narabdela
who?
Possibly, but it seems that Blue Spike are serial litigants, so whether it comes to anything...
MQA - Is it too soon to say "good riddance"?
- Thread starter Yank
- Start date
Possibly, but it seems that Blue Spike are serial litigants, so whether it comes to anything...
narabdela
who?
The main issue is with MQA misrepresenting as 'lossless'. The Goldensound video asks some questions about this which MQA have countered and the waters have become somewhat muddied.
However subjective opinions vary from not as good as FLAC, through 'couldn't hear any difference' to better then FLAC.
It has become somewhat of an issue with people who probably spend their spare time shouting at pigeons...
Stuart Frazer
pfm Member
So, according to the Administrators proposal, Naim Audio introduced MQA Products in 2016. I don’t know of any, does anyone?
Stuart Frazer
pfm Member
Yes, I thought that was also incorrect about Qobuz too. Is it on Amazon HD music? I didn’t think it was.
Still, a nice fee earner (estimated approaching £500k) for the Administrators with stonking hourly rates. It seems there are quite a few interested parties who might take MQA on. One of those mentions open sourcing some aspects….
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Rosewind
Lost in Translation
There are many problems with MQA
- you cannot revert to the master file from MQA as it is not lossless
- it introduces a superfluous extra filtering converter in any hardware that wants to get the best MQA playback quality = an extra tax on music
- the filtering process = the secret sauce used to encode an MQA is an MQA company secret and so is the decoding process
- a Norwegian hifi magazine concluded that MQA sounds brighter and may sound better on dark-sounding speakers
- The MQA company make ludicrous claims that can neither be proven nor disproven: 1: MQA is better than lossless, 2: MQA means that the music you get is like the artist or record company or MQA? has/have always wanted it to sound (Master Quality Authenticated)
- because MQA files are in the wild, unscrupulous entities may release lossy MQA-derived albums labelled as FLAC. The music pool is tainted. At one point in the past some TIDAL FLAC files were identical to MQA files = they contained identical data
Moreover …
- you cannot revert to the master file from MQA as it is not lossless
- it introduces a superfluous extra filtering converter in any hardware that wants to get the best MQA playback quality = an extra tax on music
- the filtering process = the secret sauce used to encode an MQA is an MQA company secret and so is the decoding process
- a Norwegian hifi magazine concluded that MQA sounds brighter and may sound better on dark-sounding speakers
- The MQA company make ludicrous claims that can neither be proven nor disproven: 1: MQA is better than lossless, 2: MQA means that the music you get is like the artist or record company or MQA? has/have always wanted it to sound (Master Quality Authenticated)
- because MQA files are in the wild, unscrupulous entities may release lossy MQA-derived albums labelled as FLAC. The music pool is tainted. At one point in the past some TIDAL FLAC files were identical to MQA files = they contained identical data
Moreover …
Roog
pfm Member
The principle of MQA always seemed to be a bit dubious to me, I bought a simple DAC that claimed to be able to replay it and convinced my self that it was different but then I got fed up that Tidal always seemed to serve up the MQA version of a tune. So I moved to Qobuz.
Always seemed to purport to be ‘a solution’ to a problem I didn’t have. Do I miss it? Far from it.
Always seemed to purport to be ‘a solution’ to a problem I didn’t have. Do I miss it? Far from it.
Werner
pfm Member
More impressive research from the administrators: MQA Ltd was incorporated in July 2014, and held its first press presentation in December 2014.
The first few MQA-disabled products appeared not before 2015. Funny how most of that timeline is factually wrong.
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
It depends on how you choose to finesse the meaning of 'lossy'. It adds garbage to non-MQA rendering. It also changes the HF. Which means some HF info is lost. Hence it is 'lossy' so far as that is concerned. It also adds some pseudo-noise which alters what you would have got from plain LPCM. It may well also add 'folded back' harmonics to generate systematic changes that reach below HF. Since the details are hidden, hard to tell when it comes to music what that does.
Hence it does alter the output in various ways, regardless of what label like 'lossy' or 'distorted' or whatever you prefer. What you get out isn't what was put in.
It is reasonable to argue it is 'better' than MP3. But that does not seem to be its selling point or aim.
The problems with 'secret sauce' is that we don't know how much hidden 'finesse' it may apply. Only that it presents as taking a different tack. But the sauce layer covers that so we can't be sure.
Beyond that you can see the alterations GO and I found by analysis of the output, using a Meridian DAC which I assume was meant to operate an an exemplar of the MQA system.
That DAC *did* alter plain LPCM files that had no MQA flagging or changes, though.
Jim Audiomisc
pfm Member
What we don't know is if anyone who buys up MQA IPR will then continue to promote it and demand license fees, etc.
In an ideal world, they'd make it open source. If no one buys it, it may become that by default, if the details can be found. Then we could examine it in more depth.
In an ideal world, they'd make it open source. If no one buys it, it may become that by default, if the details can be found. Then we could examine it in more depth.
davidsrsb
pfm Member
That doesn't gel with their published descriptions and patents. These show the LSBs being replaced with encoded HF and various watermark and sync overheads. Once gone these cannot be recovered, so technically the system is lossy.
Just not as bad as MP3.
lAmBoY
pfm Member
Correct, like I said, not defending it, and it does differ from older (but free) lossy codecs.