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MQA

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My favourite and most accessible Cohen album is Songs of Love and Death. Also a fan of Anna Calvi and Laura Marling, who can do a fine Cohen impression at times.
 
Del monaco said:
My favourite and most accessible Cohen album is Songs of Love and Death. Also a fan of Anna Calvi and Laura Marling, who can do a fine Cohen impression at times.
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I have to really learn and listen to Cohen. He is is one of several musicians that somehow escaped my attention.
 
There are many Waits albums I return to. I remember seeing him when I was young on a programme called The Tube set in my beloved Newcastle. Waits on the Tyne! I remember his silhouette against the spotlights and his bony hand thumping a rhythm on the piano. He was striking. Loved him since then. An album I often return to is one that is not often mooted. Foreign Affairs. There’s a sophistication to the songs and he is tender. I find Burma Shave mesmerising.
 
DimitryZ said:
I am sorry, Tony, but in our hobby people routinely rely on ONLY listening to form opinions and spend serious money. They are called subjectivists.

For some reason MQA is not afforded the same opportunity.
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The 'subjective' approach relies upon being able to make a controlled comparison. i.e. you compare two or more 'versions' knowing what part of the system has been *changed* when it comes to choosing item for that part of the system. Thus to use it, you need a chain where MQA can be inserted or bypassed as the only thing being altered when you compare music with/without it. If MQA block this, you can't do a reliable 'subjective' judgement on MQA being better/worse/different to non-MQA.
 
Craig B said:
Yay!

I like this bit...

The good news: for people not interested in hi-res, they can opt in on the lower-priced lossless service, giving them access to the entirety of the Tidal library in CD-quality. Why pay for something you don’t use?

The great news: for people who view MQA as the devil incarnate, they can keep Tidal and skip MQA.​
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But do we know if the non-MQA offer gives you something that hasn't been MQA'd and is what was presented *for* the MQA encoder? Or is it altered in other ways?
 
mansr said:
Only one problem: it's still MQA, just the even worse kind with the low 8 bits chopped off and not openly labeled as such.
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The risk of this is why we may need a widely avalable MQA 'detector' for people to use. This does not need to 'decode' MQA, but simply be able to indentify that the content has been MQA encoded at some point in its path to the end-user. HDCD exhibited this problem in the past.
 
I’m not surprised DZ sometimes prefers MQA over LPCM and vice versa. I use mostly Qobuz for streaming and YTM sometimes, I also have 1k albums as files. Streaming gives me surprisingly variable results, some music sounds poor whereas other music is very good sounding. Maybe some albums have been poorly ripped...is it the mastering, have they used MP3. All I can subjectively say I is that my CD rips don’t exhibit this level of variability. They vary, of course...but not by as much as I hear via Qobuz.

Comparisons of MQA vs LPCM must be impossible to conduct with any validity unless you know the full heritage of the mastering and that the transcription is identical.
 
George J said:
Dear Dimitry,

It would be fair to say that BBC Radio Three often manages a quality and sense of occasion that no recording, however reproduced and on whatever medium, comes close to. It is strange, like a direct connection to the performers. I have a very high bar to raise with recording replay with my radio set-up. it is also true that the daily lunchtime chamber concerts on R3 are actually the best of the best and my vintage radio of Leak and Quad does this sort of programme better than anything. I don't really think I need to worry much about recordings with the riches that R3 brings!
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I concur with the slight change that I now much prefer the 320k aac stream to FM. Initially it can sound less 'warm'. But after a while I came to conclude this was down to the relative lack of compression which even R3 has to apply to FM at times. This is why for many decades I used R3 as my reference for sound quality having - many times - attended recordings at Maida Vale and the other various venues used by the BBC, inc, of course, the RAH. Thus for me the real reference was often being at the preformance, then hearing the recording TXd by R3 later on.

And FWIW on a number of occasions when analysing the quality of the streams, etc, the BBC have sent me source files of their broadcasts so I could compare what went into their chain with what I got at home. Overall, very impressed, albeit that on occasion I spotted a weevil. :)
 
BTW thousands of postings ago I said something about a 100+ CD set and mangled what I typed. The large set is of performances by Barbirolli, but in the posting it looked like it was another Ellington reference. Both great 'conductors', but Ellington gets the prize for composition. :)
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
BTW thousands of postings ago I said something about a 100+ CD set and mangled what I typed. The large set is of performances by Barbirolli, but in the posting it looked like it was another Ellington reference. Both great 'conductors', but Ellington gets the prize for composition. :)
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I did wonder Jim but I was sure it was just rushed or distracted typing!
 
clivem2 said:
I’m not surprised DZ sometimes prefers MQA over LPCM and vice versa. I use mostly Qobuz for streaming and YTM sometimes, I also have 1k albums as files. Streaming gives me surprisingly variable results, some music sounds poor whereas other music is very good sounding. Maybe some albums have been poorly ripped...is it the mastering, have they used MP3. All I can subjectively say I is that my CD rips don’t exhibit this level of variability. They vary, of course...but not by as much as I hear via Qobuz.

Comparisons of MQA vs LPCM must be impossible to conduct with any validity unless you know the full heritage of the mastering and that the transcription is identical.
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That does raise questions like: How would you know in advance if a version you get as LPCM has actually been via a chain which included it being, say, mp3 encoded and decoded, because that suited someone. I guess that MQA does have the dubious 'advantage' here of leaving clear signs of it being used.
 
clivem2 said:
I did wonder Jim but I was sure it was just rushed or distracted typing!
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If someone likes 'classical' music it is a great set. For me it had two really welcome features.

One was that many of the early CD issues of Barbirolli's recordings were messed up by EMI using crappy ADCs and digital processing. The other is that the new set includes lots of 78-era recordings that haven't been reissued before. And excellently cleaned up in most cases. Some of the vocal examples are fascinating.

Also pretty cheap/disc. The downside is a lack of documentation, and what there is on the sleeves is in *tiny* type. But fortunately David Li Jones' discography covers all that. They should have bundled a copy, along with its CDROM that has scans of all the record labels! :)

How can you tell that I'm a member of the Sir John Barbirolli Society? 8-]...
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
The risk of this is why we may need a widely avalable MQA 'detector' for people to use. This does not need to 'decode' MQA, but simply be able to indentify that the content has been MQA encoded at some point in its path to the end-user. HDCD exhibited this problem in the past.
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I have made such a detector.
 
mansr said:
I have made such a detector.
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Then you can check Tidal :D I looked up Led Z and every album has two editions, but both have the label Master. If one of the is the SD version it means that MQA is used on both. But Talking Heads 77 has one Master and one without the label. Or do I misunderstand smth?
 
mansr said:
I have made such a detector.
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Can you remind us of the URL? My memory being what it is, I've forgotten, and this is a loooong thread! :-/

It will be useful! However I think we still face the prospect of some material that has been though MQA but has lost the flagging. So may need to be identified by the effect on LPCM interpretation. Experience with HDCD predicts this will happen eventually if enough use of MQA is made by the trade.
 
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