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MQA

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DimitryZ said:
So what is your opinion about why BS is behaving so markedly different from your past observations?

And why mention it on an Anti-MQA thread?

My third comment stands as is.
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I don't know why, but the following did come to mind...

There is an old cartoon of two people leaving a lecture theatre, and one is saying to the other: "He must be very clever! I didn't understand a word he said!" :)

This is a fairly well known for academics. The person speaking knows a great deal about the topic and has a lot of technical details in his head which he understands. But finds that he can't explain them in 50 mins (or half an hour) to an audience who hasn't spent the last decade or two researching all the details. Then finds he can't explain in simpler terms because he hasn't thought though in advance how to do so.

So the audience can't actually tell from what he says, why he says it.

I might have had trouble explaining to a lay audience and a non-scientist interviewer why I suspect the Universe might be rotating about its time-axis beause they won't have spent years looking at topics like field diffraction, coherence, and general relativity. But the topic is an interesting one if you're prepared to do things like wade though MTW's book 'Gravitation', etc. But a few people would twig this from a few comments because they know the key base areas involved.

So for all I know, he felt awkard given trying to explain things without details to the presented interviewer and target audience, because he hadn't prepared in advance how to do so ,effectively. However I have no idea of the cause, I just noticed the way he acted.

Explaining things adequately 'in simple terms' can be much more difficult than explaining them in detail to someone who already knows an assumed set of basic things. That's why New Scientist used to pay quite well. :)

BTW this is an 'MQA' thread, not an 'anti-MQA' one.
 
Rosewind said:
You are right that this is about lossy MQA and what it really is:
-
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TBH I'm more concered that it is 'additive'. i.e. it adds noise and other components that were not in the source fed into the MQA encoder.

'Lossy' I can accept, personally. I enjoy the BBC R3 320k aac streams for example and they sound fine to me. So some loss may be OK if it give some other advantage. I'm more wary of a system that *adds* things which weren't in the source.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
TBH I'm more concered that it is 'additive'. i.e. it adds noise and other components that were not in the source fed into the MQA encoder.

'Lossy' I can accept, personally. I enjoy the BBC R3 320k aac streams for example and they sound fine to me. So some loss may be OK if it give some other advantage. I'm more wary of a system that *adds* things which weren't in the source.
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Why would you be wary of things being added?

I thought noise shaping techniques have been around for many years, certainly pre MQA.
 
Have a look at the page I did on noise shaping. It doesn't have to add anything more than the basic dither noise level which is required anyway to ensure LPCM is linearised. What noise shaping does is let you shove some of the 'noise' it produces away to frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive. The *amount* of noise is much the same.

However MQA seems to add rather more than this. And what it adds is largely 'deterministic' - i.e. not 'noise', but more like anharmonic distortions. I've just done some preliminary analysis on this but am checking before making the results public to ensure I have done this correctly. Stay tuned... :)

If curious about noise shaping, see:

http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/intoshape/NoiseShapingHighRez.html
 
DimitryZ said:
I got you - you are back to being weird. I mistakenly thought you were ACTUALLY interested in an audition, instead of boring forum bickering.
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Of course I'm interested in an audition, that's why I've asked at 3 hifi shows for such a demo, and been declined 3 times. In mosts people's World, that would be pretty clear that I'm interested in an audition. You know, proactively asking for one.

I asked a legitimate question which is, in no way, boring forum bickering. You've now taken 3 posts to deliberately ignore it and not provide an answer. Why? Why not just answer the question, it would be a lot quicker and simpler. Last chance - its a very simple question - an answer would really help to clarify your approach to this topic.
 
DimitryZ said:
Kentucky Fried Chicken claims to be the best chicken in the world...do you believe them?
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But here's a crucial difference - KFC don't claim to give you the original unmolested product. They say they have changed it.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's the opposite to MQA's claims. So are you saying that MQA's claims are like KFC? It makes the product different to the original?
 
sunbeamgls said:
But here's a crucial difference - KFC don't claim to give you the original unmolested product. They say they have changed it.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's the opposite to MQA's claims. So are you saying that MQA's claims are like KFC? It makes the product different to the original?
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Don't you want all your audio with 11 Bobs and Stuarts?
 
