MQA is Vaporware

[esldude]

14 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Well to be accurate bought up by Microsoft who tried to make a go of HDCD then shut it down. About 5,000 albums were released. 

Actually they cared nothing about HDCD music discs.  They wanted the licensing of chips and some other encoding tech.  The HDCD was part of the deal, and they didn't try much.

 

At the time of purchase by MS, it was said 5000 CD that were HDCD had been released.  When it was shut down it was said over 5000 HDCD discs had been released.  So basically they didn't try to make a go of it. It was irrelevant for their purposes.  They shut that part of it down, and absorbed some tech, some licensing fees and some personal with the company. 

[esldude]

14 minutes ago, mrvco said:

 

At least you can rip an HDCD disc to a 24-bit / 44.1 KHz file using dBpoweramp and the appropriate DSP filter to get the benefits.

Just like if MQA eventually fails some software might decode it too.  Or Meridian, who already protected themselves by spinning this off into its own company, may shut it down one day without making the code available.  The two systems are very similar in many ways.  HDCD gave you 15 bit instead of 16 bit performance on CD undecoded while MQA gives either 13 or 15 bits of performance undecoded.

[monteverdi]

MQA is not DRM like implemented in SACD but it limits the sound quality what I can get from it with out paying for decoders on software or/and hardware. DSD needs to converted to PCM if your DAC can only play PCM but one has  many software choices and is not stuck with a specific licensing process to one company. So the statement that MQA is not DRM is only a semantic argument; it is closed system!

I would even accept buying into such system if it would get me a significant sound advantage but in all of my attempts to evaluate MQA were quite disappointing even I believed originally what I was reading in the audio magazines. Actually MQA made me cancel my subscriptions!

[Rt66indierock]

10 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

More speculation and refusal to see any other side to this. 

 

 

Chris,

Just tell me when I can purchase and download the following MQA albums in The Valley of the Sun:

1.       Foghat Foghat

2.       Black Oak Arkansas Black Oak Arkansas

3.       Eagles On the Border

4.       Halestorm Into The Wild

5.       Jackson Browne Running on Empty

6.       Chicago Chicago Transit Authority

They are all available on TIDAL in the US and I believe in Europe for download. Why is my side of MQA so hard for you? I can’t buy MQA albums. It is no harder than that.

[Rt66indierock]

12 hours ago, Fitzcaraldo215 said:

Well, disagreements will always abound between audiophiles about what sounds good,  the magnitude and significance of differences, etc.. 

 

Also, believe what you wish about what others who have heard MQA think about it.  I do not think your characterization of Kal's opinion, or Atkinson's is accurate.  It seems you are interpreting their writings so as to confirm your own pre-existing biases.

 

Your opinion about DSP EQ, is not shared by Kal, by me or many others.  But, believe as you wish. The DSP EQ comparison is not really relevant to MQA, anyway, except for the issue Kal raised about interoperability with current DSP EQ tools. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All I know is when Kal says an order of magnitude about a $300 multi-channel DAC I can count on the next cheapest multi-channel DAC to cost $3,000 when he made the statement. I’m assuming you know what Kal did professionally. I trust the concluding paragraph of what men like him write. John Atkinson and I talked about his MQA articles at RMAF 2016. He didn’t disagree with my characterization then.

 

My pre-existing biases for recording are: the performance of the musicians, the initial recording process and the mixing are more important than the format for playback. Universal made Pet Sounds in 1966. Warner made Waiting for Columbus in 1978 and The Nightly in 1982. Sony has made some good recordings. Almost everyone can make good sound recording and yet they choose not to most of the time. My opinion hasn’t changed about this since the seventies. For me a process like MQA might improve a record like Chicago Transit Authority but probably won’t improve Waiting for Columbus. I won’t know this though until I can download them and test them myself.

 

I don’t personally care what you think or others think about my opinion on DSP EQ. I summarized my opinions in John Darko’s KIH #35. Take them as you wish.

[Don Hills]

8 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

...

To be honest, Porsche doesn't really mean anything, except to a hugely small () segment of the population. Most people today seem quite happy with their crummy fat SUVs ...

 

(cough)

Cayenne.

