MQA is Vaporware

[mansr]

1 hour ago, Fokus said:

Beyonce's Lemonade is another example of a 1x MQA release. And then there is that one 2L recording that came off DAT.

I did a spot check of about 100 MQA tracks on Tidal and found almost half were from 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz masters.

 

[mansr]

2 hours ago, PeterV said:

I am not interested in measurements or graphs or reversed engineered software programs. All I care about is that MQA is contributing positively to the sound and that is just my personal observation. What I want to know is if this is due to the improvement in impuls response and as a result also to the reduction of time-smear in air. If my ears are capable to notice this en MQA claims are very clear about the reason and call this a 'paradigm shift' then all I care about is to get professional and objective confirmation. 

Someone should sell this guy some grounding boxes.

[mansr]

1 hour ago, PeterSt said:

Might it be helpful, here's the spectrograph of the 2nd track :

 

As you can see, apart from some anomalies, no data above 24KHz. Not even noise, which at least proves that their workflow regarding this 48KHz is OK. It also proves that nothing is faked here (no fake hires).

Please explain how you obtained that spectrogram.

[Sal1950]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

Someone should sell this guy some grounding boxes.

+1

But beware of Dracula's coffins, some nights they open and he comes out. 

[PeterV]

I clarified earlier that I do have interest in objective measurements, but focussed towards impulse response and time-smear improvement, that's all. 

[Digital Assassin]

And now Mr. Analog, Michael Fremer has jumped on board the Atkinson MQA train with ridiculous over the top

statements.

 

According to Archimago:

 

"Most recently (August 2017 Stereophile, reviewing Brinkmann's Nyquist DAC) I read that mister analogue himself Michael Fremer endorses MQA - "Had this been CD sound in 1983, I'd still be an LP guy - but I'd also be all in with digital." Wow... Really? Consider that later on in the article he used the analogy of "Grand Canyon of analog-vs-digital" to describe the sonic divide to describe the difference; did MQA make that much difference!?"

 

Please note, he said the identical nonsense a few months ago while being interviewed at a show.

 

This tells me he had a pre-determined agenda.

 

Now the entire staff at Stereophile is officially on board. They got the boss's memo.

 

 

[Sal1950]

1 hour ago, Digital Assassin said:

And now Mr. Analog, Michael Fremer

DA, Please don't use that vulgar language here on a Sunday. 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

19 hours ago, Jud said:

 

What proprietary technologies is Facebook based on?

Not sure if I got my point across.  Facebook did not set out to design a digital communications architecture. They, of course, used what was already widely available.  But, they are fundamentally an app, that rides on existing platforms and communications. And, their app, which is their only real technology, is itself proprietary, unless you have the source code for it.

[kumakuma]

39 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Not sure if I got my point across.  Facebook did not set out to design a digital communications architecture. They, of course, used what was already widely available.  But, they are fundamentally an app, that rides on existing platforms and communications. And, their app, which is their only real technology, is itself proprietary, unless you have the source code for it.

 

You are, of course, correct but let's not forget that Facebook succeeded because it was built upon "widely available" and open technologies, not a proprietary data format like MQA.

 

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

11 hours ago, fung0 said:

 

Everyone's entitled to their own opinion - but not their own facts. And I can't help noticing that you've rebutted none of mine.

 

 

What an odd thing to say. I can't imagine anyone coming to a "venture capital executive" with an investment idea based on developing a standard - open, closed or halfway ajar. Surely, most investment ideas would be based on developing products or services? And it's not at all difficult to cite products and services that have done extremely well, even though wholly dependent on open standards. (Every Internet business, for a start...)

 

More importantly, markets based on open standards do far better (especially in the long run) than even the most successful proprietary monocultures. Which is why big corporations continually invest in open standards, as IBM and Microsoft do with Linux, or JVC did with VHS, or Fraunhofer did with MP3. Clearly, standards do pay for themselves.

Gosh, I bow to your superior wisdom, and your superior semantic skills.  

 

Well, Twitter was certainly built using open internet standards, but do you have their source code?  No.  That is proprietary.  

 

Yes, Linux is open.  But, IBM and Microsoft invest much more on and receive much greater revenues from their own proprietary stuff than on Linux support.  Do you disagree?

 

JVC did not give VHS away.  Licensing was simply much more favorable to licensees than was Beta.  Beta, by the way, was widely considered better in all respects except maximum playing time, but Sony were simply SOBs about the licensing.  