Rosewind said:
Re. artist payment -

In Denmark, the grocery chains decided to raise the price of milk and hand the price increase to the milk producers in order to stop the race to the bottom.

A similar thing could be deviced for artists so they are paid better for their music. For that MQA would still be a superfluous lossy format.
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Then you would be thrilled to learn that Tidal pays the second highest artist royalties.
 
Jim Audiomisc said:
I don't know why, but the following did come to mind...

There is an old cartoon of two people leaving a lecture theatre, and one is saying to the other: "He must be very clever! I didn't understand a word he said!" :)

This is a fairly well known for academics. The person speaking knows a great deal about the topic and has a lot of technical details in his head which he understands. But finds that he can't explain them in 50 mins (or half an hour) to an audience who hasn't spent the last decade or two researching all the details. Then finds he can't explain in simpler terms because he hasn't thought though in advance how to do so.

So the audience can't actually tell from what he says, why he says it.

I might have had trouble explaining to a lay audience and a non-scientist interviewer why I suspect the Universe might be rotating about its time-axis beause they won't have spent years looking at topics like field diffraction, coherence, and general relativity. But the topic is an interesting one if you're prepared to do things like wade though MTW's book 'Gravitation', etc. But a few people would twig this from a few comments because they know the key base areas involved.

So for all I know, he felt awkard given trying to explain things without details to the presented interviewer and target audience, because he hadn't prepared in advance how to do so ,effectively. However I have no idea of the cause, I just noticed the way he acted.

Explaining things adequately 'in simple terms' can be much more difficult than explaining them in detail to someone who already knows an assumed set of basic things. That's why New Scientist used to pay quite well. :)

BTW this is an 'MQA' thread, not an 'anti-MQA' one.
Click to expand...
The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
 
sunbeamgls said:
But here's a crucial difference - KFC don't claim to give you the original unmolested product. They say they have changed it.

In case you hadn't noticed, that's the opposite to MQA's claims. So are you saying that MQA's claims are like KFC? It makes the product different to the original?
Click to expand...
So best chicken is raw chicken? OK
 
sunbeamgls said:
Of course I'm interested in an audition, that's why I've asked at 3 hifi shows for such a demo, and been declined 3 times. In mosts people's World, that would be pretty clear that I'm interested in an audition. You know, proactively asking for one.

I asked a legitimate question which is, in no way, boring forum bickering. You've now taken 3 posts to deliberately ignore it and not provide an answer. Why? Why not just answer the question, it would be a lot quicker and simpler. Last chance - its a very simple question - an answer would really help to clarify your approach to this topic.
Click to expand...
I answered you question three times and yet you seem unable to comprehend.

Audition in your own home with gear borrowed from the dealer or purchased for short money. I provided the link.

Or you can audition an MQA DAC at the dealer, provided them or you have a Tidal and Qobuz subscription. Or you can bring an USB stick with 2L LPCM and MQA files for comparison. I used an iPad with a LOSSLESS Onkyo ios player to go this comparison years ago.

What is it about above choices do you continue to misunderstand?
 
Did anyone read Darko's take on the current controversy over MQA?

https://darko.audio/2021/04/tidal-forks-mqa/

He tries hard to sit on the fence - which anyone who has read posts from both sides in this thread will know is really hard as long as fault lines go along ...

- lossy vs lossless
- origamied music file vs the full audio file
- subjectively perceived sound quality (equalised "secret soup" MQA file vs "straight" open FLAC file)
- no access to MQA source file vs open format FLAC = source file
- MQA = DRM locked vs FLAC = free from DRM
- MQA as extra layer in the great music chain that takes a cut vs FLAC = no extra payment asked
- MQA's claims to be Master Quality when you can't access or revert to the original master file vs FLAC as a faithful copy of the master file
- MQA's claim to be benefitial for the artists vs do they get paid more for how MQA "improves" their original studio work?
- MQA's claim to get the listener closer to a live performance by their MQA process vs what the original recording sounded like when it was taped/captured live with no MQA process added
- MQA's refusal to enter into an open discussion of what MQA is and why we need it vs attempts to have full disclosure of those points
- MQA secrecy vs FLAC openness
 
The tracks that GoldenSound managed to get MQA encoded include some segments of pure silence. Here's what MQA did with that. The blue curve is the undecoded MQA, red is the output of a decoder.

image.png
 
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