Sorry You feel that way
But provenance is also about being honest about the original recording and not upsampling a 48k recording to 96k
It’s simply dishonest, all releases should be kept in the original file format. MQA modifies the music, under the promise of making it better than the original. What gives
What you fail to recognize is that MQA provenance is to the highest quality Master–you realize that there are several masters for various distribution channnels, and it starts with that highest quality/resolution Master. And that may be at a higher resolution than the one you are used to hearing in the distribution channel. I applies its process to make this file small enough to stream, and then it expands it to the resolution of the original master. It does not upsample the version that you are used to hearing necessarily, unless that is the highest resolution version.
But if the final scan wasn’t at 4K you wouldn’t see the texture of that beautiful art paper it was printed on…
Getting back to providence, I think it is important, whether or not it’s MQA.
Many supposedly ‘High Res’ downloads I purchased a few years ago (probably in the ‘early days’ of downloads) are undoubtedly ‘upscaled/upsampled’ RB files in a High-Res container. I think this issue is less of a problem now, now that major labels seem to be more authentic in what they either sell, or provide to streaming companies such as Qobuz and Tidal.
Hi-Fi News & Record Review magazine here in the UK have been on a campaign to ‘expose’ this practice, and they have found that it happens less now.
So yes, providence is important. But I think MQA’s business model is now arguably becoming more irrelevant as the High-Res market matures.
When I was streaming MQA from Tidal, before I moved to a Chord M Scaler/TT2, it sounded good, and I have no ‘axe to grind’ with respect to MQA.
I just think that MQA’s now becoming increasingly irrelavant.
You don’t know that. The only guarantee of it is the word of a middleman, and one that has proven disingenuous about MQA. Even if you’re of the opinion this middleman can be trusted, he still relies on an unreliable source (which often seems to be some intern at a label). Worse still, there is not one, but two ways to bake an MQA file. One is the so-called white gloves approach, with which you get technical caveats, but where a bit of care is claimed to be taken. The second is batch encoding, which is pretty much what you could do at home with a FLAC converter, if MQA was in fact lossless. Thus, “Authenticated” is a sham.
‘MQA’ do nothing of the kind. The process described is mastering in the analogue domain subsequently captured at 24/96. Which is completely valid. It is not ‘upsampling’.
Can we stop being so selective with the ‘evidence’ please?
Good post, the usual MQA-biz from the usual suspects aside there are few on this thread that don’t really seem to understand what mastering is or why you do it.
Yes, one of the points of being a Trust Authority is actually having Trust. Even if you are and have been above board, if people do not “trust” you then what you say is irrelevant. Sadly, I think that the way MQA marketing has played out has damaged their trust attribute. And trust is one thing that is very hard to re-establish. Especially where money is involved.
Always!
Yes, and not just the hi-res market. Bandwidth increases are making the compression part of MQA less relevant. One of those ideas which probably had some marketing traction a few years ago, but which changing conditions make less important.
Well, your correct in that this particular 24/48 > analogue > 24/96 processing/mixing/mastering was all in studio as part of the product (i.e. “master”) creation process. As such, it is not part of the MQA (or any other encoding) process, and thus “legitimate” outside of MQA’s lossy encoding and it’s stealing/misuse of real PCM resolutions such as (“24/48” or “24/192”).
However I like how @Kenneth_Jonge drove home the point (if ultimately in error about this particular case) because it drives home how provence is a sort of ideal and that due to reality modern studio recording/mixing/mastering practices may only ever remain an ideal.
Ha ha, maybe your right…only Nixon could have gone to China.
Absolutely.
One of the things I’m wondering is if the dual nature (white glove v batch) of the MQA conversion process, and the continued promotion of the white glove approach, isn’t making things worse. MQA Ltd seem to believe, maybe rightfully so, that they can brute force belief in the magic blue light with this, something that’s as anachronistic in the age of fora as is bandwidth conservation in the age of dark fiber.
Technically, it likely would’ve been relatively trivial to add a flag to visually indicate the difference between white glove and batch, along with an associated shiny indicator (“it’s purple, so it’s really authenticated”) and it’d be insulting to their intelligence and engineering capabilities to conjecture this absence is an oversight. In other words, it’s a human problem.