(/cough)

[GUTB]

1 hour ago, monteverdi said:

MQA is not DRM like implemented in SACD but it limits the sound quality what I can get from it with out paying for decoders on software or/and hardware. DSD needs to converted to PCM if your DAC can only play PCM but one has  many software choices and is not stuck with a specific licensing process to one company. So the statement that MQA is not DRM is only a semantic argument; it is closed system!

I would even accept buying into such system if it would get me a significant sound advantage but in all of my attempts to evaluate MQA were quite disappointing even I believed originally what I was reading in the audio magazines. Actually MQA made me cancel my subscriptions!

 

Misinformation -- to get the full quality of DSD, you are, in fact, stuck with a specific company. Sony only allowed encrypted streaming of DSD which limited you to a very small number of incredibly expensive products. Technology has since defeated Sony's protection schemes, and once MQA is reverse-engineered it will enter the "de-facto" public domain too.

[Ralf11]

6 minutes ago, Don Hills said:

 

(cough)

Cayenne.

(/cough)

(cough)(cough) Macan(cough)

[Norton]

3 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Chris,

Just tell me when I can purchase and download the following MQA albums in The Valley of the Sun:

1.       Foghat Foghat

2.       Black Oak Arkansas Black Oak Arkansas

3.       Eagles On the Border

4.       Halestorm Into The Wild

5.       Jackson Browne Running on Empty

6.       Chicago Chicago Transit Authority

They are all available on TIDAL in the US and I believe in Europe for download. Why is my side of MQA so hard for you? I can’t buy MQA albums. It is no harder than that.

 

Your take on MQA is hard to agree with because, on an audiophile site, you are offering a critique based on market considerations rather than SQ/listening experience and  a pretty idiosyncratic market analysis at that.  I have no interest in the music you list, while at the same time SACD (which I'm sure has been dismissed as a failed or dead format somewhere in the 2000 posts of your thread) provides me with music I'm interested  in and continues to do so with new releases.  I've been very happy to live with the "DRM" considerations of SACD, in return for top quality recordings at very reasonable prices.  If MQA delivered the same I would have no problem.  As an aside, based on the Linn and RR discs I own, HDCD is/was a great sounding format and something of a lost opportunity.

[Jud]

A little surprised that more people aren't seeing the much bigger picture here.

 

MQA has so far contracted with the sixth largest streaming company (if I recall the figures on Tidal correctly), and I don't know who offers MQA downloads at the moment - can anyone tell us?

 

Meanwhile, your ability to hear the music you want is fading into the past due to something a lot of MQA haters are actually in favor of, streaming.  Streaming is, by actual numbers, taking over the marketplace from downloads.  As it does, the availability of artists many of us like but who weren't hugely popular in their day, and the availability of masterings with reasonable DR levels from artists who *were* hugely popular, fades away.  Good luck looking for reasonably priced used CDs at local shops or on eBay, Amazon, etc.

 

But keep on focusing your energy on MQA, guys, I'm sure the music industry is eager to let itself get pwned again by some third party like they did with Apple.

[mansr]

6 hours ago, GUTB said:

Misinformation -- to get the full quality of DSD, you are, in fact, stuck with a specific company. Sony only allowed encrypted streaming of DSD which limited you to a very small number of incredibly expensive products. Technology has since defeated Sony's protection schemes, and once MQA is reverse-engineered it will enter the "de-facto" public domain too.

DSD != SACD. There are other formats for delivering DSD. In fact, most DSD content these days is distributed as unencrypted downloads. No DRM there.

[mansr]

10 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

That may kind of be already happening though I'll admit my understanding of this is very foggy., The MQA CD,

http://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-encoded-cds-yes#jLTzPdmPgxSsGe5X.97

They are claiming a hi rez file is being MQA encoded on the CD, That a undecoded playback will offer better than RB sound as the file has already been deblurred and a decoder in not needed for the SQ improvement?

They also then claim the CD can be decoded by a MQA DAC for a 176/24 data rate?

Is the process for the MQA CD somehow different than regular MQA that reduces a undecoded file to a lossy factsimilie of RB?

If the deblurring process can be offered without data reduction, why not just offer it separately as a DAC enhancement and leave our lossless files alone?

I freely admit again this new processing has me scratching my head to understand.

