My ‘agenda’, as you put it, is to work to keep the debate balanced, and most importantly factual.
Your posts are not factual. For example, what exactly is a ‘lossy SuperMP3’? Unless you can prove otherwise, there’s no such thing.
Yes, MP3 exists, and it encodes to industry-wide accepted standards. Yes, there is MQA. But MQA works very differently to MP3. MQA has been proven to be lossy. But that hardly makes it MP3. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT!
As to the DRM aspect of MQA, as I have stated before, it is debatable. It is perfectly possible to stream MQA streams without MQA hardware at the moment, and it may remain that way forever, for all you know. To state that:
is simply misleading, and incorrect.
As I have stated before, I’m quite ambivalent towards MQA as a medium. What I am far from ambivalent about is misinformation being distributed, as if it was fact. That, I will challenge until these sources of misinformation are exposed for what they really are.
Nope, it inn’t. You seem to be trying to debate the definition of DRM, and if so, you are wrong about it.
Once more: DRM is not just about preventing you from copying content. It’s also about making you pay for a certain features. To break it down, I’m certain you and I can agree that if you want to enjoy the “first unfold” of MQA, you need specific software or hardware.
Now, MQA-CD alone is 13/44 or whatever, but if you pay ■■ licensing money, and purchase an MQA-capable DAC, or rip and read through MQA-capable software, then you get what was inside your file all along. Your rights (to access the full-quality file) were managed. That’s DRM.
If you were to transfer it to something maybe more immediately comprehensible, it’s the same as entering an unlock code inside an engine management system. The engine’s the same, the capability was there all along, but until your rights are managed, digitally (and you pay extra), you can’t use some capabilities.
Probably the main reason that Roon pursues streaming.
In the future, ripping to disc will go the way of buggy whips, slide rulers, and land lines; to mention but a few.
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
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Though you have to wonder if that’s a good strategy. Clearly it’s the most users. But video and Kindle seems to show that the streaming back-end owner is the king here. And if there’s another $10/month that Roon is siphoning off for a front end, that could go to that owner, the cable industry teaches us that the owner will want that $10, too.
So maybe the endgame for Roon Labs is to sell itself to one of the streaming companies. Which will be the usual suspects: Google, in the guise of YouTube, Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. Maybe one of them will absorb Spotify.
I don’t disagree with you here. However…
The most useful comparison here is with HDCP 2.2 for 4K TV content. HDCP 2.2 is a ‘royal’ PIA with me. I have all of the hardware, Apple 4K TV, and a HDCP 2.2 input on my Sony 4K TV. Yet it still falls-over regularly, and the Apple TV needs rebooting to pass a signal.
MQA? Slightly different! You can still get a FLAC signal/stream without using MQA hardware. One that still sounds decent.
Is that ‘DRM’? That’s a ‘starter for ten’, as Bamber Gascoigne used to say…!
HDCP is as painful as it is stupid. It’s one of those things that only hurts honest consumers, given those who know where to look can already get as many 4k blu-ray disk (or streaming service) dumps as they damn well please anyway, so it isn’t like it’s actually useful.
I completely agree with you that it’s serviceable, pre-decode (through no quality of its own, it’s just that redbook is both fine in many cases, and rarely used to its fullest anyway, so it’s not too dreadful, even degraded). To keep with your HDCP troubles, maybe a more useful analogy would be that with a video MQA equivalent, you’d get SDR 1080p instead of no signal on your 4k TV when you streamed 4k Netflix. Then you could pay for a new cable or a software update to your TV or whatever other scheme, and get 4k. Sure, 1080p is way better than nothing… But 4k HDR it ain’t .
MQA is always transmitted/passed in a 44.1khz FLAC ‘container’.
But from what I understand, the bit-depth of ‘unfolded’ MQA equates to around 13-14 bits. Listenable, but obviously not even CD/RB quality.
This is right, it ain’t the original - it’s an DSP altered (we know some of the ways it’s been altered, but not all given the ADC treatment process has not been reversed engineered…yet…), lower dynamic range facsimile of the original redbook. @Martin_Kelly is wrong about:
Fact!: MQA is DRM, by its very design. MQA begins and ends with DRM. As @Bill_Janssen correctly percieves, DRMed MQA is about the business end of the music industry
Fact!: MQA is a lossy, “psychoacoustic” philosophy/encoding. It’s a “Super” MP3. It’s whole reason for existence is to keep the “crown jewels” out of consumers hands, just as Robert Harley argued several years ago now.
@Martin_Kelly has a bee in his bonnett…shoo bee, shoo bee!
MQA is not based on Psychoacoustics of human hearing. It is essentially a down and up sampling techniques using close approximation of bit depth reconstruction. Because it is not bit perfect (DSP), we called it as lossy. Essentially, you can get 17 bit at 88.2/96k is not bad after all. MP3 essentially throw away information based on the limit of human hearing. As I said not everyone hear the same and this is the problem.
Just to be a little bit pedantic, the container is irrelevant: it isn’t because you’re transporting goods in a supertanker that it’s anywhere close to capacity. There’s also the paradox that because MQA encoding is more random than actual music is, it’s more difficult to compress, making MQA files… inherently bigger at identical, pre-interpolated quality.
I mostly agree with you here, except MQA is an psychoacoustic encoding because the ultrasonics are encoded with a lossy compression that is variable. When you add to this particular known fact Bob S own language, then conclusion is that it is that it incorporates a “throw information away” MP3 like algorithm, granted only for the ultrasonics.
edit: in other words, this is not right:
“Essentially, you can get 17 bit at 88.2/96k is not bad after all…”
because the 44 > 88/96 is lossy compresiion scheme that can not be reversed. Bob S himself admits this…
An end user applying DSP is not the same as a lossy, pychoacustic compression encoding. It’s the difference between lossy and not, between a SuperMP3 and Hi Res, etc. etc. That’s all a rather large point and one that MQA has had to backtrack on…
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