To be honest I don’t think you are getting a different master with MQA as often as you think you are. If you like the sound of MQA that great, but the M in MQA is just another marketing tool.
Labels aren’t hiring engineers to remaster albums just for MQA when the audiophile market is maybe .1%. MQA is not going to bring about better masters.
MQA is not a label, or even a recording/mastering process. It is a digital encoding, so everything it can or can not do is stuck in the very “simplistic” domain which Bob S derides. This is yet another example of his duplicity.
Yes, terms like “resolution” have more than one meaning even in audio. On the subjective evaluation side, “resolution” (e.g., the ability of a transducer to resolve fine detail {“microdetail”}, or fine graduations of volume {“microdynamics”}) has a long and established history/meaning. So Bob Stuart comes alone with a SuperMP3, that is lossy and employs a certain digital filtering scheme that pushes one philosophy (i.e. that slow, leaky and distorting, out of phase filtering is “good” and the more common linear phase, low IM distorting filtering is “bad”). Ok, but why does he confuse the issue? Why does he purposely abuse how “resolve” and “resolution” is used in the digital domain with how these same terms are used in the subjective/evaluation domain?
It is exactly as you say, to $sell$ something - MQA. He wants the consumer to believe that he has something new - an advance, a SQ improvement. However, his philosophy is not new, it’s just old and known opinion repackaged in a proprietary, DRM container.
Where you get all this wrong is when you say that ““High-Res Audio” is just as pernicious of a branding effort, if not more, than MQA.” This can’t be, because Hi Res Audio is a known and relatively easily understood (even for non-technical consumers) meaning and philosophy. It is the idea that, all else being equal, a higher digital sample rate will be advantageous. That’s all it is. Have certain companies abused it - overselling it and their products? Of course. However, it is not a “product” itself - its just a definition and consensus. It is also transparent - anyone can observe, test, accept or reject it as a thing, philosophy, tool, and method.
MQA however is a “product”, and its alleged and definition bending “resolution” is in a proprietar/IP protected black box. You can’t take it out and examine it, test it, or confirm it. You can’t even use it unless you agree to Bob S closed/proprietary ecosystem. If you do take it out and examine/test it, your subject to DRM and legal ramifications.
All that said, Bob S is intentionally obscuring these two domains (digital and subjective evaluation) to $sell$ something. What somewhat surprises me about this whole affair is how snookered other manufacturers and industry insiders have been by all of this. They have to know that Bob S is a con man - a poison pill who is undermining the goodwill and capital of the consumer/manufacturer relationship. His abuse of “resolution” is a set back for the industry in that they have worked hard to educate the non-technical consumer around things/terms like “Hi Res”, fidelity, compression, lossy, etc.
Bob Stuart and his brand of carnival row marketing is a bull in the glass room of an industry in decline. Time to wake up “industry insiders” and push back on this bull - for your own good if not the consumers…
According to who? Those using it for marketing?
Here is the AES Technical Committee for High Resolution Audio - according to them it’s not just ‘higher digital sample rate’…
Hi Res (not fake Hi Res like MQA) can offer “extended resolution in bandwidth, dynamic range, time, and spatial acuity” because it allows more “headroom” for your digital filtering scheme. There is no free lunch. There are always trade offs.
Bob S has a certain philosophy and opinion (though his opinion has changed through the years) about how to do this filtering in the digital domain - good for him. He oversells it, and claims he has solved something in the “time domain”, but he has not in that his out of phase slow/leaky filtering scheme is already known art. It is but a minority opinion.
He however thinks we should take his opinion in a black box DRMed container and ignore all other opinion! No choice for you!! 
None of this changes the core digital fact of Hi Res being something greater than 16/44, and that this is an open and transparent starting point for which everyone can employ their own opinion about “time domain”, frequency domain, linear or out of phase, slow or fast roll off, etc. The consumer does this by choosing his preferred DAC and system, and increasingly through DAC/software filtering choice.
MQA wants the industry to take a step back into a one size fits all. Bob S tells you there is a free lunch, there are not trade offs, and there is nothing left to do or choose. “The debate is over” according to him. Don’t you believe it for a second…
So you’ve quoted the AES Technical Committee for Hi Res Audio there, in defining high resolution…
That definition might be Bob’s own wording, which will give him a good chuckle when he’s reading this, since he’s on that committee.
