James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
299
Chris, seriously, you cannot possibly have failed to absorb even a small amount of the reasoning that people concerned about MQA have laid out.
Certainly, you can disagree with the logic and you can love the sound (apparently you do…you’ve said so just a few times) but for you to deny that people have laid out their case as to why not only do they not prefer MQA but they see it as a threat to the current music/audio eco-system is simply disingenuous trolling. Please don’t be that troll guy.
Fiat isn’t attempting to replace the fuel systems in all cars with their proprietary tech that only runs on their gasoline that everyone would have to buy, with a grand scheme to give control over fuel to a few monopolists.
Surely even if you don’t agree that is either MQA’s (or the record labels’) intention or will be the end result, you can acknowledge that the case has been made, instead of rebooting to “it sounds great, just move on if you don’t like it” which then triggers everyone to have to respond. Can YOU just move on?
However, and this was my point, that whole exchange between Amir and GoldenSound was about whether the tests GoldenSound conducted showed that MQA is lossless or not. The word “lossless” in audio is usually, nay always, about “mathematical losslessness”, because we’re interested in whether the information in the audio file is being transmitted without loss.
What Amir wants us to do is to distinguish between “mathematical losslessness” and “musical losslessness” (he’s using the shorthand definition “give me all the music”). If we do what Amir says here, why not say that any form of perceptual coding such as AAC or MP3 is muscially lossless? Then we need to wade through a bunch of different definitions of “lossless”, when all that’s really needed is the one Amir mentions, “a codec that can mathematically be converted back to the source with not a single bit out of place”. That’s what audiophiles hear when you say “lossless”, and therefore any other definition of losslessness should be qualified as a special type of losslessness.
GoldenSound’s test showed that MQA is not “mathematically lossless”, which for some reason was important for Amir to rebut, although he didn’t rebut it but introduced the demand for a degree in order to really understand the other versions of losslessness that MQA did qualify for. He could have said:
“Yes, MQA is lossy, but let me tell you some interesting stuff about it that I happen to know.”
He didn’t. He said:
“GoldenSound is out of his depth and should not talk about stuff he isn’t formally qualified in.”
I mean, that thread is a disaster. The thing is GoldenSound’s tests showed, however rudimentary, that MQA isn’t “mathematically lossless”, and only that. MQA’s choice to market themselves as a lossless codec is MQA’s problem and they are the ones who need to deal with that, whiteknightery is not needed. The amount of pushback GoldenSound received is baffling to me.
Since they had 3 million subscribers in 2016, I suspect that that number is much higher now. But even if it’s the same, I’m sure most know what MQA is.
Amir is commendable for all of the test bench measurement work that he does and publishes. But as a writer and presenter, he is not very good. His YouTube presentations are dry, awkward, and repetitive. Amir may be envious of or feel threatened by GoldenSound in that regard, as GoldenSound demonstrably knows how to create compelling presentations on technical topics.
Surely you jest? A true expert in his own mind only imo. That forum is one big ‘expectation bias’ towards whatever comes out of their leader’s mouth (or analyzer).
I do think that on the qualification side it was very revealing in the ASR thread that GoldenSound has no qualifications at all, not even an engineering background (which in itself isn’t an issue, but when comparing the two it does factor in as Amir has an Electrical Engineering degree and was VP of Media at Microsoft).
I also found it very concerning that GoldenSound began a smear campaign against Amir. Instead of countering his points, he tried to discredit the writer of them. He did eventually write a very lengthy apology for doing so.
EDIT: The ASR thread is toxic as hell, lets not extend that tone here.
Wikipedia is clear about the definition of “lossless”
Lossless compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data.
By contrast, lossy compression permits reconstruction only of an approximation of the original data, though usually with greatly improved compression rates and therefore reduced media sizes.
MQA definitely fits in definition 2.
For some odd reason they wanted us to believe it was 1 all the time.
And after the GS video it suddenly became 0 (“better than lossless”) … and then people like Amir started inventing “mathematically lossless”.
However I didn’t see the definition on wikipedia change to “mathematically lossless compression”. It’s still “lossless compression”.
I will agree on that last point and am sorry if I have contributed to it. But…
…I don’t think his EE degree or being a VP at Microsoft Media are all that important, and may even hinder his ability to look outside the by the book box of just purely measuring things and fitting the results to his agenda of ‘war on snake oil’ (do you really think the thousands that have bought better switches, cables, etc from established, upright companies, with EE’s of their own, are all experiencing nothing more than delusional ‘expectation bias’ as according to him and his ASR acolytes?). Amir has smeared many in the industry, not to mention audiophiles who hear the changes that result with careful attention to all aspects of the reproduction chain, and if one does that they had better be thick skinned enough to receive it back. Toxicity works both ways.
Fuel systems and ignition systems let alone exhausts systems have changed on all cars in fundamental ways whilst I have been in this industry. The critics howled about the loss of carbs and those dammed emission standards, but the change became inevitable and for the greater good. Who would really go back for reasons other than nostalgia.
Well, audio is changing too but not as fast as I would like.
[Moderated]
The reality is MQA is one of the worst things happening to the audio industry.
It’s trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist and then monetize it. Even among its fans, there’s mass confusion about exactly what it does and doesn’t do, and there is nobody in that group that said all their music just sounded so bad before MQA existed.
There would be so much more transparency and less confusion among consumers without MQA.
So this may be already answered elsewhere, but I can’t find it. Has any significant signal analysis been done on the unfolded 16/44 FLAC file that is MQA which is delivered to Tidal users who don’t subscribe to Master (HiFi Subscribers)?
I ask because it would seem that locating a sample set of the same FLAC file from sources of known provenance and doing a comparison would at least put to rest whether or not the non-hi-rez MQA is in fact lossless. If they can’t get 16/44 right then a lot of questions need to be answered.
Again, sorry if this is well-known and established - but if so, it’s not by me or easily found.
And just to comment on anyone’s education and ability to understand signal processing/DSP/encoding, I have several Engineering degrees (EE/CE/AE/CS) and frankly that was all textbook fodder for those who discovered Engineering wasn’t for them. Please don’t bash on those who’ve accomplished completing STEM degrees because the fields are so wide that not everyone knows everything there is in said field. That’s why everyone specializes.
This topic is not something I’ve spent a lifetime on, other than encoding of digital signals (not audio). However, it would appear to me that the statement about the marketability of this fixup to lossless black-box is highly accurate: it would be worth far more money in other industries (let your own imagination run wild, but it could be extremely disruptive).
…and if I may interject, Patronising the very people that are expected to pay for the MQA “product” certainly won’t help the MQA cause nor inspire confidence in a system which relies on secrecy or diversion to avoid effective peer reviews.
While I may not have the technical prowess of many commentators to fully analyse MQA I do recognise when an organisation is avoiding answering difficult questions, there appears to be something to hide & it’s not intellectual property rights. I’m out of here!
This is not a bad thing but the testing methodologies need to be consistent so that everyone’s results are relatable on similar models if there is overlap. I love specs as much as the next geek but it all still comes down to the listening experience and how critical you are going about it. Me - I rather have the music available in whatever listenable formats are out there but I wont dismiss listening to something just because its MQA or Spotify or on the radio.
Any day from now I am looking forward to MQA’s explanation that their “1st unfold” can be done in software, or in usb dac hardware. I tested a rpi3 - it can 4x upsample at 10% CPU usage.
MQA first unfold can be done in software, Roon does this as does Tidal. It requires a licence in the same way people expect wages when they go to work.
