MQA Tidal to launch MQA Hi-Res audio streaming in 2016

Roon Software Discussion TIDAL
61

I see … Just re-read Rugby’s post … ‘People’ in that context is referring to end users, the consumers, not manufacturers.

As far as I understand, and this is first hand information from MQA limited (who own the IP), they are focused on getting the technological adopted:

  1. Across as many platforms as possible; be that via software, firmware or hardware implementations.

  2. By the music rights owners, the labels

  3. The music listener be that an audiophile with $$$$ investment or someone with a smartphone and a pair of earphones.

Of course all three above need to ‘won over’ for a truly successful business case. I posit the first two are well under way and will emerge in 2016 … The later will take a while longer as they need the infrastructure in place.

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[quote=“AgDev01, post:60, topic:5408”]
I don’t think he is saying there are any phones out there currently decoding MQA files right now, though there very may well be in testing somewhere, but rather giving an example of the processing power necessary to do so.
[/quote]Correct, that is exactly the message I was attempting to convey.

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@AgDev01. Software decoding means the main CPU does the decoding directly while a hardware decoding is a separate built-in chip designed to decode MQA. In this way it takes away the main CPU over head. If MQA turn out to be intensive, it post a great challenge to decode on the software level, especially in mobile phones. Therefore a separate hardware chip is required. This in turn will drive the cost of the mobile phone.

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From the horse’s mouth, via Stereophile:

What Stuart did not address at the conference, however, was the unexpected delay in MQA implementation. After the announcement at May’s Munich High End Show that MQA, Inc. had over 100 strategic partners, everything has been quiet. Rumor had it that MQA decoding was requiring more battery power than was practical for mobile phones to supply.

Asked to comment on the situation, Stuart replied by email:

MQA saw it necessary for a small delay to optimize the delivery platform in order to provide more flexible streaming. MQA has also been preparing decoders for the mobile platform, but the most important aspect to note is that the audio is still amazing and unchanged. MQA has been busy building the supply chain. By working to increase the efficiency of the delivery, with no compromise to the audio, we make MQA a better company to do business with.

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I realize that. What i was trying to convey was that the decoding could be done in either manner. For example for regular phones Meridan or whomever could release a player as an Android app (not sure if iOS allows for it) that does software decoding. Whereas a DAP or other dedicated device might elect to include a chip that does decoding at the hardware level.

Either way i cannot envision an scenario where MQA decoding at the software level would be an intensive task, FLAC decoding certainly isn’t. If Tidal is intending to put FLAC files in an MQA wrapper to save space the ideal situation for that is in the mobile space. I would have to imagine the Tidal app itself would support the decoding.

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A normal PC can decode and play a 50 mbit H.264 which is a VERY calculation intensive / processor hungry codec. MQA Will not be a calculation issue for processors but in mobile devices maybe a bit power consuming. However people play H.264 streams every day on their mobile devices.

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I do think Meridian makes more money presently from their video codec royalties than their hardware sales but that is only a guess.

In today’s world, trying to earn money on hardware before software is stupid an not business vise. There is very limited leverage in hardware and high cost of getting a customer. The leverage of earnings via software is gigantic compaired even to the most widely spreded hardware. Meridian will likely try to push both hardware and software but will be forced to realize that software is the way to go and hardware is a very, very, tough sell.

I am 100 percent confident that MQA software will be pushed as much or more on to the market than MQA hardware.

68

What can be heard or not, what portions of the audio space make a difference or not, what phase shifts you introduce by slicing and dicing are all important. Nyquist is about math, your arguments do not hold in terms of accuracy.

Additionally, the ADC limitations, and all those arguments are complete yiberish. Yes, there are ADC limitations, and such but you’re just repeating Meridian’s unsubstantiated arguments.

I went to an MQA demo in NYC. Some Meridian guys were there. Their answers to my questions were utter nonesense and full of contradictions. It made no sense. FYI I have a PhD in Physics so I am technically able to discern between answers that make scientific sense and those that don’t.

