Your right about Mr. Hansen Ayre. Some of exchanges with John Atkinson about MQA over at Audio Asylum are epic. Did Mr. Hansen claim that min phase is anything other than “a” way of doing it, one that is anything other than a minority in the larger audio world?
I personally went through a min phase stage. After a while, I decided that instruments with significant HF content sounded too off and “blurred”, so I went back to linear phase filtering and decided not to worry about so called “ringing” and nuclear war
It’s a good thing I had and have that choice, and don’t have an encoding at the bottom of my digital ecosystem that forces this or that philosophy upon me…
I Absolutely agree! There always must be a choice and there is no “absolute” truth in DAC respectively digital filter technology.
MQA and Bob Steward claims to have the “one and only” solution for “original” sounding music, based on an exclusive blackbox technology, in theory from the studio to the digital/analog conversion on the consumer side and to replace all other formats because it would be the Swiss Army knife for the future of the audio industry. Regardless of any “promised” sonic advantages, this monopolistic approach, in cooperation with the built-in potential DRM abilities to make the labels happy, should alert anyone who loves music and consider the diversity of media and technologies as basis for any progress in sound quality of audio devices.
This is no new finding, we already talked about this fundamental issues with MQA in the old PonoMusic Community back in 2015.
It is a mathematical certainty. The perfect anti-alias filter is sharp and linear phase. In theory the transition band should start at 20 KHz and the stop band at 25KHz. (Assuming anything above 20 KHz is irrelevant which is still accepted). Any filter that does not meet these requirements is simply going to be less accurate. A mathematical certainty known by Sony Philips when CD redbook was designed.
Haha! Thousands of hours of R&D just for seamlessly switching? This could have been better spent on improving their products. I can understand the frustration hardware manufacturers faced. That may be the reason why it is considered a back burner.
Again, the “authentication” is marketing speak, nothing more. How do you think they “authenticate” a master for which none of the producers, artists, or engineers who originally made it are still alive?
Record companies are known to have poor storage and databases of catalog material.
Have you heard about the principals in more recent recordings who’ve said they had nothing to do with the MQA version of one of their albums and don’t approve of the sound of the result? Is that authentic?
Are you aware that it’s been shown that a so called 24/96 authentic MQA file can be truncated to 16 bits and it will still light up the little blue light? So tell me again, how the blue light proves something?
And my comment about only 200k subscribers to the Tidal hires tier and the position of Tidal in the market is a fact. Simple as that.
I trust my ears, and it sounds great here. The analog output is authenticated at source and this is buried in the file to prove it. That’s it… It’s signed off by those with the legal right to do so.
With CD and High Res, you have no clue, you take it on faith but you don’t know.
Who says MQA is analogous at the output of an MQA DAC to the original input? MQA say so, obviously, but since their encoding discards bits and is thus lossy it is simply impossible for them to get as close to the original signal as the original digital master.
How is it authenticated? Certainly not by the original artists, as there are many MQA releases by artists who have been dead for a long time. So is it “authenticated” by someone in marketing? Sales? Heaven?
This just turned into another MQA argument thread. Thought the point was whether Tidal was still offering the non-MQA version is all.
It doesn’t matter if some love it and can’t figure out why others would find this a negative. It’s just the fact that having that option to choose from is now gone for some albums. I chose to sign back up with Qobuz again.
Chris, MQA is lossy. The Max resolution of any MQA file is 17/96. Even if the original master is 24/384. All info above the 17/96 level is discarded. Any thing above that is upsampling during the so called unfolding. That’s all confirmed by MQA and Bob Stuart himself.
So lots of information is lost. MQA has decided they know what’s musical information and what isn’t. What their algorithm says isn’t is discarded when a file is MQA’d. What happens when their algorithm is wrong?
You can like MQA all your want, but just be honest with yourself and everyone else when you post.
MQA is an encoding format. I think, like many other people out there, you may have misunderstood what you’re hearing and why. What you’re saying is that you like what MQA have done in terms of modifying the audio files (which I wont call “masters” as their origin is doubtful).
For myself, when I tried the MQA versions of some very familiar albums, they had had a very strange EQ applied, or significant pitch changes (really?!?) or other issues that suggested that they had either modified the files or used different masters so that end-listeners would notice a significant difference and attribute it to the MQA file format, when it was no such thing. I do not want to listen to significantly doctored, lossy files. That is not what I paid for.
Now if MQA had released a bunch of new masters in a regular format and claimed that their mastering of the music was better, I can accept that. But not the subterfuge.
Roon does seem to have an issue with search, at least lately. Stuff isn’t showing up as it should, such as items in my library that I know are there and have added to and played before from playlists. Whether this is related I do not know. I know at least one of the principles of Roon is an MQA fan (see the Stereophile “MQA yes or no” video on Youtube) so I just hope that this isn’t a misguided effort to push people towards it.
I’ve noticed the same. Several of the MQA releases are a touch louder than the non-MQA. Have also noticed what I thought at the time were EQ differences (but didn’t spend time checking, as I did on the volume levels.) Have also thought “hmmm, that sounds a bit brighter”, but not always in a good way. Might be EQ. Might be the thing you referred to as pitch.
Ah, the memories of the FM radio pitch wars, where stations upped the speed of their turntables to make albums sound brighter… until in competition some markets had gone up almost a full pitch.
My listening impression with MQA, which I feel is clearer, with more “presence”, reminds me of looking at photographic prints. When I see prints made by my professional photographer friends themselves next to prints made for gallery sale by the big sophisticated print operations, the commercially printed images look a touch sharper, crisper, and feel like there’s a bit less digital noise in the shadows. Having worked for a professional print house, I find that massively ironic, because I know what’s done. The editor adds noise (gaussian noise, like grain) to the image before printing. That makes people PERCEIVE the image to be sharper, crisper, and less noisy.
