MQA disappointing

Audio Gear Talk MQA
1790

I’m certain Tidal is a great streaming service.

As for the files added per month thing, I actually went soft on you, because there’s no need to be mean. But since you insist…

When you say “growing at 100k a month”, it is actually an argument against MQA, Ltd. They sold MQA (in part) as some type of exclusive process requiring loads of work, because it “corrects” for “imperfections” in the “time signature” of dacs (or something like that). Where they found the engineers capable of doing that for 10’000 albums a month remains to be explained, but it mostly means the whole “authenticated by the artist” thing is bullshit, unless you count automated authentication as a valid sign-off.

This has been long-established. Since you seem to like argument by authority, I’ll quote John Siau for you. You’re a “Network Analyst”, fond of measurements, surely you won’t be so arrogant as to say you know better than the man who designed some of the best-measuring DACs ever ?

As for your graph, I know screenshots are difficult, but it’s so blurry I don’t have the slightest as to what it actually represents. There’s something green, and something yellow, that’s pretty much all i can tell. For all I know, you could be showing me the bandwidth taken by a 4k midget porn stream.

I’d encourage you to use your computer guy knowledge, download the file I linked to earlier (which happens to be one you, yourself, referred to), and look at the bitrate in your player - I’m a genuinely thoughtful guy, I know, I know, no need to thank me for using your own examples. If it’s too big a file for you to download, and you have problems with multiplications and divisions, you can try using a video bitrate calculator such as this one, enter the filesize and the duration, and 0 out the audio overhead.

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1791

Well, MQA’s Bob Stuart explained that there’s a Studio Certification for each recording to asure the MQA recording is exactly bit by bit the same as in the Recording Studio.

And the Recording Studios like Sony or Warner comply with this.

If you insist to say this is fake…let’s just leave it that way…Mr Mean Man,

I do not rely on my own knowledge alone, but also on those people that created the MQA Technology.

So against what this Gentleman says (like many others) I do ask you to read the text from Bob Stuart,

At the end each one chooses who believe in.

If you want to deny what you see it’s your choice, I am pretty sure that there is a lot of people following this thread that do not have the slightest doubt of what I am showing here.

As a matter of fact I’ve been really soft with you just for fun.

Because Facts Talk…as always.

1792

Then again…When You and QOBUZ had finished catching up…I’ll be here…comfortably seated since the waiting will surely be long

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1793

I am saying that at best, a vast majority of MQA files do not offer any custom improvement in terms of sound quality, which was one of the original BS claims, nor are they authenticated by the artist. I’m glad we can agree on this.

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They are lying to you. This is demonstrable: if there was sampling above 48khz, then it’d be measurable at output. It isn’t.

And if you’d actually known anything about BS interviews, you would’ve linked to this Stereophile piece, where Stuart tries to address Siau’s claim head-on.

I would strongly encourage those people to not trust your word or mine, and verify for themselves using the 2L file, mostly because they should ask themselves how reliable a network analyst who doesn’t command elementary school math can be as an authority on anything.

For example, do any of these operations result in a number that eqals 10 (as in the claim “TIDAL 8 Mbps QOBUZ 80 Mbps”):

155 divided by 46
197 divided by 26
185 divided by 50
338 divided by 98
42 divided by 18

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1794

Some people keep repeating that MQA is lossy.

Some people keep repeating that MQA is not lossy.

Some people keep repeating that MQA sounds really good.

Some people keep repeating that MQA sounds really bad.

Some people keep repeating that the differences between MQA and other digital formats are very difficult to hear.

Some people keep repeating that MQA is DRM.

Some people keep repeating that MQA is not DRM.

Some people keep repeating that this whole discussion is superfluous and that people should start listening to music again.

Some people keep repeating that others keep repeating themselves.

Did I forget anything?

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1795

MQA must have a great many of employees to get the ‘authentication’ from all the artists and original sound engineers for 100 k tracks each month. Impressive.

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1796

MQA = Many Questions Abound

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1797

We don’t just need a Heart Button, we need a :joy: button…

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1798

You mean MQA Ltd can encode 100k tracks per month? That sounds to be like a feat. Qobuz doesn’t even need to do any conversion at all. All it needs is to get the Hi-Res tracks directly from the music labels. In view of this, Qobuz should be growing faster than Tidal.

My question to you, how to get that info from or you simply just making up yourself?

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1799

MQA=Many Questions Asked.

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1800

The corollary of this is that I can’t recall ever seeing a product (except perhaps the Linn Sondek turntable from the 70s and 80s) that has attracted such a concerted and coordinated attack from its critics.

Now, I am not as much of an advocate for MQA as some others here, and I fully accept that MQA is not a lossless format/process. However, as I have stated before, whenever an MQA Master of an album I add to my Roon Library is available, I generally (but not always) prefer it to its 16bit, 44.1 alternative on both my microRendu/Mytek Brooklyn+ DAC and Linn Klimax DS/1 based systems.

There are a number of people on this forum who are much more vigorous in their support of MQA than am I, but there are very many more like me who simply believe that some of the MQA Masters on Tidal sound pretty good and are a very worthwhile bonus to the standard Tidal streaming service.

One thing that strikes me is that many of those who decry MQA are significantly more persistent in respect of their posts almost to the extent of bullying and certainly with an unhealthy evangelical zeal. Let me qualify this a little. There are those who decry MQA because they believe that it is an attempt to stealthily introduce DRM into the music industry; there are those who are of the opinion that MQA marketing in its early life was misleading; there are those who simply find that to their ears and in their systems, MQA encoded files do not sound as good as full hi-res or standard 16bit files. Some of those individuals actually state that some MQA files actually sound pretty good, but they are opposed to MQA on principle. Each of these positions has its merit and they are all legitimate points of criticism or at least debate, even if I do not fully subscribe to most of them.

