Exactly, hence MQA don’t have any control over provenance. Which is why this whole topic regarding Authentication is another MQA misrepresentation
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This has nothing to do with the topic of this thread. But again, you are incorrect. The recording [master] is 96kHz 24bit.
Again, no it does not. Roon makes it very clear that the container is 48kHz and the decoded MQA file is 96kHz. For example …
I think you’ve got that wrong too. Like a Virgin was recorded both in analogue and 48kHz 16bit. But you’re arguing the case for me! 
This is what provenance is about. This is what I want to see. I’m not particularly interested in MQA, but at least they are considering it and have the potential to provide the data.
So can we please keep the discussion on topic.
The recording was mastered in the analog domain and then the final Analog to Digital transfer was done at 96K
Well if the album mixes were all supplied at 32-bit float/48kHz, how can they be 96k recordings?
All MQA files are in 24/48 containers. The thing is all MQA files are in essence 15.something 48k files. Anything above this, is random noise. However MQA is mispresenting their “product” as a hires file. Initially they called it MQA lossless, until they were found out.
What Your screenshot shows is that the file is delivered in a 24/48 container and is upsampled to 96k because there is a flag embedded in the file that tells MQA enabled products to upsample to 96k. Do note that it says authentication 96k.
From the article Daniel linked to:
In mid-1984 Madonna arrived at New York City’s Power Station studios with Nile Rodgers to record the album that would make her an international superstar - using cutting-edge 12-bit technology
So it seems it is even worse than I remembered it
Tell me how this makes it a 96k recording
No that is not. MQA will decompress (or “first unfold”) to something like 18/96 or whatever it is capable of, and then it will interpolate (or “second unfold”) to whatever it wishes to unfold to. If you’d like more flexibility (and some would argue, better quality) in that interpolation, at the cost of CPU cycles, then HQPlayer has you covered. And Roon has you covered as well there.
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Or 44.1kHz 24bit. But this isn’t relevant to the discussion about provenance; there are other threads for discussing the merits–or not–of MQA. I was challenging your statement about Roon when you said “that [Roon] is not not truthful” when presenting information about a release. That is plainly wrong.
Your comment has absolutely nothing to do with the production of an MQA release. This recording was mixed in a particular way that resulted in an analogue tape. MQA and (possibly) high-res releases are derived from an analogue to digital transfer of the original 1984 tape. MQA origami is for another thread.
@Chrislayeruk and I have said that it is a 96kHz master. Mastering for the CD, hi-res and vinyl versions would take this approach too. The point of provenance is that we have this information. I’d like to see this inside Roon.
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What I meant to say, and your are correct, MQA starts with the highest Master, and if that is 352, then it processes to produce a file that is capable of being streamed at some lower resolution–and I thought it was 96 in most cases. Then the MQA DAC/decoder unfolds and renders this to the highest resolution of the Master tape. I have seen lots of MQA material decoded and rendered with my full Dac to 96, 192 and 352. I have even seen some MQA files that are rendered at 44 and 48. They were mostly pop music that I presume was mastered at 44 or 48 originally.
I agree with @Martin_Webster that intricacies on what exactly MQA does aren’t directly suited to this thread… So please excuse the curtness in advance. You’re unfortunately wrong in this assessement:
Rest assured it isn’t by any fault of your own, but simply one of the consequences of the problems MQA Ltd’s, shall we say, creative use of terminology creates when one talks about about authentication, and one of the reasons why I questioned the possibility of it being in a position of trust earlier on.
While you may believe you saw your DAC perform a miracle, all you witnessed in reality was the illumination of a blue light, and nothing else.
This blue light can be made to say anything, as @Kenneth_Jonge pointed out with his example.
If you saw that that blue light tell you an MQA file was decompressed to 352 khz, that blue light was made, by someone, to hoodwink you. That someone is who we are told is a good candidate to trust as a purveyor of a service that authenticates the provenance of files.
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The reason that anyone wants a 24/96 file is for the higher resolution.