Most likely, these CDs are simply the usual MQA data with the low 8 bits removed. These bits contain the compressed high frequencies while the 9th bit, which becomes the LSB in 16-bit format, carries the authentication signatures and some kind of peak extension data (similar to HDCD).

[Jud]

1 hour ago, mansr said:

DSD != SACD. There are other formats for delivering DSD. In fact, most DSD content these days is distributed as unencrypted downloads. No DRM there.

 

I would (seriously) love to see some figures on this.

[The Computer Audiophile]

9 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Chris,

Just tell me when I can purchase and download the following MQA albums in The Valley of the Sun:

1.       Foghat Foghat

2.       Black Oak Arkansas Black Oak Arkansas

3.       Eagles On the Border

4.       Halestorm Into The Wild

5.       Jackson Browne Running on Empty

6.       Chicago Chicago Transit Authority

They are all available on TIDAL in the US and I believe in Europe for download. Why is my side of MQA so hard for you? I can’t buy MQA albums. It is no harder than that.

 

Your argument is like me saying Tesla is vaporware because I can't purchase one that accepts diesel. MQA is a streaming format first and foremost. Who knows if you'll ever be able to purchase and download any additional format of your music in the future? Maybe the days of purchase and download formats are over. Perhaps we won't see another purchase and download format because FLAC is fine. 

 

Your side of the argument isn't difficult for me to see. I have an open mind. In fact, I see it as my job to see both sides of MQA and try to bring out these arguments for discussion. 

[mansr]

13 minutes ago, Jud said:

I would (seriously) love to see some figures on this.

I don't have any sales figures, but consider these facts:

- There are only 3 SACD manufacturing facilities in the world.

- Lots of websites sell DSD downloads but not SACDs.

- DSD128 and higher is by definition not SACD.

[Jud]

24 minutes ago, mansr said:

I don't have any sales figures, but consider these facts:

- There are only 3 SACD manufacturing facilities in the world.

- Lots of websites sell DSD downloads but not SACDs.

- DSD128 and higher is by definition not SACD.

 

11,596 items under SACD format on HRAudio.net: http://www.hraudio.net/music.php?format=1&genre=0&label=0&page=1

 

I assume all are not currently for sale.  However, I believe the SACD market in Asia and in the classical genre are doing all right, which is why I'd like to see actual sales figures for silver discs compared to DSD downloads.

[crenca]

4 hours ago, Jud said:

A little surprised that more people aren't seeing the much bigger picture here.

 

MQA has so far contracted with the sixth largest streaming company (if I recall the figures on Tidal correctly), and I don't know who offers MQA downloads at the moment - can anyone tell us?

 

Meanwhile, your ability to hear the music you want is fading into the past due to something a lot of MQA haters are actually in favor of, streaming.  Streaming is, by actual numbers, taking over the marketplace from downloads.  As it does, the availability of artists many of us like but who weren't hugely popular in their day, and the availability of masterings with reasonable DR levels from artists who *were* hugely popular, fades away.  Good luck looking for reasonably priced used CDs at local shops or on eBay, Amazon, etc.

 

But keep on focusing your energy on MQA, guys, I'm sure the music industry is eager to let itself get pwned again by some third party like they did with Apple.

 

Jud speaks to an important point here.  MQA is just a symptom of the disease - not the disease itself.  The "industry" wants MQA (or something like it) NOT for SQ reasons but because of larger, market forces at play and the belief that a MQA-like format change would solve these problems.  

 

Streaming as a threat in the sense that it becomes the only way to consume music is real and is possibly a much larger threat than any DRM/end-to-end/IP/SQ-ruse scheme because consumers are actually fully behind it.

 

This is why I keep returning to that Robert Harley article - it is the only thing I have read (beside from those like Koch who are explicitly anti-MQA) that outlined the market forces behind MQA.  In the end, Robert circled back around to an "MQA is about SQ" position but it was painfully obvious that he contradicted himself.

 

Jud, you should write an blog/article about the threat a streaming-only market is to audiophiledom...

[audiventory]

33 minutes ago, mansr said:

Lots of websites sell DSD downloads but not SACDs

 

Files are easier in using.

