No, it is just as easy as it seems. Your whole point is that bandwidth/CPU/etc. resources are finite. Of course, but so what? A closed source monopolistic encoding that fundamentally changes the market away form an existing open (digital audio) solutions is the fix rather than a bit more resources here or there, or setting the core to downsample to 24/48 PCM, which would be superior to MQA because it compresses better in FLAC anyways?? Can’t have everything (Netflix + Zoom + multizone + kids tablets + …), with our without MQA. MQA brings nothing of significance to the table, and lots of downsides for the consumer. MQA is irrelevant in todays Streaming/ISP/LAN-Wifi environment.
Your example shows 11.56 mbps between your router and ONE ENDPOINT.
A speed-test between a router to one end-point measures exactly that - the available speed between those two points. Your speed test does not measure total additive bandwidth available across your wifi network, which is additive to the speed you have to this endpoint. So if someone in your household fires up a YouTube or 1080p session to their endpoint, that is very unlikely to impact your 11.56mbps, unless your router is truly ancient (think >15 years old 1st gen 802.11b). Similarly, multi-zone is exactly that - multi-zone, with each carving out bandwidth from the router which, unless truly ancient, far exceeds the 11.56mbps to this one endpoint.
Your argument that MQA somehow solves this is flawed by the fact that Roon does the “first unfold” and would be sending the audio data to the endpoint at 24/96 anyway, so inside your wifi audio zone network, how exactly does MQA provide a benefit over a FLAC stream?
The point (that others have pointed out too here) is that MQA’s dishonest claims of a magical lossless “folding” compression algorithm is (a) manifestly false, and (b) not needed to solve the non-problem of anyone with old wifi infrastructure providing “only” 11.56mbps to individual endpoints.
To another point you’ve made: even if Dolby is a monopoly (they are not: DTS, Auro, etc), and even if they have been economical with the truth, that fails to make MQA’s lies and ambitions to monopoly OK. All the more reason to ensure we don’t allow yet another dishonest monster to gain ground in the industry.
Yep, agreed, but that doesn’t negate the point-of-view that MQA is a deeply flawed and dishonest “solution” looking to monetise a non-existing problem.
From the article the OP referenced, the only observation that matters -
On another note, it’s disconcerting to find a Roon employee so passionately invested in what is, after all, a long running and never to be resolved, pointless harangue about MQA.
that doesn’t negate the point-of-view that MQA is a deeply flawed and dishonest “solution” looking to monetise a non-existing problem.
MQA’s dishonest claims of a magical lossless “folding” compression algorithm is (a) manifestly false, and (b) not needed to solve the non-problem of
These mantras can be repeated over and over, and it doesn’t make any of them true. This is simply groupthink and group-delusion on the parts of the anti-MQA crowd, talking to each other for years until these become buzzwords. The article by Bill Leebens does a reasonable job summing up parts of it.
There is nothing deeply flawed about MQA. Get back to me when you understand the signal processing in it. As well as the psychoacoustics of hearing.
Bandwidth and storage are highly active topics in streaming that affect the future of streaming all over the world, including broadcast, tv, gaming, immersive audio and multichannel. Absolutely no one wants a solution involving 192 kHz/24b except a tiny group of audiophiles. Broadcast standards in most situations mandate data rates at or below 48 kHz. Discussions right now in broadcast are entirely in terms of AAC and the HE versions of it being fully transparent and more than enough, with slight nods to “some” audiophiles insisting on lossless code (considered a pointless indulgence in some of those circles).
So before a lot of blather about MQA on these websites, do some serious research on streaming today, what its problems are worldwide (especially bandwidth availability and cost), and what possible solutions exist. MQA can provide high resolution in situations where other waveforms can’t; and even that is a fight against the domination of lossy codecs everywhere.
Alot of us have had the luxury and/or knowledge to choose really good in-home networking components and devices that work well together to yield excellent and reliable music streaming over wifi and maybe live physically far enough away from neighbours such that whatever they do is not a problem.
OTOH, there are a lot (probably a vast majority) making do with whatever their ISP forced upon them, probably installed in a non ideal location in their home etc who struggle to even get a basic wifi light or switch to work reliably, never mind hi-res streaming, and they lack the knowledge/experience to do much about it and their ISP support dont consider it their fault either, so they do nothing about it unless it impacts the bundled TV streaming services.
Even with well researched good equipment, and a background of a career in and around software development, hardware development, networking at all levels, digital audio etc, you can easily end up with a software update one day to your router or some device that messes up a perfectly reliable system in some subtle way leaving you with little more than WTF?!?. Or a neighbour finds the high power mode on their router (it is has such a capability - mine does) and thinks that seems like a good idea when the damn thing is only the other side of the terraced house partition wall - ie less than a meter or so away from your gear.
The only way to avoid all/most this is go wired and avoid as much complexity and sources of failure as possible (even managed switches have been problems for people). It isnt that Wifi cant work reliably, it is that there are too many things that can go wrong that are pretty more impossible to diagnose/support remotely.
These days, cellular might actually be better for internet service unless you are a gamer. I actually get better upload/download speeds from EE in the UK at home on my iPhone that I do from BT infinity 2, but the latency is higher. Unlike BT, I dont recall it dropping out for several hours at a time while BT break/fiddle with something and fail to notify anyone or update service status etc and basically just lie about it when queried.
I realize that this has become a religious war, but i’d like to add a few comments as someone who, decades ago, sat on JPEG/MPEG (for contribution-quality studio video), designs audio professionally, and has listened pretty extensively to formats. I’ll keep this to some quick comments in bullet format:
Bandwidth matters on many fronts, from network congestion to cost for the streamer.
The lossy discussion is non-binary. MQA is lossless for red book. It is a teensy bit lossy for high res.
