Jump to content

Lighthouse

  • Posts

    91
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Country

    country-ZZ

Retained

  • Member Title
    Freshman Member

Recent Profile Visitors

3819 profile views
  1. Whew! It's been a so long time since I visited this site. I renewed my interest in music and just found out Qobuz is on US. Yes, I was under the rock for a very long time regarding music. Interestingly, Qobuz seems to use tar format, which is both similar (no stranger to tar since I study/run servers) and weird. Why are they not using zip or even say de-facto 7zip file?
  2. My goodness, after all of years I left this forum and just came back, all I still see is this ridiculous MQA debate. I am utterly surprised they are still pushing this. Just how much money was burned to keep the wheel? I understand that South African investor is behind Meridian but I am still surprised he is still pouring money into it.
  3. I just do not like Amazon is touching pretty much everything they can. If this happened 10 years ago, I would welcomed it. But now, far less, even if this helps people to have interest in "HD" Music. I am still surprised this company has not hammered with anti-trust lawsuits (well, based on how things going on Congress these days, it seems the day is coming soon or later) really. The whole price tag is screaming subsidiy, and there has to be some sacrifice to make this happen, but at what expense?
  4. Without this site I would not know about the quality of 24 bit downloads when it was at its rage 6 years ago. Thanks for the site.
  5. At this point, all of MQA threads are turning into giant satirical comedies. It is progressively harder to determine whether people discussing here are actually semi-serious about topic or not.
  6. I am sorry Witchdoctor, but surround is unfortunately NOT the future of audio, anytime in future for at least 30~40 years from now. 2 Problems follow : 1) Young people just do not have money to buy any semi-decent surround setups that involved in more than 2 speakers. 2) Most people just do not have even space to put stereo speakers, let alone surround system. There is no secret why suddenly soundbars became so popular. People now live in much smaller home and only thing that could actually fit into is now a single soundbar and maybe subwoofer, if those young buyers are smart enough to not hide 'that bulky, useless box' into the deepest corner of the room. Only way to go forward for surround is on headphones, such as Smyth Realiser here. http://www.smyth-research.com/ Or common surround headphone technologies such as Dolby headphones or DTS headphones X.
  7. I mean, Michael is not free from blame, but some of us here in forum did not really help the situation. But yeah... at least he is not as damaging as Bannon from forcefully positive perspective.
  8. With all of the debate whether MQA is superior/same as ordinary high-res music files is good, but I really think we are way too focused on technical issues. However, we seldom talk about issues other than technical aspects, such as the impact on the quality of music production and whether MQA is giving us customers anything value. To be honest, when first MQA is announced, I was far more interested in Meridian involving in recording production, as far as they were willing to check on mics, ADCs and other recording equipment. Because I believe there are way too many huge inconsistency on recorded music, and typically a lot of modern recordings' sound is far less than ideal. Now, several years have been passed, and I rarely hear anything about the quality of recording. I mean, all of high-res and stuffs sound good, but high-res is only worth to bother only if recording itself is good. Let's talk about convenience and availability; how's availability other than just several DACs on client side? How's the software decoder thing going on? Does Roon support software decoding of MQA now? As far as I see, the native MQA support from DAC manufacturers is still quite low, although I must point out dragging LG was indeed a gigantic win for MQA (actually, the announcement from LG that it will support MQA on their flagship V30 rekindled my interest again.) Of course, when we talk about convenience and availability, we cannot really ignore MQA's inherent DRM aspect (I am sorry Bob, but MQA really behaves like DRM and it seems you guys even licensed stuffs from DRM technology companies). I suspect this is one of the reasons why we are not seeing any software implementation for MQA other than Roon, which need constant internet connection to work. MQA's main problem is other than.... 1) Able to stream high-res with less bandwidth. 2) MAYBE, MAYBE better sounding than typical high-res due to technical aspect. There is really no incentive to use/adopt MQA. This is such a bad situation because these two points above are very weak compelling points. 1) If a person is suffering from less bandwidth, he/she rather either download high-res beforehand or just use typical sub-CD quality lossy stream. 2) Superiority of MQA is hotly debated pretty much everywhere. I really hope Meridian, Bob and rest of MQA pushers focus more on increasing the quality of music and aiming for true wider adoption (like, say, even DRM'd plug-in for Foobar2000 would help the situation a lot. Price like 50~100 bucks and see if people bite) rather than endlessly debating about technical aspects of MQA.