 

I do not know the Fraunhoffer story.  But, was there no licensing whatsoever required, meaning no revenue stream to them?  Weird.  OK, just googled them.  MP3 is patented and licensed from Fraunhofer, not a free open standard.

 

CD was not a free, open standard, BTW.  The players and discs were manufactured under license from Sony/Philips.  Dolby on cassettes was also not free and open.  DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, DTS and Dolby codecs, HDMI, etc.   all require licensing.  

 

So, you are miffed because MQA chooses not to do business in the completely open standards way that you consider correct and just give their process away.   Shame on them.  However, in spite of your philosophy, many other companies have been quite successful while maintaining proprietary protection over their unique technology.  In fact, doing so is mandatory to satisfy investors looking for a return on a new idea.  That was my point.

 

What other undisputed "facts" of yours were those again that I was supposed to rebuff?

[mansr]

35 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

You are, of course, correct but let's not forget that Facebook succeeded because it was built upon "widely available" and open technologies, not a proprietary data format like MQA.

If we're going to make this analogy, Facebook is the music while the internet protocols are the file format.

[kumakuma]

2 minutes ago, mansr said:

If we're going to make this analogy, Facebook is the music while the internet protocols are the file format.

 

Interesting way of looking at it. I was considering Facebook to more like a music player.  

[mansr]

13 minutes ago, kumakuma said:

Interesting way of looking at it. I was considering Facebook to more like a music player.  

That would be the browser.

[Fitzcaraldo215]

10 hours ago, soxr said:

 

They trade mistake A with mistake B. A trade-off. It's in their AES paper. In the hope that one is audible and the other not, without providing scientific proof, just anecdotal proof. Smoke and mirrors.

 

 

I just talked to the CEO of a well known audio company. Confirmed that it is a non-problem.

 

Actually, there are multiple AES papers outlining their theories over a number of years, all peer reviewed, by the way. Now, that does not mean that peers attempted to dublicate experimental test results or that peers agree with all conclusions.  But, many of those earlier experimental results were done by others, and that research is meticulously cited, and those citations will have been checked via peer review for consistency.

 

Yes, the papers cite some MQA experimental results, and those experiments may not be fully described,   But, I do not recall seeing any simple anecdotal result cited.  I do not think that would have passed peer review.

 

Your chat with one CEO is anecdotal, and it proves nothing. But, yes, I know, since you are on the right and holy side of this debate bandwagon, you are allowed to get away with vague anecdotal statements.

[Shadders]

Hi,

Isn't the issue with regards to open, being that Sony/Philips published every detail on their standard for CD, so everyone can implement their product accordingly.

With MQA it is a secret closed standard, so no one except those who have signed the NDA can implement, and only MQA Ltd can process a sound file to encode.

Then there is the peer review aspect, where MQA is not peer reviewed, but still claims benefits against other open standards, but we can never know to confirm.

There is a saying in the security area " security through obscurity". Proponents of a system say it is secure as no one knows how it is constructed. Problem is that people will always try and reverse engineer and crack the system, and they generally succeed, or a very basic back door exists.

Regards,

Shadders.

[Jud]

Facebook is the peanut butter while the protocols are the jelly....

 

I think we can get a little too far into analogy.   The fact is that there is a continuum, from less to more open (e.g., Google and Apple both built OSs based on Unix; Google has been more open with its OS than has Apple; but Google is anything but open with its search algorithms).  

 

There is also the separate but related question of standards and interoperability, where MQA has been pretty terrible, and many successful companies have been quite good (MS and Apple frequently not having been good, but Google being a notable success that has usually been good at adhering to standards and maintaining interoperability).

 

It’s a little odd that folks who are worried about MQA taking over the world are at the same time arguing that those committed to standards and interoperability are usually more successful.  MQA, being less standards-compliant and interoperable, should therefore be less successful.  And in fact I think this is the case.

[mansr]

5 minutes ago, Shadders said:

Isn't the issue with regards to open, being that Sony/Philips published every detail on their standard for CD, so everyone can implement their product accordingly.

