Hello
Could you elaborate on “white glove treatment”? What does that mean? (3:30)
What is “impulse response square wave” and other “illegal signals” to test performance of lossy encoding process?
What is illegal and why is it? Could you clarify, please?
Because it’s still very difficult to find real data here. Despite their unpopularity in some quarters measurements are still a more reliable source of objective information than ears. Ears can tell you what you like, measurements will tell you why you like it.
This is surely a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Why not approach the company themselves first rather than a clandestine movement with no right to recourse for MQA? If there’d been a prior suspicion that there’d be a takedown of the tracks after contacting MQA a different approach might have been advisable.
MQA’s determination to keep the technical facts in the dark and supress attempts at independent testing are precisely the things that have got us to this point, and prevent folk from moving on.
Not all publications and specifications are like patents at all, a quick browse of the IETF Site will quickly disabuse you of your misapprehension.
We’ve dealt enough with the lossless thing, including several responses immediately above. Let’s just avoid this silly issue, shall we?
I know the AS publications thanks; nothing there hasn’t been discussed a thousand times and much of what’s there is equally problematic
It’s not a “silly issue” at all.
MQA marketed themselves as lossless. They claimed to be lossless but with a smaller filesize.
That was demonstrated to be false and they are now trying to pretend that was never claimed.
MQA being lossy is ENTIRELY the point of my original video.
They aren’t pretending anything at all. They have never varied, in the seven years MQA has existed, in their explanation of the techniques, psychoacoustics, and reasons for calling their signal lossless. The actual problem is in the common understanding of PCM, which includes too much excess noise. Nothing is gained by preserving all the noise in a high resolution PCM signal, whether you extoll its lossless character or not.
Then why did their original logo say “MQA Lossless” and then they had to change it to remove the “Lossless”?
I would assume it’s because they got sick to death of the attacks on their algorithm, labeling, founders, etc. Trying to get ideas across that are accurate and insightful but contradict the standard PCM chain used in audio is not simple.
Just out of curiosity, how do you know that re-encoding to MQA actually lowers the noise floor?
It doesn’t lower the noise floor, except in the sense of noise shaping (which can be used in PCM too). Their encoder measures the actual noise floor in the track (due to recording noise, venue noise etc) and uses that and signal data to determine the dynamic range that needs to be preserved.
So the noise floor of the recording decides how many bits are necessary. The rest are then spent somehow folding high-frequency content into those bits.
It’s obvious from basically all the material available to us, including the papers you linked above, that MQA is just another lossy codec that prefers minimum phase for reconstruction (“temporal deblurring”). It’s just premium MP3 with a forced reconstruction filter. My old Cambridge DACmagic had a minimum phase button, why do we need to implement it in the sound file?
Does this video attempt to get across its ideas in an accurate and insightful manner?
It’s difficult to see the claim of “reversibly lossless” in the context of the video as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead. That’s the textbook definition of lossless compression right there, only used where it shouldn’t be, no? Back to that issue of who to trust.
I don’t have time to watch at the moment, but what about assuming it’s just a poor explanation. Bob Stuart doesn’t have an easy job trying to get ideas across in a way that’s comprehensible to the ordinary person who has no idea what a filter is, and certainly not what processing is done in lossless compression. It’s a lot better to work at understanding the ideas than to nitpick at every wording choice.
This whole discussion doesn’t change a thing about the situation. What’s happening in the market does.
Totally agree:
I disagree with this. As a consumer I’d like to decide what to do with that “noise” by aligning my view of what to do with it in software I control and sending the bitstream over to hardware I control.
Or Spotify may make high res along with redbook available, and trounce Apple. Or none of them may put out a product that competes with Tidal and Qobuz on quality, and all of them survive. The streaming world is developing rapidly and it’s far too soon to know. But everyone should be happy that better quality is becoming possible.
Feel free. You have lots of options.
There is lossy encoding which removes data to make the resulting bitstream smaller. Then there is package compression which looks for repeating patterns and reduces the size of a file to represent those repeating patterns in a smaller package.
In the first example that’s a lossy codec. You’re literally changing the audio waveform to remove information from it. You cannot reconstruct the original waveform because the data simply isn’t there (although MQA uses a method which comes really close). However, you can argue we cannot hear the difference between the lossy and lossless wave form.
The second does not touch the waveform. It simply forces a an “uncompress” operation on the package to put the bitstream back to its original, uncompressed, state. Nothing is lost from the original bitstream by this operation.
MQA isn’t a container (it uses FLAC as its container). It, however, does do the lossy encoding thing (although in the most sophisticated way I think we’re ever seen in history, got to give MQA credit for that as that’s a nice achievement). This makes it a poor solution for archival purposes and forces MQA filters and noise shaping on consumer which has, traditionally, been something the consumer got to chose for themselves and not dictated by the publisher/streaming provider. It’s really that last part I have an issue with no matter if it sounds good or bad to my ears.
Lossless in not the subject of discussion anymore, the response it just an example of twisting language to make their increasingly funny excuses every time they are asked for simple answers. What they mean by lossless is completely irrelevant. The same with deblurring, and master quality authentication of the batch conversion of a million files to MQA. I think there is no point in asking Bob Stuart any more questions, and GoldenOne said that he will not make any more videos about MQA.
I suspect you are taking on the whole audio industry, and the poetic license that is core to marketing (don’t look at cables!). I really don’t understand how a subjective experience of something positive has to be diminished because of alleged inadequacies of marketing materials. And there’s the rub…do you think anyone who might like what MQA sounds like, to them, were born yesterday? I can’t think of a single audio company that doesn’t amplify (no pun intended) what its product does…but with a smidgeon of media literacy, one learns to suspend belief, test for oneself, and make up ones own mind.
[Moderated]
Lossless or not, the bigger issue is if MQA and the three major record labels decide to deliver MQA FLAC as the default file delivery, then we are all stuffed as this is the long term strategy, locking the master away from the consumer. At the moment Tidal are cornered with MQA and the competition are free to deliver PCM FLAC to the consumer so long may it continue, as there are plenty of choice of alternative platforms to suit the casual listener through to the audiophile with competitive costs for now