MQA is Vaporware

[psjug]

6 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

With all due respect, you failed to understand what I wrote. MQA-encoded files only have 2 sample rates, 44.1kHz or 48kHz. I was referring to what happened spectrally when those files are unfolded.

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

Forget sample rates for now.  You said lossy "Above 44.1kHz or 48kHz".  Implying that it is lossless below this.

[Currawong]

12 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

Putting to one side your emotional language, I made this point in the very first article I wrote on MQA: that it offers a benefit to the record companies in that, as with the LP, they are no longer selling a clone of the master.

 

 

 

9 hours ago, Brinkman Ship said:

So finally we have it...you fully acknowledge that MQA files are NOT identical to the master, and are lossy.

 

8 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

I have said that from the very first time I wrote about MQA, in December 2014. They are derived from the master, of course.

 

 

From the original, 2014 article: (emphasis mine)

 

Quote

Fig.4 shows the final result of this folding and packing: a 24-bit MQA file sampled at 48kHz contains all the musical information corresponding to an original recording sampled at 192kHz. You are not getting something for nothing: The data above the baseband Fs is packed sufficiently beneath the recording's noisefloor, using subtractive dither, in an information space area that would otherwise be random, that it will not have audible consequences. When this file is played back with an MQA decoder, it unfolds to give the original resolution and bandwidth required to playback the music without loss.
 

 

Sorry John, but that article has "lossless" written all through it, including in the graphs, and your explanation above. MQA sold itself as reproducing the original music losslessly until Archimago's article came out showing otherwise. Then all description of that vanished as the facts came out.

 

Despite what Bob Stuart is trying to sell people, "lossless music" is defined as having no reduction in bit depth. MQA by definition has to use bits, somewhere, to store the high-res musical data, so is, by definition, lossless. Your stating that you never claimed otherwise is simply untrue. "All" means "all".

[Brinkman Ship]

A perfect example of why JA is not a straight shooter, evasive, and disingenuous. Period.

 

The time is done for nuanced parsing and passive aggressive debate from him.

[Sonicularity]

MP3...all the musical information corresponding to an original recording sampled at 192kHz...for a significant number of listeners and with an enormous amount of music.  Nah, it will never fly.   

[Currawong]

Who is claiming that MP3 stores "all the musical information [corresponding] to an original recording"?

[firedog]

15 hours ago, Brinkman Ship said:

You have continued to claim that MQA'd albums sound BETTER than the masters. You can't have it both ways.

Well of course he can. That's the whole claim of MQA: that their altered files/sound superior, because they correct errors in the original recording/conventional playback chain. 
 

Whether that is true or not is a different question. I don't think JA has ever been one of those claiming that MQA isn't lossy. The question is whether they are losing something audible and/or adding something actually improving the SQ of the result. 
It is not logically impossible for the MQA claim to be true. There are psycho acoustics involved which could theoretically make such a claim possible. 

 

One of the issues with MQA and some of their supporters is that instead of clearly stating their claim that MQA is "perceptually lossless" they repeatedly say - or strongly imply - that it is lossless. That's a demonstrably false claim. The quality of the resulting SQ is something else entirely, and a different debate. As are all the other aspects about MQA being a "market control" tool for the labels, sleth DRM, etc.

 

In any case, MQA doesn't seem to have gotten any traction in the marketplace at all. In most of the world it is basically non-existent. It's only success has been Tidal hi-fi streaming, and that is a fraction of a percent of the market. Barring a major shift, it will probably cease to exist in practical terms in a year or two. I wouldn't be surprised to see manufacturers stop supporting it, or only supporting  the "first unfold", which frees them from all the bother of dealing with MQA filterings and the resulting problems of implementation. 

 

[firedog]

13 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

I was referring to the fact that any time someone posts a positive comment on the sound of MQA files to CA, people like you swarm like a host of white blood cells to repel the intruder. You seem incapable of comprehending that your opinions on MQA may not be shared by others. Like I said, groupthink,

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

Not accurate. There's an entire thread here for giving recommendations of good sounding MQA classical files.

[labjr]

I don't think they can sustain many more years of the kind of losses being reported. 

