Things like this (whether it’s demonstrably psychosomatic or not, eh 
) is why the situation’s more ominous than just ditching Tidal for Qobuz.
I’m not a computer scientist, but I simply can’t see anything that MQA does that couldn’t technically be done with existing free and open tools, and that includes authentication: auth on a hash in a metadata field, add a SoX tag or two for the filtering, etc, etc.
Well. If folks can’t hear a difference at all with MQA then what is the point of it? I definitely can. I hear some subtle distortion (phase and poor imaging and loudness dynamic compression) while others hear the Angels singing (that kind of hyperbole is definitely psychosomatic) …the interpretation of distortion as a pleasing effect is well documented - many prefer certain high end tubes over a more accurate sound from SS (myself included).
Thanks, MusicFidelity and all others who participated in this topic.
Completely agreed - I’m not necessarily thinking “DSP as a way to make a crappy speaker acceptable” or “a small speaker big”, but more “make a great speaker even better”, more, to take a practical example, on the lines of what Audeze did with Roon than what Dirac did with the Apple earbuds. My hunch is what we’re seeing from Kii, D&D and B&O is just the beginning.
Yes. And it’s something that needs to be split from mysticism. I don’t see why it’d be heretical to front Kiis with a tube pre, for example, it’s just that I don’t think the “have you ever heard a SET amp” / “SET amps are the best, solid state sucks and you’re deaf and dumb if you don’t like SET amps” type gatekeeping is of any interest.
We talk a lot about Lossy and Lossless, here’s a thing about streaming, Tidal, Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Lossy and Lossless. No Qobuz… Which STREAMING SERVICE SOUNDS the BEST?
I’ve been listening to Apple Music a lot lately. I like it.
I must be a true lossy lover – as opposed to the fake stuff from MQA. Let’s call that glossy from now on.
Yes the audibility of distortion levels of MQA are similar to Apple compression at 256. Not readily apparent without careful examination and knowing what to listen for. Definitely for casual listening AAC 256 and MP3 320 and MQA are perfectly acceptable formats.
However, Apple and MP3 working groups never stated that their product was “master authenticated” or better than high resolution. Therein lies the problem with MQA…inflated marketing claims. Money for old rope…
3.3. Environment and Microphones
Fellgett derived the fundamental limit for microphones,
based on detection of thermal noise, shown for an
omnidirectional microphone at 300°K in Figure 9 [52].
Cohen and Fielder included useful surveys of the selfnoise for several microphones [51]. Inherent noise is less
important if the microphone is close to the instrument and
mixing techniques are used, but for recordings made
from a normal listening position then the microphone is
a limiting factor on dynamic range – more so if several
microphones are mixed. Their data showed one
microphone with a noise-floor 5 dB below the human
hearing threshold, but other commonly used
microphones show mid-band noise 10 dB higher in level
than just-detectable noise. This further suggests that
those recordings can be entirely distributed in channels
using 18–20 bits.
3.4. Properties of Music
Content of interest to human listeners has temporal and
frequency structure and never fills a coding space
specified with independent ‘rectangular’ limits for
frequency and amplitude ranges. As we noted in Section
2.2, environmental sounds show a 1/f spectral tendency.
Ensembles of animal vocalizations and speech have selfsimilarity which leads to spectra that decline steadily
with frequency. Music is similar but the levels decline at
a progressively increasing rate
And your point is ?
officially released, 24 bit, 192khz MQA-authenticated , recording of Like a Virgin ? Your example of an old track on tape and Bob Stuart thought about it. Just info.
Then the relevant link was his own post on that specific recording, which I linked to yesterday.
Whether it’s a blog post or an AES paper doesn’t change anything to Archimago’s findings.
There is nothing new presented. CD 16 bit and 44.1 KHz redbook has long been known to be a technically perfect format for distribution (if produced correctly).
