radamel
Music Fiend
I think you are speculating. Or are you saying that you KNOW for a fact that Tidal has decided to increase their price and that I'll be willing to accept that price increase?
MQA announces licensing deal with Universal Music Group
- Thread starter radamel
- Start date
I think you are speculating. Or are you saying that you KNOW for a fact that Tidal has decided to increase their price and that I'll be willing to accept that price increase?
johnhunt
pfm Member
Do you mean people taking out tidal subscriptions when you say sucked in? if so I was sucked in months and months ago. By the way have you listened to Mqa yet?
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
But if you knew that the best quality was only available via a paid source, wow - you'd be set for life
I did an outline of the public info on this a while ago. You may find these pages help.
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/origami/ThereAndBack.html
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/bits/Stacking.html
Basically, MQA employs three tricks. The above shows what their patents on the first two describe. The third is some kind of magic metadata to tell the playout system how to 'adjust' for the choice of ADC/processing at the start of the chain. There is, of course, also a magic bitpattern to tell the system the data is MQA. Someone on the CA Forum has spotted this xored into the LSB of the Left and Right channels.
The snag is that - surprise, surprise! - the patents and public statements omit many vital details. Thus the real details of how the system works are buried under a layer of secret sauce.
davidsrsb
pfm Member
The tests carried out and published so far show now evidence of the part 3 filter adjustment being done at all.
This reminds me of HDCD where nobody ever used some of the features listed in the patent and marketing blurb
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
Yes, the phrase "HDCD on stilts" has come to my mind once or twice. :-/ Both seem to try to pull off a magic trick of producing a result that is presented as 'compatable' with both LPCM replay and "magic decoder ring" playable. The problem being that the data is *not* now plain LPCM, so may have sacrificed *something* wrt LPCM.
For 24bit files/streams that may not matter as the magic may have replaced some of the excess noise bits. And *may* have no audible effect upon LPCM replay. But I am particularly wary of the part of MQA that presents it as possibly suitable for use on 16bit/44.1k audio CDs. That would be dream for some big music companies as they could decide sometime in the future 'single inventory' and flog high priced CDs on a "one size fits all" claim.
Given the music biz's messy track record with HDCD...
Personally, given the way they have often fouled up things in the past I confess I don't feel that I'd feel very 'assured' by them saying they have 'assured' me of the results.
Stunsworth
pfm Member
I don't know how the fuel management system in my car works, but I manage to get to work every day.
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
Its always shakey to try making analogies which have also cherry-picked one statement out of a long set of points. All too often the attempted analogy isn't a reliable one. However since you've done that already, consider the following...
And you're still happy if it turns out that the car company sold you one that fiddled its test results and you've burned more fuel and had lower efficiency than they let you believe?
The real problem here is that you may not know what you have lost or missed out on. HDCD is a classic example of this. As has been the selling of cars based on engine management systems that gamed the tests.