Yes, anyone can buy the CD spec from the IEC: https://webstore.iec.ch/publication/3885

[soxr]

49 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Actually, there are multiple AES papers outlining their theories over a number of years, all peer reviewed, by the way. Now, that does not mean that peers attempted to dublicate experimental test results or that peers agree with all conclusions.  But, many of those earlier experimental results were done by others, and that research is meticulously cited, and those citations will have been checked via peer review for consistency.

 

Yes, the papers cite some MQA experimental results, and those experiments may not be fully described,   But, I do not recall seeing any simple anecdotal result cited.  I do not think that would have passed peer review.

 

"There is also upward aliasing introduced by the reconstruction process: here we rely on plausibility arguments, verified by listening to the final result that these alias products, lying above 48 kHz, are inaudible and low enough in level to avoid slew-rate or other problems."

So MQA introduces new mistakes (aliasing), which they claim are inaudible, and they provide only anecdotal proof. How did they test that? Did they use double blind methods? It's not documented.

[Jud]

10 minutes ago, mansr said:

Yes, anyone can buy the CD spec from the IEC: https://webstore.iec.ch/publication/3885

 

Derivation of the term “RedBook.”

[mansr]

Just now, soxr said:

"There is also upward aliasing introduced by the reconstruction process: here we rely on plausibility arguments, verified by listening to the final result that these alias products, lying above 48 kHz, are inaudible and low enough in level to avoid slew-rate or other problems."

So MQA introduces new mistakes (aliasing), which they claim are inaudible, and they provide only anecdotal proof. How did they test that? Did they use double blind methods? It's not documented.

Moreover, if those alias artefacts are inaudible, what's the point in high-res, and by extension MQA, in the first place?

[Jud]

3 minutes ago, mansr said:

Moreover, if those alias artefacts are inaudible, what's the point in high-res, and by extension MQA, in the first place?

 

Depends on how audible one thinks time domain effects are, I suppose.  But that doesn’t necessitate MQA.

[Fitzcaraldo215]

9 minutes ago, mansr said:

Moreover, if those alias artefacts are inaudible, what's the point in high-res, and by extension MQA, in the first place?

Their story has not changed.  Greater timing accuracy is what is conveyed by hi rez and it is much more important than frequency response issues, aliasing, etc.. But, it is all psychoacoustic or perceptual, which presents huge problems for traditional audio analysis.  

 

I am am not saying their analysis is correct.  But, there it is.  

[Fitzcaraldo215]

21 minutes ago, soxr said:

 

"There is also upward aliasing introduced by the reconstruction process: here we rely on plausibility arguments, verified by listening to the final result that these alias products, lying above 48 kHz, are inaudible and low enough in level to avoid slew-rate or other problems."

So MQA introduces new mistakes (aliasing), which they claim are inaudible, and they provide only anecdotal proof. How did they test that? Did they use double blind methods? It's not documented.

Sorry, can you give me the entire context of the quote before I agree with your conclusion?

[soxr]

1 minute ago, mansr said:

Moreover, if those alias artefacts are inaudible, what's the point in high-res, and by extension MQA, in the first place?

The same question can be asked if real ultrasonics (real upper harmonics of the musical content) are audible. This is still a big debate.

Some years ago we did a test with content that had 20 Khz + content: the DVD-A version of this.

https://www.discogs.com/Laurence-Juber-Guitar-Noir/release/8486906

A very good sounding highres album. I had the 24/96 version, and cropped a one minute piece out of it, saved as 24/96 WAV. Made sure the file had ultrasonics to begin with so ran a spectrum through audacity.

I used my sox method as disclosed in my first post here, to downsample to 16/44.1 and upsample back to 24/96, with rate -vsM . Posted both 24/96 files on some forum and only one hifi dealer with super expensive gear could tell the files apart.

All the other forum members reacted like: great resampler you have there, can't hear the diff.

I did this test because I had this test improvised live in foobar: I used a secret rabbit code downsampler + upsampler in the DSP list which I saved as a DSP profile so I could quick switch, and then I could live switch between native 24/96 and the band limited version in realtime. I created this on the fly as some customer asked: does highres matter. So we live tested this and they could not believe it. Foobar was running in WASAPI or kernel streaming bitperfect mode, so it did not interfere with windows resampling.

Something similar is also documented here:

https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/journal/?ID=2&pg=2

So yes, the arguments in the MQA AES paper debunk the need for highres.

[soxr]

6 minutes ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Sorry, can you give me the entire context of the quote before I agree with your conclusion?

http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=17501