Thanks Greg … and Merry Christmas!
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No one can fault you for liking MQA, enjoy it.
But stick to you opinions, or the facts. Do not quote MQA marketing material almost verbatim and present it as something you know.
And find out more about what lossless means, what is DSP, and how digital filters affect what you hear.
It took like three years for MQA to finally drop the word “lossless” from their marketing. Only because they could not pretend anymore it is.
You cannot possibly know that other than from reading MQA marketing materials. What you hear is the result of of MQA DSP.
Sorry I would never say that about MQA. Your quote comes across as if I said it, weird.
MQA is Lossy Over 40Khz, please show me the microphone that can record this and the person who can hear it. These high sample rates are for filtering and not Music. There is no music there to lose.
My apologies I picked it from your response my fault
They should rename MQA “Hydra Audio” because for each debate thread you try to chop off, three more grow!
Chris, it’s not lossless. There are two choices and anything else is a euphemism. It might sound great. But it simply isn’t lossless.
We may some day find out that although our ears do not exactly hear frequencies, that does not mean their absence does not affect sound perception. I cannot say I know that to be the case. Doesn’t matter for streaming, but MQA should not become a standard archival or physical distribution format as Bob Stuart would like, because it does not store the entirety of the signal. It is fine as a streaming format as long as it stays in its corner.
The way people compare the lossyness of MQA to MP3 is disingenuous at best. They are Chalk and Cheese. Worlds apart. It really is a cheap shot and does the argument no good at all. MP3 loses data across the whole audible frequency range by design. MQA does not.
Any energy in any frequency that isn’t even there at above 40Khz has no effect on sound unless you can prove otherwise.
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I’ll take the “sounds great”. That’s what I want from this process, not some semi religious devotion to (inaudible (to some)) purity.
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Take what you want. Just don’t state obvious untruths like it’s lossless. And I do not buy any argument that something can be virtually lossless. It is or it isn’t, in this context, and it isn’t. I’m not against anyone enjoying their format of choice. Just don’t make claims that are flat out and demonstrably inaccurate, is all.
I stated nothing, lossless is a red herring, pretty meaningless if you’re just listening to music , which is what I’m here for. Lossy/Lossless- bothered. I think they meant that you couldn’t hear the bits that are lost, pretty innocent statement, hardly worth a fatwa…
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I’m not fond of sloppy language either. Nor of MQA.
But by your admirably strict definition, other technologies that are not lossless include microphones, amplifiers, vinyl, tape, speakers, crossovers and stereo. And ears.
That’s a rhetorical sleight of hand, but nice try my friend! Lossless simply means the original file can be recreated 100%. By your definition MP3 is not lossless because someone somewhere might have a crappy microphone that does worse damage.
Frankly I do not care if MQA is lossy or lossless except as (1) it is claimed to be so when it is not, either by Bob Stuart or fans of MQA, or (2) I would at some point be forced to purchase or archive MQA rather than by choice (because it becomes the dominant format for more than streaming from Tidal). Otherwise, have at it.
To be clear, please do not include me in some of the more vitriolic viewpoints on MQA. My concern doesn’t revolve around the sound quality of a given listening session. Indeed this weekend I probably chose 15 MQA tracks to listen to. I don’t like the end-to-end aspect of a proprietary format that is a solution to a non-problem (outside of streaming, as above) and which clearly garnered the interest of the record labels because of its DRM potential at some point in the future.
That’s all I’m saying (for now).
MP3 is clearly Lossy. It’s designed that way over the full audible frequency band. How can you say it’s lossless by any definition… it is what it is.
MQA is lossless over the audible band. No crappy microphone required. The best in the world cannot record 45Khz I bet your tweeters cannot deliver it either.
For MQA to work, it has to be end to end. That’s how it works. Otherwise it’s like saying ‘I like that car thing but I don’t want wheels’.
For sure we can agree, MQA can sound amazing and that’s the whole point…
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I was kidding but only a little. “Lossless” has come to mean, “are there any losses between the creation of a PCM file and the delivery of a PCM file. (Or DSD…) But that step is only a part, a very small part, of the chain from the sound of the performance to the sound of the reproduction in my home, and all of those other steps are lossy.
So not only does this focus on the lossless distribution channel lead to misguided decisions: “I’m not going to use any lossless stuff, I’m sticking with vinyl”.
But Stuart has made this point himself, that their goal is to get closer to making the whole chain lossless (by correcting for lossiness elsewhere). This is an interesting goal. We can discuss whether (a) those other losses are really a problem, and (b) whether MQA succeeds in solving it, and © whether the improvements MQA claims are worth the sacrifices they make. Interesting questions. But refusing to acknowledge the entire chain, and just focusing on the distribution channel, is not a correct analysis. It serves only to shoot down MQA, perhaps for reasons unrelated to sound quality (DRM! Profit motive!).
FWIW my answers are (a) not that I can hear, (b) not that I can hear, © don’t hear the losses either.
MQA is lossy by definition in the digital realm. MQA’s marketing speak attempting to confuse the digital domain with the analog domain is just that, marketing speak.
Sure but that’s all I was referring to.
I agree that what happens before that moment (creation of the PCM file) is orders of magnitude more influential on the quality of the audio than any reasonable thing that might happen after that moment.
Just that you might not be able to hear the “loss” so is it really a loss? Opens dictionary…
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Where has lossless “come to mean” this? In MQA marketing materials, but no where else. An PCM sampling at 10Khz to the depth of 8 bits is lossless. A PCM sampling at 1khz to 4 bits of depth is lossless. An MQA file (any MQA file) is lossy, as is MP3 at any sample rate.
The intentional obfuscation of the digital domain with the analog domain and what is “lost” there (though “lossy” is not an accepted way to describe these physical phenomena) through the limitations of microphones, electronic thermodynamics, etc. etc. is Bob S marketing strategery…
edit: sorry James_I, I see you were quoting the above - you did not make this statement
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I made it, and I said that “lossless” means that everywhere, in these pages and in the press and the internet. Everybody calls FLAC lossless because it delivers bitperfect from the files to the DAC. The point was that everything before that, and everything after that, is lossy. Including the creation of the 24/96 FLAC file itself.
So if you use a strict definition of lossless, it should apply everywhere and hence be somewhat useless.
Like my favorite example, MQA does not faithfully reproduce a full volume signal at 48 kHz, and under the strict definition that fact alone would disqualify it from the term lossless, but we don’t have such signals and we don’t want them because they would fry the speakers. So one conclusion is that a strict definition is less than useful, better to use nuanced language. Another is that the rectangular transfer mechanism is useless since it doesn’t match the content.
But the internet doesn’t do nuance…