Two examples:

1- I asked about “Master Quality Authenticated” and whether this meant that the MQA encoding parameters were adjusted based on the recording chain. After much much dodging the Meridian guy said something along the lines of “We have analyzed audio chains and ADC performance and have implemented one encoding algorythm that optimizes playback.” All good with that - but that is not the claim;

2- A 192/24 file was played followed by the MQA’d version of the same file. The MQA’d version sounded better, markedly so. How do you explain that? My explanation is MQA is an euphonic implementation of lossy compression, a very good one in fact.

Now to clarify my position: I am all for MQA, a euphonic compression mechanism, and the ability to deliver better than CD resolution while not using much bandwidth.

But my respect for Meridian is greatly diminished by utter BS such as lossless compression, “authenticated”, and all that yiberish. Completely unnecessary nonesense.

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  1. Recent sampling theory shows that, under certain conditions, under-sampling Nyqvist is possible. MQA makes use of this.

  2. Unless the Meridian guys present at that NYC demo were Bob Stuart and/or Richard Hollinshead, then I agree that they probably didn’t know what they were talking about.

70

1- The Nyquist theorem is math, and doesn’t get trumped. With additional assumptions you could come up with other results obviously, but again, not lossless. For example if you say that nothing can be heard above 20KHz then you could just dismiss all sampling frequencies above 40KHz. References please.

2- As I described it, the original was 192/24, and that file was taken through the MQA process and played back. If your claim of “lossy but lossless for the human ear” is true, the two files should’ve sounded identical.

1 Like
71

I suggest you have a chat with Bob Stuart, someone who knows one helluva lot more about digital audio than both of us. :smiley:

References:

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=17497 <-- Won the conference award for the best peer reviewed paper. Basically debunked the very damaging and flawed 2007 Meyer-Moran paper which claimed that “HiRes” (>20kHz) wasn’t audible.

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=17501 <-- Essentially the “MQA” paper.

While these concepts might surprise some, the theory of sampling has evolved considerably since Shannon and Nyquist and, in several other disciplines, such as image processing or astronomy, undersampling can increase resolution with careful application-specific thinking [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26].

[19] Unser, M. ‘Sampling – 50 Years after Shannon’, Proc. IEEE vol. 88 No. 4, pp. 569–587 (Apr. 2000)

[20] Gensun, F., ‘Whittaker-Kotelnikov-Shannon Sampling Theorem and Aliasing Error’, J. Approx. Theory 85, pp. 115–131, (1996).

[21] Butzer, P.L., Stens, R.L., ‘Sampling Theory for not necessarily band-limited functions: A historical review’, SIAM Review Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 40–53, (Mar. 1992)

[22] Eldar, Y.C., Michaeli, T., ‘Beyond Bandlimited Sampling: Nonlinearlities, Smoothness and Sparsity’ CCIT Report #698, (Jun. 2008)

[23] Dragotti, P.L., Vetterli, M., Blu, T., ‘Sampling Signals With Finite Rate of Innovation’, IEEE Trans.Sig. Proc. Vol. 50, No. 6, pp. 1417–1428, (May 2007)

[24] Herley, C., Wong, P.W., ‘Minimum Rate Sampling and Reconstruction of Signals with Arbitrary Frequency Support’, IEEE Trans. Information Theory Vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 1555–1564 , (July 1999)

[25]Pohl, V., Yang, F., Boche, H., ‘Causal Reconstruction Kernels for Consistent Signal Recovery’, EUSIPCO, Bucharest, pp. 1174–1178, (2012)

[26] Unser, M., Aldroubi, A., ‘A general sampling theory for non-ideal acquisition devices,’ IEEE Trans. Signal Processing, vol. 42, pp. 2915–2925, Nov. (1994)

My apologies that many/most of these papers are not free to the public.

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72

Well said Joel, I was thinking of writing something similar myself. There are many people on this forum and others dissing MQA without any real understanding of it and without having read any of the key papers outlining the technology.

