MQA explanations wanted - fundamentalists need not apply

Is any DAC worth the money? You are the only one who can decide this really. I’m quite happy with just the first unfold and in no rush to upgrade just for MQA’s sake.

This is where a great retailer should be able to help you with demo units to try at home.

This is from RMAF 2018, ‘MQA: The truth lies somewhere in the middle’ Wow, that was tough to watch!

We can’t refute Archimago’s science so lets just repeatedly use his anomynity as an excuse to why marketing must be true.

All the MQA representatives in the audience had to do was to speak the “truth” and prove him wrong. It’s pretty obvious why they chose these particular tactics.

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I revised my post after watching this great presentation.

Chris Connaker has come over brilliantly in this. He is clearly the next Stereophile if he continues to maintain his impartiality and he continues to ask poiniant questions that are in the interests of his customer base. He appears to be on the side of the consumer and offers a refreshing alternative to the paid advertising shills of the audiophile review world.

MQA management on the other hand exuded ignorance and simply came out with ad hominem and hand waving attacks from the peanut gallery. Every point MQA made was an ad hominem (attack the person not the science). Based on the way they tried to disrupt and undermine everything presented, I think MQA management don’t even begin to understand or have a grasp of the science of audio engineering at all. Valid points made by Chris should have been acknowledged but they weren’t - and this exposes MQA as being mere management charlatans rather than clever engineers (what they should be). The mediocre quality of MQA management and their strong appeal to authority marketing may be enough to fool some audiophiles (who all want the fairytale of studio quality to be true) but MQA management won’t fool anyone with half a brain cell or any real scientific background or anyone who cares to take a look under the hood of MQA.

MQA management should have stayed away from the presentation and it would have quietly been forgotten. By showing up in force and aggressively attacking Chris, they have quite clearly made Chris into a hero: David standing alone against the Goliath of the record labels and manufacturers.

As Chris stated, the questions he raises about MQA have been on CA for many months and he has invited and welcomed a response or rebuttal from MQA but none was forthcoming …until today when we got an earful of noisey ad hominem attacks without anything substantive from a scientific perspective.

If I was DCS, EMM Labs or anyone seeking to maintain a reputation for accuracy in digital music then I would drop MQA immediately…

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It’s been polishing the proverbial from the outset.

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I must say that the reactions from the MQA representatives in this video did not engender confidence in their product in me. But as Chris Connaker’s concluding slide rightly stated, the success or failure of MQA is not down to me - it’s down to decisions taken by the Amazons and Spotifys of this world.

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The video was almost as riveting as the Kavanaugh hearings.

The Bard wrote something about “protesting too much” that I think applies to the video. MQA didn’t score any points.

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Thanks for posting this! Chris is clearly very patient and did a great job responding to the MQA folks (who were being jerks for the most part, I agree). Though I don’t think his presentation really fit the “somewhere in the middle” title. He was mostly presenting anti-MQA arguments and not equivocating them much or at all. It’s not surprising that the MQA folks felt that he was unfair. The DRM point in particular was very hand-wavy, he could have broken that down a bit and said what definitions of DRM it might fit and which it doesn’t.

There’s a danger of endlessly rehashing the same arguments, which is something I see happen a lot especially in audio forums. What Chris was doing there was basically yet another MQA thread on ComputerAudiophile. Teasing apart what people are saying and what’s known, or where he has good information, would have been more helpful IMHO. He still could have come out on one side, but at least based it on more than “this guy says and that guy says.”

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There are no claims. Facts were presented that have been on CA that MQA has chosen to leave unanswered for months. A fact is a fact. It stands on its own merit. The plots and questions could be generated by anyone - that isn’t the point - although MQA would prefer to argue from the positional authoritative perspective as self-proclaimed experts - “I don’t want to talk about scientific details. I am right because I have more experience than you. Just take my word for it” sums up MQA argument.

It think it is great that MQA voluntarily snookered themselves by trashing his presentation with nothing other than meaningless ad hominem points. MQA management have done a great service by exposing themselves for everyone to see that they don’t have a leg to stand on.

I think the truth can and should be re-hashed as many times as possible. The one thing about the truth is that it never changes and important accurate criticisms of MQA remain unanswered to this day!

If he presented the responses he got from MQA and explained why he disagreed or how they were incorrect I would have found this a much more convincing argument. Now it seems like there could have been valid arguments made by the MQA folks that Chris is just ignoring. Maybe they gave BS answers that dodged the questions but just from watching this there’s no way to know.

I do think the Archimago thing from the MQA side was ridiculous though. Exposing who they are is not going to prove the measurements to be misleading. If MQA could prove that the measurements are not representative of reality then they could have done so already.

More on MQA

There’s a 44-page firestorm raging over at the CA forum at the moment. I still don’t think that MQA has done itself any favours as a result of this debacle.

I don’t think I am going to visit, I’ll just listen to some of the best sounding music in history…
I did hear the ‘Who moved my cheese’ comment somewhere, and they don’t like it :joy:
As they say, the dogs bark and the train moves on…

Another ill-thought out, unwanted format sails into the sunset.

That assumes that half a dozen contributors to a 44 page thread will be able to make that sort of difference. Do we have that sort of power?

Almost certainly not. And nobody believed Cassandra either, but it didn’t mean that she was wrong… :grinning:

RMAF MQA talk

Already posted in this thread.

Thank you.
People can access the talk without going through Archimago, if they choose so.
But yes, you are very attentive. I expected your post.

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