What is being done here is equivalent of taking a picture with a 640 x 480 camera printing it on a piece of paper (analog), then scanning it at 4k. However You look at it it does not make it anything other than a 48k resolution file. It is a misrepresentation of what it is, when MQA chooses to represent a native 48k file as a 96k file it is the same (however at a higher quality) as converting an MP3 file to a FLAC file an expecting a higher quality. It doesn’t change the resolution nor the quality. You still only have the information of a 48k file. In the case of the MQA file You even have losses when converting it to a lossy MQA file.
As for provenance, this information is not available for 99% of all tracks. How many of the X number of tracks on Tidal are exactly the same as this. A 48k file packaged as 96k.
Again a 12-14bit digital capture with analog recordings, the digital signal to noise radio of a 12 bit recording hovers around 72dB and an ideal analog studio mastertape 77dB why would You even consider bringing this out as a 24 bit file (144dB) Why not just release it as 16 bit file and keep it honest. This is an example of MQA showing of files as if they have another provenance than what is fact.
What I’m trying to open Your eyes to is the fact that MQA represents their tracks as being something that they are not. While at the same time shouting about authentication and provenance.
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Is MQA really relevant anymore?
I think not. Qobuz, and more importantly Amazon have failed to adopt/use it.
‘Game over’ IMO.
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My DAC does not have a blue light, but illuminates either PCM or MQA and if its MQA, it displays
the resolution. I have seen MQA at 44, 48, mostly 96, some 192 and surprisingly lots of 352 which is
classical almost exclusively.
You have seen your DAC display an incorrect number. That is all it is.
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To put this in analogue terms, if your memory goes that far back, cassettes used to have a little tab you could break to make it impossible to record over them. Well, like the broken tab on your cassette that told the cassette player it couldn’t record, Bob Stuart’s broken format tells your DAC what it should do, and what to show you. This is embedded inside the datastream where music information would normally be, which is why the worst of the format, MQA-CD, plays back with lesser fidelity than regular CD on non-MQA hardware.
Despite MQA, LTD’s assurances of the contrary, beyond a certain resolution, even an MQA dac never allows an exact recreation of the original file.
All it allows is an approximation. You can argue it’s a good approximation, you can argue that the approximation sounds better to you than the original or that it sounds no worse, but the cold, hard, fact remains: what you are hearing, fancy names and confusing lingo or not, is only a synthetic approximation of what was originally on the master tape. A simulacrum of what it purports to be, wrapped into a perversion of language, sold by the last people you should trust to be honest and transparent about what they’re peddling, which is why it’s so sad that @danny is probably right that the most likely person to be able to extract authentication data from the majors is Bob Stuart.
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From the body of the SOS article, rather than the banner…
“a Sony 3324 24-track digital tape recorder was obtained for the recording“
The 3324 was 44.1/48kHz 16bit
I quite like this as a description of the mastering process. Except that your paper printout is creatively manipulated during mastering to add colour or effects before being scanned.
In many cases - broadly I guess anything that is not an ‘acoustic’ recording - mastering is part of the creative process…
Technically, yes
However the ADC’s and DAC’s S/N was only 14 bits
Quite right, they tweek the sound to be just right. Without raising the resolution.
Kenneth, maybe it’s like baking a cake. You put in a couple of cups of flour, of sugar, two eggs, 6 tablespoons of butter, 3/4 cup of milk, and put it all in the oven. But the resulting cake: do you measure that in cups? In tablespoons? No, you measure it in pieces of cake. Same for recordings. The whole is not the same as the ingredients.
More like telling that You put in free range eggs, Ecological Sugar, butter and Milk on the packaging.
Then whats actually inside is all processed ingredients, powdered milk, Coconut oil and other nasty things.
At the end it looks like cake but the taste…
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It’s disappointing that you have taken the discussion away from provenance. Whilst your analogy is naive it is also irrelevant since the recording/ mixing/ mastering process is the same regardless of the final format.
I get it that you don’t like MQA. I’m ambivalent about its merits but this discussion is about provenance and what is/ could be possible.
So again I ask that everyone keeps this thread on topic and refrains from using this thread as an outlet to bash MQA. It’s not about the ‘blue light’ or origami. We’ve already established that if you care to read this thread in toto.
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