 

I wonder if they'll regret not offering "temporal deblurring" a la  carte sans lossy compression? I kind of doubt it since improving the sound wasn't their primary objective.

[John_Atkinson]

12 hours ago, Currawong said:

From the original, 2014 article: (emphasis mine)

 

Quote

Fig.4 shows the final result of this folding and packing: a 24-bit MQA file sampled at 48kHz contains all the musical information corresponding to an original recording sampled at 192kHz. You are not getting something for nothing: The data above the baseband Fs is packed sufficiently beneath the recording's noisefloor, using subtractive dither, in an information space area that would otherwise be random, that it will not have audible consequences. When this file is played back with an MQA decoder, it unfolds to give the original resolution and bandwidth required to playback the music without loss.
 

Read more  

 

Sorry John, but that article has "lossless" written all through it, including in the graphs...

 

Thank you for posting the link to my original article . Note that I wrote "musical information." LPCM encodes both music and the original analog background noise with the same precision up to Nyquist. From the article:

 

If you look closely at the red and blue traces [in fig.1 at https://www.stereophile.com/content/ive-heard-future-streaming-meridians-mqa ], four things become apparent:

1) That a sample rate of >96kHz is required to encode all of the music information in this recording.
2) That the information present above around about 55kHz is noise.
3) That within the baseband (<24kHz), the noisefloor is above the 16-bit quantization limit.
4) That the musical information only occupies a fraction of the information space, generally a triangle-shaped area with the greatest dynamic range at low frequencies and the smallest dynamic range at ultrasonic frequencies. This is because of the fundamentally self-similar nature of music with respect to its spectral content.

 

So if you can exploit the fact that random noise is random noise, ie, if, when decoded, it has the same level and spectral content as that on the original signal to be encoded, you can exploit that fact to create a pseudo-random noise signal that includes a buried data channel. This is not new - Alan Turing did this in the 1940s and Peter Craven and the late Michael Gerzon did something very similar in the 1990s.

 

So yes, while the output of the decoded MQA file does not have the same bits as the original PCM-encoded analog signal, and is, in that  sense lossy, as I wrote, you don't get something for nothing -  the musical information is preserved, up to Nyquist with 2Fs sample rates and up to the limit of the musical spectrum at 4Fs rates.
 

You then get the advantage, as I described in my September 2018 article on A/D conversion - https://www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion and was also touched on by Paul Miller in the July 2017 issue of Hi-Fi News - of more accurately preserving the time-domain aspect of the original signal. But again you don't get something for nothing: that time-domain optimization of the digital transmission chain allows for there to be aliased energy in the reconstructed signal. This was discussed both by Paul Miller and by Jim Austin in Stereophile. But in my point 4 above, as the energy above Nyquist with music in the original analog signal is low, so will be the level of any aliased signals in the baseband.

 

The question then becomes: is this tradeoff worthwhile when it comes to sound quality? My experience has been that it is; others, particularly on this forum, say that it isn't. Recording engineer Tony Faulkner, in a letter I published in Stereophile, also says that he is bothered by the presence of the aliased image energy in the baseband. This surprised me, as Tony pioneered the use of a moving average anti-aliasing filter that doesn't have much rejection of energy above Nyquist - see https://www.stereophile.com/reference/104law/index.html .

 

So it goes ?

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

[Shadders]

58 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

So if you can exploit the fact that random noise is random noise, ie, if, when decoded, it has the same level and spectral content as that on the original signal to be encoded, you can exploit that fact to create a pseudo-random noise signal that includes a buried data channel. This is not new - Alan Turing did this in the 1940s and Peter Craven and the late Michael Gerzon did something very similar in the 1990s.

Hi,

If dither was applied to recordings for 16bit encodings, which was to remove the correlated noise which could be heard at the lowest level possible, where is the study that every recording in the world can give up 4bit or 3 bits from the 16bits to be used for MQA ?

 

58 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

But again you don't get something for nothing: that time-domain optimization of the digital transmission chain allows for there to be aliased energy in the reconstructed signal. This was discussed both by Paul Miller and by Jim Austin in Stereophile. But in my point 4 above, as the energy above Nyquist with music in the original analog signal is low, so will be the level of any aliased signals in the baseband.

