Comparison of PCM and MQA

You dragged the product plug out of me, I generally avoid talking up gear I own as it can distract from the argument. I quite enjoyed that though :wink:

Could You find this article? It sounds like an interesting read.

You’d have to read the literature on filtering, sampling, and converter design for the last 2-3 decades to see it in any form other than what is said in hi-fi journals, One place where I’ve seen it summarized is the first paper in that JAES issue cited earlier.

I wish I could, I’m not sure if it was written or Bob talking about this. I do remember it though. If I find it again, I will be sure to post it.
I think it was referred to, or I understood it as, Adding Grit.

We had a similar thing at a drum recording session I attended where they demonstrated recording with different mic positions and numbers. The very last piece of advice was to find the cheapest and poorest mic you have and record the overall sound and then at the final mix, experiment with feeding some of this into the mix… Adding some grit…

…which the mastering engineers don’t always get involved in.

They have the final say, or it won’t be happening. These things are discussed.

That’s just not true in many (most considering the rate of conversions) cases:

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Not true, I have been instrumental in several takedowns. Where no one involved with the production (Musicians, Rights owner, Local record company, Mastering Engineer…) had been involved in the decision to degrade their work by publishing it in a lossy format.
They didn’t like what the automated conversion had done to their work, so the lossy file was replaced with the actual master

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I expect if they are interested in superior quality, they can be involved. Especially with new recordings or white glove treatments.
If they are encoding to MP3 or AAC, the lossy formats I understand you are referring to, then why would they bother? It’s truly lossy and no input will save it perhaps… With MQA, this is not the case.

Don’t you think they SHOULD be? The process is called Master Quality Authentication…

Should if they choose to be. I mean, who would say, nope your the artist/creator and you can’t be involved :joy:

I take it from this and other HWZ posts that the main complaint is that rights owners (labels) are doing MQA encoding after mastering is finished and without cycling back to have the album remastered. There are some valid issues in that, particularly the need for possible rebalancing although I don’t know what percentage of albums are in that position. Essentially it isn’t an issue with MQA itself, it’s an argument about the system and one that should be taken up with the rights owners. Perhaps they should be monitoring albums in that situation and should consider the cost of remastering. Or re-involving the mastering studio at the point of encoding.

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Moderators have removed some posts which were off topic or personal. Please keep to the thread topic.

Sorry, but the lossy format that I am referring to is MQA.
Since MQA is only perceptually lossless. Which according to MQA is much more challenging :rofl:

Which is funny because MP3 is regarded as perceptually lossless with a bit rate from 175 and 245 kbit/s VBR. Hence why I call MQA - MP3 vers.2

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Forgive me if I view the JAES issue with a little scepticism. The article comes from what appears to be an “MQA special”. Only Jamie Angus can claim real independence and she’s not exactly providing a ringing endorsement:

The techniques described in this tutorial are applicable to high resolution audio because the short impulse responses of the spline based reconstruction filters may offer some temporal advantages.

The rest of the articles appear to be from MQA staff so they’re obviously going to favour their own filter. The main argument against established practice is the need for a window because support for infinite responses isn’t possible. Again the alternative approach is to provide a window that’s big enough that the lack of infinite support isn’t noticeable. No need for a closed format or proprietary secrets…

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Well, MP3 was never designed or intended to improve sound quality, and MQA is designed specifically as such. So, my comments stand with regard to artistic intent being built into having ones music released in MQA.

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MP3 was developed to play music perceptually lossless, as is MQA

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That may be but MQA is designed to be able to improve on masters and lift the sound quality for all way above anything MP3 can achieve as its main mission was to save bandwidth. Two completely different approaches but with the common function of saving bandwidth.
Greater quality is enjoyed even without an MQA decoder, I can’t play MP3 on my CD player in my van, so it’s not even backward compatible… Doh!

For Me the complaint is the web of lies that is MQA.
First it was lossless, then it was perceptually lossless (At the moment their website again only says lossless)
Everything was Authenticated, well that’s been disproved (personal experience)
They claimed to be lossless up to 48 kHz then the gap showed up exposing that anything above 22 or 24 kHz is in fact a mirrored representation of the signal below these frequencies.
There’s no DRM yet they include strong encryption and even include this ability in their patent.
The simple fact that none of their (many) claims has been demonstrated to be facts.
All the measurements showing that their claims is fake has not in any way shape or form been refuted.

I have contacted MQA several times to get clarification, they never want to do this in writing. They always ask to call. When asking for a dialog per mail they clam up. Something to hide?

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Just call, what are you worried about… I’m sure they don’t bite…