[The Computer Audiophile]

14 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

Jud speaks to an important point here.  MQA is just a symptom of the disease - not the disease itself.  The "industry" wants MQA (or something like it) NOT for SQ reasons but because of larger, market forces at play and the belief that a MQA-like format change would solve these problems.  

 

Streaming as a threat in the sense that it becomes the only way to consume music is real and is possibly a much larger threat than any DRM/end-to-end/IP/SQ-ruse scheme because consumers are actually fully behind it.

 

This is why I keep returning to that Robert Harley article - it is the only thing I have read (beside from those like Koch who are explicitly anti-MQA) that outlined the market forces behind MQA.  In the end, Robert circled back around to an "MQA is about SQ" position but it was painfully obvious that he contradicted himself.

 

Jud, you should write an blog/article about the threat a streaming-only market is to audiophiledom...

 

4 hours ago, Jud said:

A little surprised that more people aren't seeing the much bigger picture here.

 

MQA has so far contracted with the sixth largest streaming company (if I recall the figures on Tidal correctly), and I don't know who offers MQA downloads at the moment - can anyone tell us?

 

Meanwhile, your ability to hear the music you want is fading into the past due to something a lot of MQA haters are actually in favor of, streaming.  Streaming is, by actual numbers, taking over the marketplace from downloads.  As it does, the availability of artists many of us like but who weren't hugely popular in their day, and the availability of masterings with reasonable DR levels from artists who *were* hugely popular, fades away.  Good luck looking for reasonably priced used CDs at local shops or on eBay, Amazon, etc.

 

But keep on focusing your energy on MQA, guys, I'm sure the music industry is eager to let itself get pwned again by some third party like they did with Apple.

 

 

Perhaps I don't understand the logic. 

 

 

"...your ability to hear the music you want is fading into the past due to something a lot of MQA haters are actually in favor of, streaming."

 

The ability to hear music that was never released on CD, and multiple remasters of the same thing, has never been better because of streaming. I've been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac lately. Looking at Tidal, I can listen to many versions of the albums without purchasing anything. It's simple for a label to just throw an album up on a streaming service rather than produce a physical product. 

 

Perhaps I'm not following the logic, but I'm very willing to listen.

[crenca]

45 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

 

 

Perhaps I don't understand the logic. 

 

 

"...your ability to hear the music you want is fading into the past due to something a lot of MQA haters are actually in favor of, streaming."

 

The ability to hear music that was never released on CD, and multiple remasters of the same thing, has never been better because of streaming. I've been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac lately. Looking at Tidal, I can listen to many versions of the albums without purchasing anything. It's simple for a label to just throw an album up on a streaming service rather than produce a physical product. 

 

Perhaps I'm not following the logic, but I'm very willing to listen.

 

This is not a complete answer but perhaps a beginning of one:

 

Some of us (you would fall outside of this camp I think) place a high value on the status quo of our digital music ecosystems and the market conditions that has up until now cultivated that ecosystem.  This ecosystem has certain fundamentals such as:

 

1)  Ownership or possession:   putting aside the technical letter of the law of copyright, in the current ecosystem the consumer owns and possesses (physically and digitally) the music he purchases.  This involves a high degree of control - he can play it and copy it from here to there and modify it however he sees fit.

 

2) Open format:  PCM and DSD possessed by the consumer are not "locked" behind IP and the consumer can take advantage of his own or other genius and innovation (such as when he buys a better widget) and someone else (i.e the IP holder) can not control/direct or otherwise $profit$ from it.

 

3)  Consumer driven:  Any change to the fundamentals has to come from the consumer - change is "crowd sourced" as opposed to hierarchical in that there is no one industry player that is powerful enough to effect significant change to the whole system.

 

Most of the time "industry innovation" does not threaten these fundamentals.  However, MQA and streaming do - yes yes, they are innovation in-of-themselves but they are more than that - they change the fundamental ground and status quo that the music consumer has enjoyed gosh, since at least 1930's I think...

 

Now, digitization (the format change of our music from analogue media to digital software) that has occurred since the 1980's has of course been a disruption but the way it has (so far) played out (CD, etc.) is that it has largely fit into the fundamentals.  Again, MQA and streaming are different...