The only problem with CD redbook is the inadequate design of DACs for playback. Too many, if not most DACs, suffer from differential non-linearity, IMD, jitter and other issues. The ONLY reason that higher resolution works better for consumer playback is the inadequacy of the majority of DACs and the possibility of better DSP accuracy with greater bit depths and sample rates.
A higher sample rate and a greater bit depth on playback has the tendency to help randomize timing and amplitude errors and facilitate filtering such that it is all further from the audio band and less audible.
A good DAC will sound perfect and measure exceptionally well with CD redbook. The majority of other DACs will sound better upsampled by software. (In general the best measured performance type DACs are upsampling anyway because that improves accuracy upon conversion to analog ). Of course, listeners may prefer DACs that do not perform well from a measured response - just as many of us like tubes…
Finally, studios actually do need greater bit depth and higher sample rates because the recording, mixing and mastering process involves digital manipulation and greater resolution offers much better mathematical accuracy when massaging the audio.
It is the MQA filter which created the typical sound signature, some like this kind of sound which may resemble to old analog sound with some distortion… but I don’t. Music is supposedly being created for what they sound originally but not to process again to sound like something else. Digital filters in PCM have a large impact on SQ and this is an evidence. One can imagine there so many MQA filters (more than 16 of them) and each is used for different music contents. This tunning process of applying different filters on different music contents is like applying a subtle EQ to their likings.
I was not aware of 16 filters.
I guess if they tailor the sound towards what listeners like then that is good but the claims of Master Authenticated are just silly if the reality is some kind of pleasant DSP.
I am not a fan of pleasant sound. I prefer accuracy. That said, I like the way tube even harmonic distortion can help tease out more detail in a mix. I find hi-hat with a good tube is more easily heard in a mix - probably due to harmonic overtones that don’t normally exist on a hi-hat but are very helpful to our ears/brain. It is amazing but if we hear ONLY harmonic overtones then our ears/brain work out and hear the fundamental…so something buried in the mix in rock music with heavy guitars (masking) is suddenly apparent with tubes…
I believe that tubes are a very effective way to reduce the effect of masking (a loud sound of lower frequency masks higher frequencies that are close above it). I roll tubes to find ones that are most effective to get stuff out that tends to be buried by electric guitars. Rock has nearly always been a fight between guitarist drummer and vocalist with everyone trying to be loudest! Only in his old age did Page finally give us more detail of Bonham’s handywork…the deluxe LZ editions from around 2014 are nice because the drums are more audible.
Some background on the different filters here. These are different filters applied during rendering / upsampling (after core decoding) to supposedly compensate for differences in DAC characteristics (and recording chain, I suppose). Which filter would be the correct one to actually compensate for any deficiencies in the end to end chain is a bit of a shot in the dark. On top of that, a DAC that needs compensation of deficiencies in this way would be a pretty lousy one. Differences in DAC performance tend to be below -100db, well below the threshold of audibility (see stereophile or audiosciencereview for examples of measurements).
But “end to end control” sounds good in marketing.
Can one not also imagine hat they are used to compensate for A/D conversion in the original, hence being “un-EQing”. Huge leap there…
bottom line is play it without mqa if its available and with and see what works best with your setup. add the one you like best to your library and the other not.
No, I cannot imagine that. In a modern digital recording of a band with analog instruments there are hundreds of A/D conversion with different converters. How will you ‘componsate’ all this conversions. These kind of claims are not believable and one of the reasons people like me have a strong snake oil feeling about mqa.
These filters are ALL minimum phase and apodizing. They are leaky from an aliasing perspective. They broaden the transient/reduce the peak amplitude.
This can ONLY be described as distortion.
Look at this filter - it is an appalling design.
This isn’t science. It is total BS. Scientifically an ideal filter is the white line. In practice a filter should have a transition band between 20KHz and 25KHz.
I am not surprised this is audible because it is awful.
If people like the sound then they enjoy added distortion - it is as simple as that.
Hundreds of A/D conversions? That sounds very unlikely. Presumably you have recording experience or some evidence to back that up?
I think these claims are credible, the logic is clear, the rationale sound.
