Hifi Bob

This might be it: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/mqa-disappointing/44057/500

Fx, why should it be down to someone such as yourself to create a convincing demonstration of MQA’s virtues? Why did MQA never do this themselves...?

There’s a demo here https://github.com/plext/cdtr that’s easy to reproduce. They take a square-wave sampled at 1GHz, convert to Redbook then back again, and with saturation, the result is identical to the original. I tried it on an Ubuntu machine and it works. So 1 nano-second rather than 55 pico-seconds but impressive nevertheless.

I think that this has only ever been a marketing pitch. In the context of recorded music, I wondered if Neil Young / Pono might be the originator but it’s been around for a while before then: That's how we at Rotel feel about hi-fi. The real joy of owning an audio system is to experience the pleasure of a great performance by reproducing it exactly as the artist intended. Stereophile, May 1998.

Meridian has been trying to tap into the CD/audio supply-chain for decades. In the 90s they had "autodither"; it never took off, perhaps because HDCD stole the limelight at the time.

But if that’s seen as a good thing then dual-layer SACD is better since the CD layer is unadulterated and you can have separate masters, a squashed one for in the car and a dynamic one for at home.

The usual BS. But my, how dull can Bob be? I’d be surprised if anyone makes it to the end of the video.

Algol—the ’60s programming language? The mind boggles.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. “an effect on the lower frequencies which we do hear” would be non-linear distortion that might or might not occur dependent on the playback chain and room characteristics—i.e. quasi-randomly. If a bit of thickening up of some sounds is desirable, much better to apply it during production—in the audible band, of course; this gives the best chance of the listener hearing it “as the artist intended”.

Try sox's sinc filter instead of its highpass filter. By default it's like an axe, which is probably closer to what you want here.

I was appalled, watching BS's video, to see him wantonly weaving technical fact with fiction in an attempt to deceive the general public for his personal gain. (Also his derailing of the scientific process—diverting attention and perhaps funds away from work towards real improvements in sound reproduction.) If the problem had really existed, there would have been articles over the years, in Sound On Sound for example, by recording engineers bemoaning the fact that they were unable to make the recordings that they wanted to. Mastering engineers would have complained that no plug-in in the world was available to correct the blur caused by the ADCs. ADC manufacturers, audio tech. companies (Philips, Sony, etc.), plug-in writers, academia, would all have pitched in with their thoughts on whether the problem was solvable, or in what time-frame it would be solved, or at what cost. When BS finally announced that the problem had been solved, respected journals, perhaps Scientific American or New Scientist, would have announced the news with articles looking back at the history of the problem, recounting previous unsuccessful attempts to solve it. BS would have been hailed as a genius, MQA would have been bought immediately by Apple, etc., etc.... Of course, none of this actually happened. Back in the real world: BS by name, BS by nature.

That seems like saying if only this CD were available in MP3, I would buy it without any hesitation at all. Sure, unlike MP3, you can’t do the exact MQA encode yourself, but load it into a DAW and you can perform all manner of lossy processing to your heart’s desire!

That’s odd, since providing customers with what they want doesn’t require justification. Something else he mentioned was that the mixes he receives are typically already highly compressed.

Indeed, it’s far from rare: corporation/company sends blogger a cease & desist letter and given the choice of spending potentially huge amounts of time/money on lawyers, down comes the ‘offending’ blog entry—immediately.

And yet MQA remains firmly stuck in the Betamax-zone. It seems that only in Japan is there a smattering of interest.