  9. I will be (my first time, actually) there from Saturday morning to afternoon. I will probably have to leave about 5PM based on my flight time.
  10. I guess that's ok though. I am still a "Freshman Member" despite the fact that I signed up this forum in 2011. At least... he is not fresh anymore.
  11. I believe one of HA mods claimed that it is possible to achieve effective 120+ dB with proper dither with 16/44.1. Basically, the reason why 24/96 is used for analog transfer is simply convenience. Which I understand, since I also use 24/96 for my Vinyl digital transfer works due to convenience as well. But, that's not the main issue. The issue is that music labels trying to sell these analog transfer as "High-Res" format despite it is not even close to being High-Res. Companies abuse the fact that people do not understand these '24/96' stuffs only indicates the size of the bucket. It does not tell whether water is actually filled that bucket or not.
  12. Price is not really ultimate reason why people became disliking audiophiles. The main reason is that this whole industry is solely based on lies, delusion, nonsense and customer-hostile attitudes. We still can't conclude debate that analog-tape masters are NOT high-res in any ways of the form. We still have some bs video from industry that "compression is bad" which does not talk about dynamic range, but rather promoting high-res music (what's the point of high-res if dynamic range is less than 6?) Still can't conclude debate that Vinyl is NOT 'high-res' or 'better quality' than CDs. No one outside of analog audiophile community accepts 'Vinyl is superior to CD' claim seriously. It is as ridiculous as flat earth theory at this point. Still relentlessly suing customers and do whatever to enforce stuffs like DRM. MQA and latest UHD HDCP 2.2 are best example of these, and it is the prime reason why people stopped giving attention to owning UHD contents and high-res audio. I wonder if industry has realized that considerable size of Blu-ray buyers are entirely depended on whether AnyDVD HD is available or not. "Price is TOO HIGH", "RIP OFF" indicate that such products are overpriced. And people think those products are overpriced because those products do not give such values in the first place. So why do audiophile/videophile products do not give enough vales to not being called "RIP OFF"? Answers are basically explained above points.
  13. Yes, it's a cool idea indeed, and very obvious one. I am certainly not the first one to post it. The idea is so obvious that it literally came out as soon as MQA was announced. And if my memory cells have not collectively committed seppuku yet, I am also very certain this idea was discussed deeply and in length in MQA Q&A thread. But it never happened because Meridian wanted to sell its DACs. However, MQA could not be the incentive to sell Meridian DACs nor be successful as a format. It's now (un)officially dead. IF Bob really wants to make MQA successful, a huge re-introduction is absolutely needed along with availability of MQA plug-in that can be used in various music players. Apple is finally implementing FLAC playback on their ios device, and (yeah, I know this rumor has been persistent for a while) maybe they are launching high-res music service, for real, this time. It can be very last chance for MQA or it will go to ways of HDCD, DSD and other obsolete formats.
  14. So, I skimmed through the thread, and it seems people just do not get why MQA is 'dead'. Nothing has really changed since that Q&A from Bob in this forum several years ago. People just really do not care much about technical aspects.... I mean cassette tape was actually terrible medium in many technical shortcomings, but it was main audio transport until CD comes around. MQA, just like DSD and (arguably) High-Res audio in general, have huge accessibility and usability issues. People, even those who claim they care about the sound quality, massively affected by convenience and accessibility to choose stuffs. The best example would be me, who have equipment and stuffs which cost thousands of dollars, yet vastly rely on Spotify for my daily music needs. No.1 Issue : No software decoding; So the result of MQA's nature of DRM, and the fact that Meridian has tried to push this format to sell their own products, We have so little way to play MQA and get its benefit. I am not asking for reverse-engineered freeware stuffs or something; it would had been so much better if I could buy, say a $150-ish software decoder which can be used with various music players as a plug-in (e.g Jriver and so forth.) It is obvious that my DAC manufacturer, Schiit, is not going to implement MQA (for really good reasons) and I have no intention to buy another DAC to play one specific format. So far, only Roon seems to support software decoding, and they just barely started after the momentum of the format has been lost.
×
×
  • Create New...