Sure, no doubt Bob S is trying to steer things his own way - why else would he bother with the committee
Besides, this AES committee is part of the AES. The RIAA and other industry elements are more influential. Hi Res in the end is a line in the sand, and all lines are “arbitrary” to a certain extent. The point of it is to provide meaning and context. That’s all that which you quoted does, provide the “why does Hi Res matter”, technically. All technical aspects ultimately matter because of what they can or can not do from a fidelity standpoint.
You appear to be thinking that quote is doing/meaning something else, or something. What do you think it says?
My main point was about the marketing to which so many are raising large objections. When I used the word “label” I’m referring to the very visual branding that comes with audio technology:
MQA has this brand label:
High-Resolution has this label:
Yes, I recognize MQA and “Hi-Res” are different entities. MQA is a product from a single company while the other one has emerged as a “marketing standard” used by many companies.
My point are both are trying to convey a standard for sound quality. In the case of “Hi-Res Audio” the predominant factor used is based on digital domain figures of merit (bit depth and sampling being the main ones). In the case of MQA, the predominant factor is time-domain analogue resolution.
To illustrate one example of how “High-Resolution” marketing emphasizes the wrong thing I went to the Auralic website, clicked on products, and clicked on the first one on the list (https://us.auralic.com/products/altair). The first thing they emphasize is the high-resolution that comes from a DAC that’s capable of DSD 256 and PCM 32 bit/392 kHz then they emphasize the quad-core A9 chip to handle all of those bits. It’s not until the bottom that they have a small mention of timing jitter performance (not quantified) and available custom filters. Auralic is hardly alone taking this approach.
Another example from Schiit (a vocal anti-MQA company) with their Yggdrassil (https://www.schiit.com/products/yggdrasil) DAC. Their first and dominant selling point is the mutli-bit DAC that provides 21 bits of resolution (it must be good…it’s what’s good for medical imaging!). Then they mention the JFETs to drive long cable runs and finally at the end mention timing and noise improvements.
Where is the outrage at this kind of marketing?
I just find the reaction to MQA’s marketing to be lopsided and exaggerated. All companies are hyperbolic about their products…MQA is no different.
While there’s plenty of legitimate debate over MQA’s technical approach I think their counter to thinking about sound quality as predominantly a digital domain problem is a good thing.
I think the AES definition of “high-resolution” is a good one. Note it never states the qualifications of “extended resolution in bandwidth, dynamic range, time, and spatial acuity” as only digital figures of merit. To achieve high-resolution you need digital and analog quality.
Two of the biggest technical counters against MQA are based on digital figures of merit: 1) digitally lossy compression; and 2) lower bit depth. That is, a SuperMP3 (the horror!).
Other, more legitimate counters, albeit rather overblown in my opinion, are concerns over: 1) aliasing (a.k.a. “leaky filters”); 2) DRM trojan horse; and 3) the one standard to rule them all. The aliasing is a fair concern and definitely a tradeoff that results from the non-Nyquist sampling scheme that aims to keep the impulse response narrow. Some hear distortion due to this approach others don’t. As for a possible DRM grab in the future, this didn’t bode well for the audio industry in the past and is not likely to be a mistake repeated again. I am as loathe of monopolies as any other consumer and certainly wish to see health competition in the audio market. Given the technical tradeoffs evident in MQA, isn’t it more likely that competing approaches will survive to appeal to a diverse market with many tastes?
I may not be following you, but why would anyone have “outrage” at Auralic claims (which are specific and verifiable digital resolution processing specs), or Schiit’s claims (again, specific and verifiable bit resolution specs), or for that matter the usual definition of Hi Res, which is something > 16/44? All of these claims are true.
MQA’s claims however are false. Almost all of them have been falsified.
Also, no, MQA’s “counter thinking” is not a good thing. They falsely characterize the claim (i.e. set up a strawman), and then tear it down with their own set of false claims. Two, three, four wrongs added up together don’t make a right.
Maybe, maybe not - no one can predict the future. However, the known intent is there for a monopoly, not only from MQA’s side but from the labels side (read Robert Harley’s “MQA from 10,000 feet” for a good explication of the motivations).
Besides, MQA is already DRM as it is - it’s the freemium model, DRM by design.
So the question becomes, why tolerate MQA at all, what good is it? All of it’s sound quality philosophy is already available elsewhere without the proprietary, DRM wrapper. Why bother with it at all? Why have consumers and companies like Roon wasted time and $money$ on something that is a nothing burger?
Yet another thread about MQA. I just don’t get it…
Yes, the specs are most certainly verifiable and true. The marketing is the claim that by meeting those specs you will get “a Hi-Fi audio system that sounds great.”