So what is the point of MQA or any other high resolution offering ?

 

Full 16bit 44.1kHz is sufficient. There are no time domain issues with a linear filter, as long as it has sufficient order and stop band attenuation.

 

Regards,

Shadders.

[Brinkman Ship]

1 hour ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

Thank you for posting the link to my original article . Note that I wrote "musical information." LPCM encodes both music and the original analog background noise with the same precision up to Nyquist. From the article:

 

If you look closely at the red and blue traces [in fig.1 at https://www.stereophile.com/content/ive-heard-future-streaming-meridians-mqa ], four things become apparent:

1) That a sample rate of >96kHz is required to encode all of the music information in this recording.
2) That the information present above around about 55kHz is noise.
3) That within the baseband (<24kHz), the noisefloor is above the 16-bit quantization limit.
4) That the musical information only occupies a fraction of the information space, generally a triangle-shaped area with the greatest dynamic range at low frequencies and the smallest dynamic range at ultrasonic frequencies. This is because of the fundamentally self-similar nature of music with respect to its spectral content.

 

So if you can exploit the fact that random noise is random noise, ie, if, when decoded, it has the same level and spectral content as that on the original signal to be encoded, you can exploit that fact to create a pseudo-random noise signal that includes a buried data channel. This is not new - Alan Turing did this in the 1940s and Peter Craven and the late Michael Gerzon did something very similar in the 1990s.

 

So yes, while the output of the decoded MQA file does not have the same bits as the original PCM-encoded analog signal, and is, in that  sense lossy, as I wrote, you don't get something for nothing -  the musical information is preserved, up to Nyquist with 2Fs sample rates and up to the limit of the musical spectrum at 4Fs rates.
 

You then get the advantage, as I described in my September 2018 article on A/D conversion - https://www.stereophile.com/content/zen-art-ad-conversion and was also touched on by Paul Miller in the July 2017 issue of Hi-Fi News - of more accurately preserving the time-domain aspect of the original signal. But again you don't get something for nothing: that time-domain optimization of the digital transmission chain allows for there to be aliased energy in the reconstructed signal. This was discussed both by Paul Miller and by Jim Austin in Stereophile. But in my point 4 above, as the energy above Nyquist with music in the original analog signal is low, so will be the level of any aliased signals in the baseband.

 

The question then becomes: is this tradeoff worthwhile when it comes to sound quality? My experience has been that it is; others, particularly on this forum, say that it isn't. Recording engineer Tony Faulkner, in a letter I published in Stereophile, also says that he is bothered by the presence of the aliased image energy in the baseband. This surprised me, as Tony pioneered the use of a moving average anti-aliasing filter that doesn't have much rejection of energy above Nyquist - see https://www.stereophile.com/reference/104law/index.html .

 

So it goes ?

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

 

.."you don't get something for nothing.."

 

No you don't..

 

-so EVERY MQA file does not have the same bits as the original..LOSSY..or as you say in your typical passive

aggressive manner, "in that sense lossy"

 

-there is aliasing, in other words, distortion.

 

Let's add to that, required hardware upgrades or purchases, fees paid, and a closed proprietary DRM's system..

 

So tell us again, please why we need MQA?????

 

You are Cinderella, and the clock is approaching midnight.

 

The fact that believe the trade off is worth it makes your judgement and hearing highly suspect.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Fokus]

2 hours ago, John_Atkinson said:

You then get the advantage ... of more accurately preserving the time-domain aspect of the original signal. But again you don't get something for nothing: that time-domain optimization of the digital transmission chain allows for there to be aliased energy in the reconstructed signal. ... But in my point 4 above, as the energy above Nyquist with music in the original analog signal is low, so will be the level of any aliased signals in the baseband.

 

But the 'more accurate' time domain representation is mostly in the eye of the audiophile beholder who has been trained to look at impulse plots, ignoring that they are in a sense illegal and that they don't even tell half the story. whereas aliasing, when falling into the audible band, is a very real problem.

 

But anyway, if the signal energy above Nyquist is low enough to keep aliasing innocuous, then it is surely low enough not to trigger that vile filter ringing at the cut-off frequency at any significant level.