Our testing showed that high res formats (video or audio) have sufficient redundancy that they can suffer HUGE compression without any and then only small loss.
It also showed that in viewing tests (studio quality video remember) even the lossy stuff was vastly better than lossless NTSC (“never twice the same color”) "
MQA does not charge to encode. It sells decoders. And the first unfold is free
My listening tells me that the most critical contributor to quality is the original recording/mastering. Most of the stuff from Verve, blue note and Mercury from the early 1960s through 1970s, done on two and 3 track tape with Studer tube stuff or custom built stuff in the case of the Fines, blows away most modern HD (24/96 etc) recordings. Why? They cared. 16/44 car be fantastic.
There are many solid reasons why 16/44 often sucks. Let’s start with pre-empahsis errors, sloppy level sets that reduce it to 11 bits effective, screechy mics (performers want mics with “pop”), heavy compression and complex mix-downs, blah, blah. And we worry about -96dB being sufficient? really?
I’ll point out that i have a very, very resolving system. I am not arrogant enough to think i can measure everything as we hear it. I understand psycho-acoustics (or under stand its principles and that none of us really understand it!!)
So let’s quit bickering over absolutes. Most of the MQA version i hear on Tidal are superior to the regular versions. I honestly doubt its the MQA tho - since almost all of them are also remastered with more care, less compression etc. Back to point #2 above. “its the recording stupid”
Listen to Horace Silver’s Songs for my Father (16/44), or Ella and Louis (16/44) or the MLP 1812. Eah is revelatory in suggesting where sonic problems are and are not.
Oh, and get your room right and set up your speakers.
Excellent post, @Just_Me.
We are learning more about psychoacoustics and neuroscience though. I look forward to it changing the way audio is understood.
Let me preface my analysis by stating that I am not the worlds foremost expert on WiFi, and that I invite any corrections.
I think you have a misunderstanding about how WiFi works. Your statement appears to assume that:
A. All routers support MU-MIMO.
B. All devices support MU-MIMO.
C. The devices are located far enough away from each other that they can be beamformed too separately.
MU-MIMO support was added to the WiFi spec in IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2 (aka WiFi 5 Wave 2). Remember, 802.11ac is limited to the 5GHz band, it won’t do anything for your 802.11n (WiFi 4) devices. MU-MIMO made it’s way to the 2.4GHz band in WiFi 6, but it’s really only useful if all of your client devices support it.
When your wireless network is not actively splitting spatial streams using MU-MIMO, your router is only capable of “talking” to one device at a time. In a congested 2.4GHz environment, this means that you’re fighting with with other APs on your within your channel slice for airtime.
To exemplify this, I devised a test using iperf3 on my home network. iperf3 uses a server/client architecture and enables testing of LAN speeds between devices. My setup is as follows:
iperf3 server running on two separate computers connected directly to gigabit switch
iperf3 client running on two seperate Raspberry Pi 3 B+
Wireless Access Point: Verizon G3100 (WiFi 6 Tri-Band, 4x4 spatial streams in each band (aka 12 stream))
Wow, right there, is the whole MQA problem in a nutshell.
Stonewall: State “There is nothing deeply flawed about MQA”, but fail to provide any factual evidence - you know, something, anything, that can be independently verified.
Discredit the opposition: You are in no position to disprove claims that MQA is lying, so instead you bizarrely assert I don’t understand “the signal processing of it”. As a qualified engineer I can certainly hold my own with Fourier, Laplace, and Z transforms, but my understanding of signal processing doesn’t help me one bit with MQA. You wanna know why? No one, outside of MQA’s proprietary inner circle, with or without a PHD in Signals, can possibly understand it because MQA refuses to publish it. Not only that, they refuse to even allow an end-to-end “black box” test of its claims. Why? Because they know their claims will crash down in the face of independent scrutiny.
Misdirection: You then call to question my understanding of the psychoacoustics of hearing. If MQA is lossless, as they claim, then why on earth would that be relevant? Oh, wait…
I’ll double down. MQA is not just deeply flawed. It is deeply dishonest too.
Oh, 3 more quick comments having seen the discussion of wifi throughput above:
If at all possible, direct wired ethernet is vastly superior to wifi. All my stuff is wired.
If oyu need to do wifi, consider a very good mesh system. I have 3 Nokia beacons and routinely get > 200 mbps through them. And yet i still hard wire. Consider that.
I have found (not entirely sure why yet…) that if i needlessly feed 32 bits to say, an 18 or 20 bit ladder DAC, i can get stuttering. Dropping it to 24 fixes that. So either the added bandwidth or the conversion (how hard is it to drop bots i ask) are in the way.
I will note that the “how hard…?” part may go hand in hand with what i have foudn as a slowly wade into DAC/player design: Most hgih end designs are basically datasheets with fancy faceplates and a few higher end parts. I’ve fixed problems by using truly advanced ideas like memory and shift registers (tongue in cheek for barbed replies) or coupling transformers. So never be too sure how your gear will handle the digital stream. I wonder what Roon found on characterization. They can;t talk of course. Too bad, i’d like to have a conversation with their lab’s walls.
I do not care about about the technology of MQA even one iota. All I care about is sound. After going onto the 2L test bench, and downloading all selections in all formats from Redbook up, making sure my Roon and Cocktail Audio X45PRO were set up for optimum MQA playback, I random played each work, one by one, and all formats for that work. It was easy to tell when MQA came on as the quality dropped. Even Redbook sounded better than MQA. This went on for about five hours. Non-MQA always beat MQA. That is all I care about. For those who like and prefer MQA, happy listening. But, I refuse to knowingly listen to an MQA track, just as I refuse to listen to mp3 tracks.
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