Who claimed this? I mean, with quotes and everthing. I want to see it.
Probably over one-half of the anti-MQA people.
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Should be very easy for you to pull up some quotes then.
If you have an iOS device, there’s an app called SongShift that will transfer your tracks say from Tidal to Qobuz for you: https://songshift.com
The tracks then end up in Roon when you sign in to the service.
There are other various services that can do that but this one is free!
Granted, I’m not sure this can help for playlists created directly in Roon.
Ah yes, open source FLAC. Stop being too big lads and exploiting the market for zero dollars.
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Yes, that’s the argument for MP3, as well. Most listeners can’t really tell the difference between psychoacoustically-informed “audibly lossless” 320 kbps MP3 and CD-quality PCM. As @killdozer says, it depends on who is doing the listening.
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This until they start to hear better quality over time… then you start to notice, it’s almost subliminal but when you try to go back, you start to realise.
Look what’s happened in video. Yards of press was written about the quality on Beta Max and VHS etc. Now, with increased quality over time, you wouldn’t give any of it the time of day.
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Chris, does it really sound any worse/better than the same album streamed in hires pcm. Have you compared mqa Vs the hires pcm counterpart using Qobuz to compare as an example. I had both and in the end I could tell the difference and found mqa did not live up to the hype at all and on a non mqa system sounded much inferior.
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All Bourbon is whiskey but not all whiskey is Bourbon. Additionally, there are two standards for Bourbon depending on if you use the American definition or the International definition.
All MQA is PCM but not all PCM is MQA.
All FLAC is PCM but PCM can arrive in many many different containers.
FLAC is lossless - By FLAC’s own definition this means no loss when encoding the PCM into the FLAC container.
An MQA encoded sources are always output as PCM.
The output of MQA encoding put inside a FLAC container is, by definition, lossless. It’s a lossless data stream of the MQA.
There is no such thing as lossless recording. Every recording method, including analog, has dynamic range and resolution limitations.
But we, at various stages of the packaging and decoding stages on the digital side of the chain, can define lossless but it will always refer to lossless of the encoded digital data stream not lossless of the original analog.
I’m not a fan of MQA but here’s the problem with calling Tidal out on their Hifi tier of being lossy…
Tidal is delivering a FLAC container and, based on my argument above, that is lossless. It’s the bit-perfect data stream of the encoded MQA. Now, here’s where its really muddy…
If that MQA data stream was encoded from the ADC then it is lossless from analog to your renderer. You’re receiving the same bits the ADC encoded (or the output of the DAW as chosen by the engineer).
However, if that MQA was encoded from PCM then you’re effectively getting a resampled + filters applied new PCM. This is, of course, different than what the original ADC captured but this is 90something% true of all modern music as it passes through the DAW.
The argument really should be if people prefer MQA encoded sound vs. native PCM encoded sound at like-for-like bit-depths/resolution. For the PCM you’d need to play it back with minimum phase filters as this is part of the MQA encoding and playback process (you’re locked into this and there is no choice here).
And… here’s where the debate about sound quality becomes downright silly…
Minimum phase filters are designed to remove pre-ringing but the side effect of this is these filters cause a delay in the higher frequencies; they arrive at your ear after the lower frequencies. They also increase post-ringing. This delay is theorized to reduce our ability to process spatial and timing cues in the music. However, pre-ringing is theorized to be the reason people find digital encoding of music to be fatiguing (it’s also theorized post-ringing doesn’t matter much or at all which is why the increase in post-ringing isn’t a problem).
Spatial and timing cues are what gives us the holographic sound stage from 2-channel stereo. Changing this timing may also be why people say MQA sounds “off” and “not right”. But the reduction in pre-ringing is exactly why others may find it less fatiguing.
It should be noted that in a full MQA end-to-end system MQA is supposed to be reducing the effects of this delay so these cues are not lost. However, it requires a full end-to-end MQA unfold as some of that work is done in the DAC.
OK, back to Tidal and MQA. If I get the PCM not touched by MQA I get to pick my own filters. If I get MQA encoded PCM then I’m forced to listen to MQAs filters and I no longer get to choose a linear filter over a minimum phase filter. MQA is, effectively, telling me minimum is right (and by association so is Tidal). I prefer to let my ears decide.
MQA should be considered lossless as long as its coming to you in a lossless container. You may not like how MQA encoding sounds but that’s very different than calling what arrives at your renderer lossy or lossless (it’s just maybe different depending on what the source of the encoding was).
I could go into why MQA encoding of PCM is lossy but this is already long enough. That discussion can get very deep into why it is theorized the methods MQA uses are not audible as there is existing studies in support of this. However, to the trained ear anything is audible. All encoding methods have a signature if you know what to listen for.
Some additional reading if you’re still awake:
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/mqa-time-domain-accuracy-digital-audio-quality
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No. A lossless container makes you transport data in a lossless way, that’s it. I can convert a 64 kbps MP3 to a lossless FLAC. By your logic, the MP3 is lossless. S in, S out. It’s what happens before packaging in a lossless container that’s interesting.
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This is exactly what I’m saying. If I only ever released music in MP3 and Tidal sent it to you in FLAC that’s lossless. You’d be hearing what I released digitally and bit-for-bit (the PCM data stream from the MP3). It’d sound terrible and you won’t like it. You can open up the encoding algorithms for MP3 and point to exactly what sucks about it. But, I’ll still say the FLAC is lossless because FLAC doesn’t touch the PCM held within the source.
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Especially when the schtick is that it’s “Master Quality Authenticated”…
MQA is never lossless and they themselves do not state it is anywhere in their marketing information.
*A. Yes. *
MQA comes in a lossless (FLAC) file from the music label, so you get exactly what the creators intended.
But a lossless file is just a digital container, a box for data, and what really matters is the content!
Inside the file, MQA is very different: the audio data is higher resolution; it’s cleverly packed and designed to preserve and confirm that you get full Master Quality, wherever you listen.
MQA delivers clearer sound: our encoders remove the audible ‘digital blur’ that builds up in studio production. The decoder authenticates the file, to guarantee that nobody changed it, and it maintains that pristine clarity, so you can hear the original wherever you are.
MQA is more efficient: it puts the full sound into the container without wasting or losing data.
Is it better than lossless? Yes, that’s the sort of progress you should expect from the world-class team who developed lossless compression in the first place (30 years ago).
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Well in that case, they’re lying (that seems like the norm for them), because everyone knows MQA removes data so by definition, is not lossless.
I would trust them more if they said the truth ‘well, we think we sorta sound lossless, but are not technically’.
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Universal is also part of that group. Who’s music WILL you be buying?
You’ve missed the point that @ipeverywhere was making I think. If you are encoding direct to MQA and distributing in a FLAC container you are lossless as far as the original recording is concerned. There is no alternative master/data stream to encode from so the MQA data itself is losslessly delivered in that constrained case. You may not like it, but it’s a lossless MQA encoding.
If you are taking an existing PCM data stream (or a PCM master) and re-encoding it to MQA that IS lossy. As you have a different result from your original source.
This is what Tidal does. There are few studios actually producing MQA recordings at origination with the exception of ones like 2L.
Yes agreed. You’ll have to go back to @ipeverywhere s post for the rest of his point. But I guess if more labels go the way of 2L TIDAL will need to do less re encoding.
Personally I moved from tidal to Qobuz sometime ago because I don’t have an MQA DAC and I don’t really want one. Maybe that will change in the future.
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Maybe only the smaller labels, or I’ll buy used. A gazillion used vinyl, CDs and SACDs. I haven’t bought one of their’s in at least five or six years, anyway.