[Sal1950]

On 9/22/2018 at 7:40 AM, John_Atkinson said:

 

Putting to one side your emotional language, I made this point in the very first article I wrote on MQA: that it offers a benefit to the record companies in that, as with the LP, they are no longer selling a clone of the master.

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

 

Right on point!

Yep,   MQA will no longer allow the end user access to hear what the original master tape sounds like. Support for it by Stereophile is a knife in the back to music lovers everywhere.  Good or Bad, What matter is it what you think these lossy distorted files now sound like? You can say the same for introducing a slight roll off on the top end, or a small dip in the presence region, but that isn't what High Fidelity is all about. What does Stereophile now stand for in today's world, what's good for the consumer or what's good for the record companies? I thought we answered that question in the last fight over DRM?

Once again, 

Shame On You John.

[The Computer Audiophile]

That’s true Sal. No matter what is said about MQA technically, it isn’t what the artist or anyone in the studio intended because it happens after the fact. 

 

Artist sings, it’s recorded, mixed, mastered for a very specific sound. Then MQA changes that (for better or worse doesn’t matter) sound. This is the opposite of as the artist intended or high fidelity. 

[christopher3393]

54 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

That’s true Sal. No matter what is said about MQA technically, it isn’t what the artist or anyone in the studio intended because it happens after the fact. 

 

Artist sings, it’s recorded, mixed, mastered for a very specific sound. Then MQA changes that (for better or worse doesn’t matter) sound. This is the opposite of as the artist intended or high fidelity. 

 

Hi Chris. Do you also affirm Sal's repeated "Shame on you John"? To me, this implies a moral judgement of J.A.'s behavior, which has to include a determination of JA's intent. This involves some mind reading that, in my view, several members have engaged in liberally when it comes to addressing JA. This strikes me as unhelpful, unwarranted, hostile, and inappropriate. In my opinion John's conscience  is better equipped to guide him in discerning an ethical issue here. Shaming him regarding this issue is not much better than stating that he is taking bribes from MQA without any factual information that indicates this. He has taken great pains to deny this several times.I'm not surprised that he would find some of the things said to and about him offensive.

 

Where do you stand on this? What do you see as your responsibility as moderator in this regard?

[crenca]

39 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

 

Hi Chris. Do you also affirm Sal's repeated "Shame on you John"? To me, this implies a moral judgement of J.A.'s behavior, which has to include a determination of JA's intent. This involves some mind reading that, in my view, several members have engaged in liberally when it comes to addressing JA. This strikes me as unhelpful, unwarranted, hostile, and inappropriate. In my opinionJohn's conscience  is better equipped to guide him in discerning an ethical issue here. Shaming him regarding this issue is not much better than stating that he is taking bribes from MQA, which he has taken great pains to deny several times.

 

Sorry christopher3393, I always seem to be the one to reply to you on this direction ?

 

I am not much of a moralist, so I don't know about "shame" per se.  That said, it does not take "mind reading" to see that JA and his stance/perspective on MQA is indeed "unhelpful, unwarranted, hostile" when it comes to the interests of EVERYONE in this hobby who is not an industry insider.  As he has explicitly said, MQA is about not selling the "crown jewels", the master.  He is NOT interested in even a balanced pros vs. cons judgement of MQA, let alone a music lover/consumer judgement.  It does not matter whether he is compensated directly - he is compensated indirectly in that he and his trade publication is an industry insider organ, designed for the industry and music lovers are the product that it sells.  Our interests are not primary, or even on the list of concerns!  

 

His and his trade publications and "the industries" stance on MQA is so anti-consumer and so bad for this hobby rather "bribes" are involved is besides the point as JA is "guilty" no matter.  I for one really do hope he is being "bribed" (i.e. compensated directly) because at least that might make the selling of his audiophile soul for  MQA somewhat understandable (from a certain perspective ?).

 

The "shame", such as it is, is on all of us for daring to believe that JA and Stereophile was ever about high fidelity - it is only about the industries concerns, and when high fidelity happens to align with that then fine, but when it does not then high fidelity loses out to industry concerns and needs.  Stop reading Stereophile people! Stop pretending that what they are selling you has something to do with your quest for high fidelity!!