However, there are a number of other individuals who post very frequently on this and other forums with what appears to be a very unhealthy compulsion to rebut absolutely any implied positive comments relating to MQA. Some persistent posters claim with absolute authority and arrogance that ‘MQA is lossy so it cannot possibly sound good’, or that ‘all MQA Masters sound awful’ or that ‘MQA sounds worse than heavily compressed MP3’ equivalents, and that those who voice support of any sort for MQA are either at best simply ‘ignorant’ or at worst in the pay of those who promote and license MQA. The latter view is preposterous, patronising or downright deliberately antagonistic, and such absolute views in respect of sound quality are actually at odds with those of some of their fellow critics of MQA.

Again - I repeat my position which I believe to be a more reasonable position to hold than that of some of those who are most vocal in their criticisms of MQA.

In my view MQA Master files on Tidal can sound very good when played through my MQA enabled DAC, or via the Roon first MQA unfold through my non MQA DAC, although I accept that others will not share my positive experience. However, despite my personal opinion about the sound quality of MQA files, the quality of a DAC (and its streaming partner) as a whole is of more importance to me than the inclusion of MQA support. In the event that I were to choose a DAC in future I would audition and choose the DAC that sounds best with non MQA source material simply because such material constitutes by far the majority of source material available to me. In the event that my chosen DAC were to fully support MQA then that would be a bonus.

Absolutes have no place in music or music reproduction, nor in any other similarly subjective field of argument.

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1801

Possibly not, but you have hit on the one that is most appropriate:

"Some people keep repeating that this whole discussion is superfluous and that people should start listening to music again".

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1802

I think you’ve ‘hit the nail on the head’ here. I think with respect to comparisons to 16/44.1 streams from Tidal, MQA is more-often-than-not the clear winner. At least that’s what I’m finding anyway.

It’s only when you compare MQA to ‘true’ High-Res streams from Qobuz, or from your local library that the water becomes muddied. But is that a fair, or even valid comparison to make? Yes, true 24-bit streams are now available from Qobuz (for the moment), but aren’t we comparing ‘apples to oranges’ here?

I have always maintained that MQA ‘fits’ with streaming. I would never buy an MQA download, and would always plump for the 24-bit files over MQA. But I enjoy streaming it from Tidal, as you do.

And maybe that’s where all this debate is possibly irrelevant. There will always be people who pay for a 24-bit download, but those numbers are shrinking.

However, the growth is in streaming. And that’s where I believe MQA fits in. It may well become the ‘universal standard’ for streaming high-quality streams, rather than MP3/AAC. And if, or when, more labels and distributors adopt MQA, it may well be that 24/96+ streams, such as are available from Qobuz right now become a thing of the past. I personally hope that this doesn’t happen, as I like having choice at the moment, but if the future of streaming from Tidal/Qobuz was a 16/44.1 and MQA-only ‘universe’, then I don’t think it would pose a detriment to my enjoyment of streamed music.

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1803

Didn’t Stereophile find that the MQA Mytek DAC uses minimum phase filters irrespective of MQA or not - in that sense it may sound a lot more like MQA to begin with? Leaky minimum phase filters being the secret sauce of MQA.

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1804

I think it has the stock Sabre options until MQA kicks in. Not sure if they fixed the not switch back after getting MQA.

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1805

Sometimes due to switch from PCM to MQA or vice versa can cause some noise, so manufacturers stick with MQA filter for PCM. Of course this solve the switching noise but PCM is playback on MQA filter which is not intended to. When this happened, the measurements will show up with aliasing and noise due to leaky MQA filter.

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1806

HWell that will certainly affect listening evaluations.

My PS Audio DSD does MQA unfold all inside the Bridge II - supposedly - so that may get round this additional problem with most MQA DACs. Of course it upsamples to 4x DSD so the output filter won’t be MQA but the upsampling to 88/96 or 192 likely uses those poor quality MQA filters.

1807

I fixed the sentence for you. MQA is not like yet another audio product - a speaker, cable, software player, or even encoding. It is an attempt at DRM, which is to say it is the product that all these other products depend on - and you depend on to listen to any music at all.

So naturally it is going to get more attention and focus. Turns out, it’s a big fat nothing burger. Almost none of its claims are true, and even those that are true are highly qualified.

The rest of your post is (yet another) verbose recounting of the subjective evaluation, but that method is quite besides the point to MQA’s DRM and place in our digital (musical) ecosystems. As the Robert Harley of TAS put is a few years back, MQA is not about “how it sounds” and “does it work for me” and subjective evaluation. It’s about DRM, the “crown jewels”, and the reality of the music industry in modern digital commerce.

So, back to the point, has anyone ever seen such an organized and concerted astroturfing campaign in audio before?

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1808

Yes and no. The filtering used in the folding itself has already affected the “sound” of MQA even through your scenario. Not that MQA is about the “sound” of anything. It begins and ends with DRM…

1809

Oh I agree that MQA minimum phase leaky upsampling filter will still be overwhelming everything that is sent from the bridge.

That said - if I play another non-MQA track then it will use the upsampling filters in the PS DSD DAC - by all accounts these are pretty much your standard linear phase type (what has been trusted and proven mathematically for 50 years).

MQA seems to have invented a whole new branch of audio science in order to justify their solution to a non-existent problem - voodoo marketing.

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