Anyway, whatever comes next needs to be transparently master quality authenticated if it is to carry any weight, let alone succeed. That’s why it probably should be done with auditable software, which as we all know, would be the easiest part. The problem is in the meatspace.
Again, by mixing in analog, do we gain any more musical info that in any way shape or form warrants the 24/96 moniker. If MQA was truthful about provenance they would release it as a 24/48 file which it is. There is no information other than analog noise above 24 kHz (since it was originally captured in 32/48)
Since “the Magic” in MQA is placed in the LSB’s they do not gain anything in sound quality by sampling at 96k
You can not reproduce anything not captured in the original recording whether You mix in digital og analog.
Are there not 2 colours for MQA. Green for upscaled and Blue for approved by the artist. Would that be provenance?
The first part of your post is correct as you can see in the attached MusicScope chart. The Christopher Cross album was a digital recording in 24/44.1, mixed analog and finally mastered to 24/96
Maybe this analog mixing will have a sonic gain, but the outcome is still the max. 22.05 kHz from the original digital recording.
The 24/96 are for sure upsampled, but not MQA is responsible for this, it has already been done by the label. MQA simply encodes the files delivered by the label, of course without any reliable authentication.
This chart is not from a MQA file because MQA is a black box and not easy to analyze. It is a chart from a HiRes album downloaded from Qobuz. HDtracks is selling the same fake as 24/192.
I don’t know if this album is available in MQA but in principle the chart of the MQA file would look similar.
You can do an analog capture from a MQA DAC (require a ADC) or digitally from Roon output into a file after it gets decoded. If the digital master is 24/96k but the original analog master is limited to around 20kHz frequency response, you are at the mercy of the original analog master.
The small print is important here. Blue is the artist or the rights owner.
That means the label. There’s no way to know who, erm, bluelighted the release.
To put it in practical terms, if MQA had been a thing in the 90’s, it’s conceivable that while Prince was fighting the good fight to control his music, Warner could’ve sold you Prince albums with the same type of “authentication”.
Yes.
You are conflating mastering with the subsequent processing to create an mqa encoded file. And the 24/96 file appears to be available on Qobuz.
Thank you Yoda for doing this. Its a great piece of work. In this case, I am waiting for the doubters to apologize for their behavior.
That said, if there are holes in the provenance procedure, I have no issue with pointing them out in a courteous way, so that they can get fixed. A nice email to MQA would probably get read and answered. If its possible to produce a fake MQA file on you PC, I am sure they would like to know.
We should also realize that the state of the Masters I have been told, is in various states of repair. Some are badly damaged, there was the fire, some were stored by the artist properly and some not, and some are in the land fills. I am surprised that its possbile to go back an read documentation at all on recordings made 10, 30, 50, 70 years ago. I also expect that there would be errors made, and its appropriate to document them. If you have proof of something amis, just post the details, no need to get hostile and accuse someone of something that be right. There are 2 sides, like this case. If there are more facts, lets hear them. I hope Yoda does not get attacked.
I also have been in audio for a short time as a Manufacturer 35 years ago, and as a hobbyist for a lot of what has gone on. I remember the promise of CD, DVD, SACD, Higher Rez, DSD, etc etc, so I can understand why some are sceptical. The SQ has never lived up to the hype. I also realize that we have been lied to on many fronts, about food, oil, medicines, pesticides, the fire, and that was clearly wrong and this is why many take that tact.
Thanks @Danny for providing MQA, and Bob Stuart and Peter Craven for the research and development. For my ears, and I realize that maybe not for all, its really wonderful.
Well. The picture is nice, and tells us something about the file. But it’s not evidence for all of the later assertions in the post. Am I a doubter?
If you’re implying that is what I stated by “pretty much what you could do at home with a FLAC converter, if MQA was in fact lossless”, it is either a gross distortion of the point I was making, or a profound lack of understanding thereof.
What has already been proven, and that I posted earlier, is that the blue (or white, or rainbow, that doesn’t matter) light will come on even in the case of an intentionally degraded file.
I’ll let you ask the people who did that research how MQA, Ltd responded to it, and also if this channel can be exploited to make a DAC believe that a completely different file was authenticated (my understanding, which is limited, is that it cannot, but I could be wrong).