[The Computer Audiophile]

33 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

 

Hi Chris. Do you also affirm Sal's repeated "Shame on you John"? To me, this implies a moral judgement of J.A.'s behavior, which has to include a determination of JA's intent. This involves some mind reading that, in my view, several members have engaged in liberally when it comes to addressing JA. This strikes me as unhelpful, unwarranted, hostile, and inappropriate. In my opinion John's conscience  is better equipped to guide him in discerning an ethical issue here. Shaming him regarding this issue is not much better than stating that he is taking bribes from MQA without any factual information that indicates this. He has taken great pains to deny this several times.I'm not surprised that he would find some of the things said to and about him offensive.

 

Where do you stand on this? What do you see as your responsibility as moderator in this regard?

I’m not into shaming people for whatever that means. 

[rando]

Talk about putting a cow among the minions, @christopher3393.  

[rickca]

The media business ... whether TV, print, internet ... has always been about effective delivery of advertising.  The content is tailored to attract the target audience.  Since when were audio publications any different?  I think what gets people upset with MQA is that the content itself (reviews) has become an advertising message.

 

It's like a sportscast focused on what brand of shoes the athletes wear rather than their game performance.

[crenca]

On 9/22/2018 at 9:24 AM, Brinkman Ship said:

 

"As for MQA's ability to "fold" and "unfold" very large files for streaming and playback, hearing 24/96 and 24/192 files streamed through the Nyquist via Tidal was an ear-opener. Had this been CD sound in 1983, I'd still be an LP guy—but I'd also be all in with digital."
https://www.stereophile.com/content/brinkmann-audio-nyquist-da-processor-page-2#jLhDX4J4LcdghJcP.99

 

 

 

@christopher3393, think about this quote for just a second.  It is so meaningless, so subjectivised - and on top of that technically wrong - what is the real reason for Stereophile to publish it?

 

It is this industry insider commitment to make MQA plausible even though it is against your interests in every significant way.  Why would ANYONE trust Fremer & John Atkinson and their ilk even when there was no apparent and obvious conflict of interest between your needs as a consumer/music lover and the industries (as there is with MQA)?  When they are not trying to sell you something, what are they trying to sell you?!? These guys are no more and no less than sophisticated (well, in Fremer's case not very) embodiments of the carney game host.  Stop reading them people!

[christopher3393]

I appreciate the responses. I'm unplugging for the evening. Sometimes it's best to step away. Thanks.

[Sal1950]

6 hours ago, rickca said:

Since when were audio publications any different? 

Back in the "golden days" of audio and the first beginnings of high end audio. Stereophile, TAS, Audio Critic, IAR, and more were all advertisement free and based on the promise that they would be free of outside influence in their reviews.

We all know how long that lasted. 

[labjr]

I think MQA will be DOA in a couple more years. Hopefully sooner. They shot themselves in the foot by using lossy compression. What were they thinking! Audiophiles were going to go for this? And the average Joe could care less abut audio quality. So it's a lose-lose-lose situation. The third lose is for the financial loss to the fools who invested in this nonsense.

 

 

[John_Atkinson]

18 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

What does Stereophile now stand for in today's world, what's good for the consumer or what's good for the record companies?

 

I wrote earlier this year: "as long as audiophiles can download or stream original, non-MQA, hi-rez PCM files, why should MQA be an issue? However, what if they no longer have such access to the originals, but only to their MQA versions? . . . Regardless of MQA's technical elegance and promised increase in sound quality, the removal of consumer choice in recorded music is indeed a relevant issue."

 

See https://www.stereophile.com/content/more-mqa

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

[Sal1950]

10 minutes ago, John_Atkinson said:

 

"as long as audiophiles can download or stream original, non-MQA, hi-rez PCM files, why should MQA be an issue? However, what if they no longer have such access to the originals, but only to their MQA versions?"

 

See https://www.stereophile.com/content/more-mqa

 

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

So what's your point John, that you printed Hanson's concerns, or that

Chrislu's response was blunt: "Well, that's the goal!"? (to bury bit perfect distribution of the master recording) ?

While all along you, Austin and the others at Stereophile continue to write full article after article in glowing praise and support of MQA and selling music buyers down the river.
Who's best interests does Stereophile support,  the consumer or the recording industry?