No one says it does. Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m not saying MQA is a solution… yet. I’m asking who/what does address the full provenance issues?
The rest of my post was on topic. Provenance, including your peculiar take on it, is a subset of Audiophile concerns around quality (from recording to delivery to customer).
Man in the middle, who do you think your kidding?!? This is a non issue - there is no money in purposefully hijacking the product by those on the outside, and accidents and intentional misdirection by the labels has been “solved” by the audiophile community itself. Your example of the German Hiresaudio is incomplete - they do these checks now because audiophiles (i.e the customers) complained.
Provence as an MQA $sales point$, which is your point, can not be separated from what MQA is overall - a DRM product from beginning to end designed to “control” the customer…
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You mentioned services have automated detection of provenance issues. This is 100% a different issue from what MQA addresses. Any content identified by hires audio as “bad” would be given a pass by MQA because it’s the labels delivering this bad content on purpose.
I’ve asked around to my contacts at streaming services small and gigantic. They nearly laughed at me when I asked about a provenance issue / man in the middle issue.
MQA is a solution looking for a problem. Where is this provenance issue MQA seeks to resolve?
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I disagree. So do others, as cited in multiple posts above. If you don’t care, then move on to another topic.
I will not let your bias against MQA derail a conversation on provenance.
I am trying to talk provenance and I believe MQA is closer than others. I am not looking at MQA as a solution, as they are not. The goal is to discuss provenance, not MQA. If you have an alternative to MQA to discuss, feel free to contribute.
@ComputerAudiophile, read this topic carefully from the top. You showed up late to the conversation. Multiple ideas have already been presented on what a good provenance system should entail, and the noise levels are fairly low because of heavy moderatation of both pro-MQA and anti-MQA propoganda.
As for where MQA can reach (possibly) in regards to provenance, that would be to get your “point A” to be a trusted source. But as stated multiple times above, they aren’t even close yet. However, they are tackling the hardest problem in my opinion (also noted above).
As for your argument about labels feeding bad data, it has been addressed multiple times above. Please see the example of Bernie vs the big labels. This all has been stated multiple times above. I’m starting to understand the problem with these MQA threads. No one wants to read once they hear MQA.
As for my personal agenda here, that would not be anything about MQA. I do care about manipulation of audio data. I do care about being sold something (commercially sold, or metaphorically sold) that isn’t what it’s container says it is. Where I stand, is that I am looking for a solution to this problem so I can integrate it into Roon. I jumped on this topic about Provenance and MQA because the way I see it, no one else is solving the data ingestion pipeline part of the problem, which I think is the largest problem to solve. Digital signatures and the technology involved is not difficult in implementing the mechanics of the solution. If anyone has solved any of these problems, obviously I am interested, but as I have already said, I think the data ingestion pipeline between potential trusted entities and the distribution of that data to me is the most important thing to get to the bottom of.
This is not a valid argument. Sorry dude.
Hell, I see the man in the middle issue happening all the time inside of hardware. You’d be surprised at how much of your beloved Hi-Fi gear is full of shit inside that is lying about what it does. When Roon Ready’s signal path and certification process forces these issues to arise, we see fixes happen. What happened before that? What if we didn’t force it?
Hi Danny - I think you’re overstating the importance of an album signed off on by “Bernie Grundman” as opposed to Sony Music. We alreay have Mastering Engineer credits. However, the Mastering Engineer is working for the label and can only offer suggestions to how the final album should sound. Many Mastering Engineers have told me their names are on albums they hate to admit they worked on but they did what the client asked them to do.
This will not change with any provenance technology indicating a specific person signed off. In a way we have it already.
This is similar to the SPARS code. We were told an album was AAA or ADD or DDD. It really meant nothing because the final product could be great or terrible from either one of those. Same with an album signed off by Bernie Grundman for provenance.
I love music and I love technology. If there was a prvenance issue of man in the middle attacks that anyone on Earth could verify, I’d be elated to learn more and write endlesly about how technology is helping the artists who bring so much joy to my life.
As I see the proposed solutions above, they are using technology for technology’s sake, seeking out a problem where none exists. Plus, with “everyone” streaming from a handful of services and content distributors, control of the source material is almost easy.
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As you note several sentences later, the tile of the thread is “Provence and MQA”. You don’t think it is just a bit idealistic to have a merely positive discussion of “Provence and MQA” when there is so little about MQA that is even true/non-fraudulent, let alone a positive for the consumer?