I would add a couple of things about Bob Stuart. He graduated in Psychoacoustics, Electronic Engineering and Management from Imperial College London, one of the most respected engineering colleges in the world. He was also the main developer of Meridian Lossless Packing that is used in DVD-Audio and Blu-ray and is part of Dolby-True-HD. Those who claim their PhD’s in Physics give them greater knowledge should write their rebuttals of Bobs work and submit them to the Audio Engineering Society for peer review and publication.

From my reading MQA is a lot more than just a form of compression, though it is certainly a very clever one. Whether it is truly lossless or not I cannot judge and I’m not sure that Bob Stuart claims it is truly lossless. (Maybe some Meridian representatives don’t really understand it either.) In what I have seen and read he is careful in his words and claims that MQA gets us closer to the master recording.

He also claims that MQA strives to address temporal blur which he believes is more important than mere resolution. I have not seen much discussion of this aspect here.

Personally I don’t know if MQA is really an improvement or not yet but on the basis of its provenance I’m willing to give it a fair chance and not make claims that well educated/ respected industry leaders are talking “bullshit and yibersih”. I certainly would not do that if I find that it “sounds markedly better” If that is the case they must be doing something right and maybe they know more than I do even though I graduated from Imperial College as well :smiley: and maybe I am the one who is not understanding something.

3 Likes
73

Here’s my question regarding MQA. Is there really going to be a lot of content? I can’t see labels really re-doing their catalogs, when most are very slow to roll out 24bit PCM versions… Are they just converting 24bit PCM into MQA?.. I remember at the beginning of 24bit some of the original releases were just up-sampled CDs (HDtracks was guilty of this practice)… These are just some questions I have, and as of right now I really have no interest in buying a new DAC and re-buying the same albums again… No thanks… Time to enjoy the music and not the formats.

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Yes content could be a big problem, also it could mean we have to buy all our content again, however Tidal proposing to stream MQA helps a lot.

I think you are right and that to get the full benefits of MQA you need to go back to the original masters not just rework other releases, even other hi def releases and that you will need an MQA DAC, not just a computer program to unpack the file.

However despite the number of barriers it seems like it could have potential to help us enjoy the music more. I agree though lets make sure we enjoy the music now and not obsess over future formats that may or may not make it. I’ll try and take this to heart and make this my last words on this subject.

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Very cool, will take a look. Thank you.

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To go back to the MQA and cell phone discussions, i saw this tidbit on Stereophile.

On the playback front, MQA also announced the first MQA-equipped smartphone, HTC’s One A9 (above). HTC smartphone demonstrations, as well as music playback of recordings by Lindberg, Peter McGrath, and others on Wilson and Meridian loudspeakers, are promised throughout CES, January 6–9, in the MQA Suite (30-335) in the Venetian Towers in Las Vegas.

Stereophile Link

As of note looks like the number of announced hardware partners has increased as well.

77

Will I decode MQA with Tidal, Roon or Auralic ? Decisions, decisions …

78

Just to confirm then:
If MQA is implemented in SW or players, there is absolutly no need or a benefit to have a MQA DAC ?

Can freeware projects like Squeezebox implement MQA without a licence fee, or any suggestion how a licence can be achived ? (If someone at the Squeezebox community are willing to implement the MQA codec).

79

To be honest I am not sure one way or the other However from this paragraph in the absolute sound article on MQA it seems like there are benefits from the encoder being more closely linked to the DAC. To me this implies the decoding would best be done in the DAC. However other parts of the article indicate that the decoder may only need basic info about the DAC such as resolution which would be pretty straight forward to put into a computer decoder.

The Absolute Sound.com

I think I just broke one of my New Year resolutions to not post anymore about this anymore and just enjoy the music :neutral_face:

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This The-Absolute-Sound-MQA is better. It has Robert Harley’s interview with Bob Stuart as well as the article. However it’s very lengthy and pretty heavy reading.