[mansr]

1 hour ago, Jud said:

11,596 items under SACD format on HRAudio.net: http://www.hraudio.net/music.php?format=1&genre=0&label=0&page=1

 

I assume all are not currently for sale.  However, I believe the SACD market in Asia and in the classical genre are doing all right, which is why I'd like to see actual sales figures for silver discs compared to DSD downloads.

The exact numbers are beside the point which is that DSD downloads don't have DRM.

[Jud]

4 hours ago, mansr said:

DSD != SACD. There are other formats for delivering DSD. In fact, most DSD content these days is distributed as unencrypted downloads. No DRM there.

[Emphasis added.]

 

10 minutes ago, mansr said:

The exact numbers are beside the point which is that DSD downloads don't have DRM.

 

Right - were you distinguishing SACDs from "DSD content"?  I wasn't, which is one reason I asked if there were sales figures on this (the other reason is because I'm just curious to know).

[lucretius]

11 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Chris,

Just tell me when I can purchase and download the following MQA albums in The Valley of the Sun:

1.       Foghat Foghat

2.       Black Oak Arkansas Black Oak Arkansas

3.       Eagles On the Border

4.       Halestorm Into The Wild

5.       Jackson Browne Running on Empty

6.       Chicago Chicago Transit Authority

They are all available on TIDAL in the US and I believe in Europe for download. Why is my side of MQA so hard for you? I can’t buy MQA albums. It is no harder than that.

 

What you really should want to download is the hires files that the MQA files are based on, not the actual MQA files.  It seems to me the usefulness of MQA is being able to stream hires files (folded into MQA files), without requiring more bandwith than would be needed to stream a redbook file.

[jhwalker]

17 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

What you really should want to download is the hires files that the MQA files are based on, not the actual MQA files. 

 

Why?  If the MQA version sounds better (still under debate, but a lot of people say it does), why would you want the original, inferior version?  Makes no sense.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Perhaps I don't understand the logic. 

 

 

"...your ability to hear the music you want is fading into the past due to something a lot of MQA haters are actually in favor of, streaming."

 

The ability to hear music that was never released on CD, and multiple remasters of the same thing, has never been better because of streaming. I've been listening to a lot of Fleetwood Mac lately. Looking at Tidal, I can listen to many versions of the albums without purchasing anything. It's simple for a label to just throw an album up on a streaming service rather than produce a physical product. 

 

Perhaps I'm not following the logic, but I'm very willing to listen.

 

Hi Chris -

 

I was thinking of our very enjoyable afternoon at Top Secret CA HQ  .  OK, so my interests are probably a little different than most folks', but remember how difficult it was to find the Stones' version of "Money" to compare with the Beatles'?  And that it was impossible to find the original version of the song "Heigh-Ho" from Snow White to compare it to Tom Waits' version?  So that's one piece of this: Even with so many tracks available, the streaming services don't have everything I want to listen to.  Of course I shouldn't expect that they would; but what happens if they become the only game in town?  If, as with so many other areas of commerce, the industry grows to love the idea of content you can never stop paying for?  (Thank you, cable TV or whichever industry spawned this model.)  So that's one piece: Obscure artists or obscure tracks by famous artists, or stuff that just gets old, that either is never picked up by the streaming services or is no longer available from the one you're subscribed to.

 

Another piece of this has to do with best quality versions of tracks from relatively famous artists.  My wife loves a couple of Bob Seger albums.  I looked at the DR Database and various other references to see what was likely to be the best mastering.  Here's what I saw:

 

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=bob+seger&album=against+the+wind

 

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=bob+seger&album=night+moves

 

Quite a difference between the new remasterings and the original CDs, eh?  So I bought the old CDs from a very reasonable vendor on eBay.  But those old CDs won't be around forever, and as they get rarer, they'll get more expensive.

 

If you have a hankering for some Bob Seger tonight (I would assume that as popular as Seger was, those albums will be available), which of those masterings do you think you'll be listening to?  Or how about Fleetwood Mac, let's say their most famous album, "Rumours"?  Will you be streaming the "Deluxe Edition," average DR 10?  Or earlier versions, average DR 15?

 

I know we've been talking about "lossy compression" in the context of MQA, but even its harshest critics say they expect little to no audible difference coming from that.  With the DR figures shown here, we're talking about a different kind of compression that may very well be "audibly lossy."