As the boutique labels have demonstrated, this is the least important thing. The important things are recording the artists/performance with actual quality/fidelity, business issues such as communicating/selling good recordings to consumers who are actually interested them (i.e. the 1%), etc. The culture at the big labels is not interested in fidelity because the 99% are not - they are satisfied with a compressed/loudness war/mp3 compressed streaming product. Thus, there is no digital/technological solution to the quality/provence problem because the problem is at another level, and thus not a “problem” at all for most.
My argument is that nobody on Earth has identified the provenance issue as an issue. Let’s use facts, not edge cases where an intern screwed up.
Your comments about hardware or right on, if we were discussing hardware.
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By the way, I should note that I’ve spot checked many albums through streaming services via the HDCD flag on the LSB over the tears. For content that is supposed to be HDCD encoded, it all illuminates the HDCD indicator on one of my DACs.
If we’re going to use edge cases of provenance issues, I believe we should use my experience with HDCD encoded albums because it’s evidence that no issue exists and is likely a larger sample size than the anecdoatal intern uploaded a torrent file problem.
I thought you were researching this problem, as was I. Did you give up after a few of your contacts turned up fruitless? I didn’t.
Remember, I’ve seen it happen (once again, as stated above). as I’ve said, NDA’s prevent me from sharing examples, because who wants to be seen as a fraudster? I’m trying to find public examples.
I haven’t given up, but I’m also not going to endlessly look for WMD when I believe the only thing I’ll find is a spent casing with residue in the desert.
The members of the Audiophile Style community would like real data with which to use when making decisions about purchasing or technolgies to support. The days of a Minister of Information are long gone. When members of the press stand up and say “believe me, but I can’t tell you why” consumers get a sour taste in their mouths. I’d love to show them real data that provenance is a real issue. Heck, if it is an issue, I’d have a ton more to write about and it would be great for business.
As it stands now, the fact that MQA is involved with saying there is a provenance issue and Bob Stuart was one of, if not the first, person to say this was an issue to the audiophile audience when he launched MQA, this is going to be an ultra hard sell. MQA ltd has been proven to be misleading at best and fraudulent at worst with its marketing claims (MQA quickly removed the lossless logo once it was called out on it). Thus, people are rightfully skeptical.
Now back to researching this one. :~)
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I am at a loss on what the controversy is regarding provenance…maybe I missed something. As a music lover I very much appreciate when I have information I can trust about the album I’m listening to. When streaming from Tidal or Qobuz through Roon I’m often left wondering if the metadata I read in Roon is truly accurate for the music I’m listening to (i.e., the credits may be for a different release than what I’m actually listening to).
When I first heard about MQA’s authentication I had hopes this would include a validation of such metadata through some form of digital signature in the stream. So, I may not be an “audiophile” nor represent the market/community but I am with @danny on wanting to see this improve.
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I welcome all improvements to metadata as well.
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Whoa, there. Provenance is way different than metadata and metadata is not going to improve just because of provenance.
I guess this is what I’m missing. Please explain how provenance doesn’t help validate metadata?
It does if you do it right… a digital signature just says a trusted source verifies that the data is what they say it is. If you want to apply that signature to metadata, it would do as you want. You could even go two-way and have a mixing engineer say ‘yup, i acknowledge I did this in this capacity’.
MQA doesn’t do this but it doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The idea is sane and desirable (to me and probably others).
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Yes, I think that would be awesome.
Disagree with Danny and get your post deleted. Great forum…
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I think the posts are getting deleted if they stray from the provenance topic, especially if MQA “bias” is displayed.
I think the provenance issue is interesting, but I believe that MQA Ltd is not the entity to get it done, if it can be done at all. They have earned the skepticism of many…
I had a post deleted; I’m not sure that it was really out of line… but, it’s not my forum.
I guess this thread is perceptually lossless…
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I believe provenance is an issue to every single person that has tried any of the HighRez Download services out there. Any sane person would question the relevance of paying often more than for the CD for a few files and in the worst case scenario, a jpeg with a cover image.
But i am pretty convinced that you can find upsampled/lossy conversion in our CD-collections too(or vinyl albums for that matter). A CD is no guarantee for either the source or the handling of our precious music. Manipulated files are this generations bootlegs…