Luckily, there is an incontrovertible way to compare two version of the same audio. Done properly, the Null Test is the perfect mathematical proof that two audio signals are identical. Also called a Difference Test, Null Testing demonstrates that two audio streams are identical when the difference signal is exactly zero. On the surface, this is quite simple: Just mix two signals together while flipping the polarity of one of them. If the result is pure silence, the two signals are equal, bit by bit.
Actually, in the digital domain, this is more complicated that it might first seem. If two waveforms
are off by just one sample — even at mind-boggling sample rates like 768 kHz — the null test won’t be
valid. I turned to a very expert colleague, Ronald Brandt, to do the actual Null Test. Tidal Master Track (MQA) and non-MQA Tidal Hi-Fi tracks were downloaded from the web; the identical songs were accessed from “traditional” 16-bit/44 kHz compact discs, and 24-bit/192 kHz versions. Ron is meticulous and left nothing to chance. He spent far more hours in a Digital Audio Workstation program, recording, editing, eliminating timing drift and signal inverting than he did doing the actual comparison. After all this effort, he created a digital transfer recording of the resulting null that totally bypassed analog stages. Before we go any farther, let’s make sure you understand what we mean by “null”. Null difference testing consists of combining two different signal sources with identical levels, but out of phase by exactly 180 degrees. If the two signal sources are 100% identical, no sound will be heard — they’ve perfectly cancelled each other out. If sound is heard, the two signal have different properties and the differences are what’s audible. Null testing is absolutely indisputable. It’s pure mathmatics at work: 1 plus minus 1 equals zero. Ron begain with CD and Tidal MQA versions ofsome different genres of musical material. Both versions of the signals were then fed to both a Meridian Explorer 2 and Mytec Brooklyn DACs, MQA versus CD. MQA-on versus MQA-off. Care was taken to make sure the null was evaluated at the loudest part of recording where the brick wall limiter applied to the master was being ridden quite hard. Then the actual null test was performed on the same test equipment. Any differences between the CD and MQA versions would result in a waveform consisting only of those differences. The null test results are not visually exciting, but VERY conclusive.

The two versions of Emmylou Harris yielded……a tiny but inaudible difference (the fuzzy parts of the blue lines).

BOTTOM LINE: MQA was the same audio signal that was contained in the original signal source. By “the same”, I mean that it yields an approximate –70 dB null when compared to the original source. Personally,
I am unable to hear a difference between them once the null is –50 dB. At –70 dB, even a passing bat would not be able to hear any differences. Why My Attorney Had to Review This Before I Published It.
There is no enhancement and nothing special with Tidal Master MQA. If you listen to the streaming of a stock song and compare it to an MQA streaming of the same song, they sound the same.
The experiences reported by reviewers was an early version of MQA “doctored” with cross-talk cancellation. The signal available to the public contains none of that. It’s just an ordinary copy of the original. It does not work by getting rid of “pre-ringing”. It does not work by “turning Shannon/Nyquist on its head,” though several knowledgeable people that should know better. It is a pass-through with simple noise shaping (nothing new in itself) that reduces the apparent signal-to-noise ratio in a way that is good. MQA is a paradigm shift only in the sense that it allows Tidal to violate the listener’s privacy. I regret that the reviewers and audio journalists have been unwittingly caught in a big hoax — what they heard did indeed sound different. My fear is that customers now will think they are getting something
very special like the sound the reviewers experienced and wrote about., but what they are really getting is nothing significantly different from the original. By that measure, MQA is a hoax and a big lie!

Bob Carver • Fall 2017

[artto]

The Bobfather, in his The Emperor’s New Encoding” rebuttal said “It does not work by getting rid of “pre-ringing”. It does not work by “turning Shannon/Nyquist on its head,” though several knowledgeable people that should know better.

 

What? That last sentence is incomplete. Yet some people think he’s a genius! Yes, I’m nit picking. And of course so is Carver.

[artto]

The Bobfather, in his The Emperor’s New Encoding” rebuttal said “It is a pass-through with simple noise shaping (nothing new in itself) that reduces the apparent signal-to-noise ratio in a way that is good.”

 

OK Bobby, if it’s “good”, what’s the problem? Oh, I get it. Bobby didn’t come up with the idea.

[artto]

The Bobfather, in his The Emperor’s New Encoding” rebuttal said “MQA is a paradigm shift only in the sense that it allows Tidal to violate the listener’s privacy.”

 

What? OK Bobby. Please explain how this allows Tidal to violate my privacy.

[artto]

The Bobfather, in his The Emperor’s New Encoding” rebuttal said “but what they are really getting is nothing significantly different from the original”

 

Hmm, I can’t imagine what’s wrong with that. Isn’t that the whole point? Or am I missing something? Oh wait, according the Bobfather, it means  “By that measure, MQA is a hoax and a big lie!”

 

Really? “nothing significantly different from the original” BUT “By that measure, MQA is a hoax and a big lie!”

 

Ah, the words of true genius!