Likewise, MQA’s technical approach for “hierarchical sampling, fractional-bit coding, end-end subtractive dither and platform-specific D/A rendering management” are measurable and verifiable. They claim this results in “better sound.”
How are these two marketing approaches different?
These are fair questions and why I think competition will endure even though it will continue to be an oligarchy. The same is true for many other industries that benefit from mass and scale–the “networking” effect–to deliver economically efficient results.
Most of the arguments are about sound quality differences and technical arguments about definitions, resolution, lossy/lossless, etc.
It seems some can hear a difference, some can’t, some can hear a difference on some tracks and not others. Some hear some MQA tracks as better than non-MQA while hearing the reverse with other tracks.
I think it is fair to say that the difference is minimal, ambiguous, subjective.
IMO, what is more important are the arguments regarding market dominance, DRM, and choice.
The mantra for many MQA advocates is something like “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.”
But the bottom line is: If MQA succeeds, there will be no choice to make. MQA or nothing.
That is the largest reason as to why I am against it.
How likely do you think that is? Personally I have a collection of non MQA music, I’ll be able to listen to that come what may. I suspect other music may be available… We have monopoly commissions. It’s not really a compelling argument. We’ll be doing a number of things where “that’s all there is”…
Well, for one the “platform-specific D/A rendering management” claim has been falsified.
I think I am following you better however. Look, if Bob S had come out from the beginning with “what we have here is a lossy SuperMP3 - we don’t pretend it is “hi res”, and we like our filtering scheme but we don’t claim to “fix the arithmetic” of the ADC/DAC process, nor do we claim that we have discovered something new in reference to the “time domain”. Nope, this is a nifty compression algorithm that probably is not all that useful given typical bandwidth these days, but would have been 10 years ago…” or something similiar, well then he would have had a beginning of an argument (only a beginning) of why anyone should give a hoot. He of course would have had to justify why anyone would actually pay for it (in any way - development, licence, etc.) when you can do the same or similar with current open format/standards. Why would anyone agree to a closed DRMed digital ecosystem when they have an open one that works as good or better than the one you are proposing?
In the end your equivalency of marketing claims does not hold water. Auralic, Schiit, most everyone else - they tell the truth, and then says “it sounds great”. Bob S makes false claims, and then says “it sounds better than anyone else - there is no debate”. He is on a ho notha level…
Thanks for taking the time to answer, @anon72719171 . Mods, I’m sorry if you feel this is off topic - i’m simply picking apart the victimisation narrative MQA proponents seem to have espoused.
Monopolistic harvesting and use of data has been criticised by consumers, and consumer advocacy groups, for the better part of the decade, including via innumerable articles. There’s also been congressional inquiries into the resulting election meddling in multiple countries, and inquiries into user privacy by others, including regulatory agencies. We completely agree it isn’t enough, and that there should be much more regulation there, though, but it’s factually incorrect to state it’s inexistent or even close to comparable to the scrutiny BS is getting over MQA.
There’s regulation here, as you should know. Here again, I agree there isn’t enough, but one good example would be the investigations by Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, into Android and AdSense. Like the user data abuses, this didn’t happen ex nihilo.
I’m not entirely certain who you mean here - Dorsey and Zuckerberg ? There’s outrage after outrage after outrage over their actions.
You’ve never heard the name Greta Thunberg, have you ?
MQA set themselves up for failure from the beginning, with there over the top claims and jump the shark methods. Bob S knew the Audiophile market and culture however, and new how to pull its strings. MQA however failed in the larger consumer audio market where they actually expect real substance and results.
The problem is that the preconditions in the industry for something like MQA, which is to say the change over from open standards to closed, still exist. The labels desperately want DRM, mostly as a way to convince their investors that they are doing something - anything about “piracy” which is what they tell their investors is the reason for their decline since their peak in the late 1990’s. This narrative is false, but the investor class does not know any better - or so it would appear.
The positive is that false narratives are hard to maintain - truth is like gravity, you can only flap your arms against it for so long before you fall back to the hard ground of reality.
So in the end I am really a glass half full when it comes to all of this. MQA (or anything like it) is just too rickety to prop up for very long.
Do you expect to be taken seriously?
Sorry ineffective (not existent in effect)
we agree then
Newspaper owners
I have now, What chance of reasoned action when Don rips up the agreement in the interests of personal enrichment.
I wouldn’t worry about the mods.
I’d choose my existing collection…Not quite as depicted!
Will all Vinyl be MQA?
