Reference

Great work.

Cheers,

Michael Lavorgna
Editor, AudioStream.com

What an epic, truly brilliant essay! I could not agree more with any one direction, let alone sentence.

This is also an irrefutably convincing argument for MQA, when we remind ourselves of what the larger (music) market bears. Times change, and we need to change with em... Companies want to protect their company jewels and MQA's anti-piracy protection would seem very attractive.

I am super-grateful for modern CNC machines... turntables would NOT be the same.

Just use FLAC. Which we and the music 'industry' have used for years.

It's lossless, free, fully supported, takes up roughly the same space/transmission bandwidth as MQA, is not proprietary, doesn't need a new or modified DAC, and doesn't add possibly audible artefacts like MQA does.

And music will continue to be composed, performed, sold, and listened to whether the present music 'industry' is 'healthy' or not. It just needs a little more competence than it has now.

MQA is totally pointless except for DRM. Which the really BIG suppliers of music have stopped using.

MQA may sound better than FLAC files? Have you ever done an apples to apples listening test to verify that there is no audible benefit to MQA in comparison to FLAC? I will be listening to MQA files for the very 1st time today. The first 8 Black Sabbath albums via MQA files that came included in a vinyl box set. Playback will be
via an iFi Nano iDSD Black Label DAC (US $170 new). I'm looking forward to hearing what all the fuss is about. I can't remember an actual music file format having stirred up so much vitriol before. That is, of course, besides MP3..............

"Buying online, downloading, and managing a digital music library are not nearly as much fun as a weekly expedition to the neighborhood record store."

Forget that. The few times I've had any pleasure flipping through record bins was when there were good record stores whose bins weren't full of crap.

"....But I've seen the damage done by freeing up information...."

Umm, no. Not in a thousand years. The only solution for offensive free speech is freer speech and more of it. The sharing of music tracks is offensive to a just society, but that doesn't mean that the ability to share is offensive. The ability to share is my protection for a product I purchased, that can remain intact in my possession forever. Anything less is forced obsolescence.

If it turns out that I can play purchased music coded in MQA forever on open-source music players, then I'm OK with that, I think. What I really need to know is the worst-case scenario: For the MQA tracks that I currently possess or purchase in the forseeable future, is there a way that I could lose the ability to play those on an open-source player?

I only raised the possibility that it "may sound better".

I take it you were unable to hear any sonic benefits to MQA with your listening tests with the dCS Rossini?

As mentioned before I've never had the ability to play back and hear MQA files until today. All comparisons of the different files (FLAC 96/24, vinyl ripped DSD 5.6, CD quality FLAC, etc.) would be done using identical components obviously.

First, a thank-you to Mr. Austin for a thoughtful essay; and to Stereophile for responding to the howls of MQA critics by drilling into the subject. More please!

Now, let's talk about the opening theme of Mr. Austin's essay. There's no question that the digital revolution upended the music business -- and not for the better. There have been articles written about old guys (and they're mostly guys) still on tour to make money, because the expected royalty stream from the sale of the music they wrote and performed in their hey day has dried up. Another collateral development has been the evolution of "music artists" into branding factories. They can't make the kind of money selling recordings that pop artists from, say, the 1960s could so they develop their "brand" and put it on headphones and other merchandise.

The issue, quite simply, is copying, At the end of the analog era, copying began with cassettes (reel-to-reel was too clumsy and not portable). The response was to put a "tax" (or whatever you want to call it) on the sale of blank cassettes that was put into a royalty pool and eventually distributed to copyright holders. This provided some money and, fortunately for the artists, second generation copies from cassettes were unacceptably bad.

Digital copies are, of course, bit-perfect; so there's no limit to the number of generations that can be made from a single original. MP3 and the Internet just made copying on mass scale easy, especially given the bandwidth limitations of 90s-generation Internet access.

So, how does MQA relate to any of this, Mr. Austin? Can it be used to prevent, or discourage (through sonic degradation), copying? I get that the music companies can avoid publicly releasing their 24/96 or other hi-rez masters by releasing MQA-treated 16/44 files instead. But if the MQA file is sonically equivalent to the master in the vault and if it can be copied without damage, and if that copy will sound as good as the original when played on an MQA DAC, I don't see how this works.

Sure, there could be a royalty paid to copyright owners for every MQA DAC and ADC sold (like there was for cassettes and blank "music CDs"), but surely that can't replace the royalties from individual music sales.

If the answer is that the industry never sells any music file and moves to an all-streaming model (which would allow for royalties to be collected as part of the streaming fee), the streamed file could still be captured and copied. In fact, a number of Internet player/streamers already use caching to an SSD to improve sonic quality. Sure, to avoid infringement claims, they either don't cache the whole file, or flush the cache when the file has been played. But I'm sure those functions can be defeated or hacked.

So forgive me if I don't understand how MQA helps solve the unauthorized copying problem inherent in digital music files.

MQA is certainly an improvement over MP3; I don’t really care about that, since I don’t listen to MP3 much.
If that’s what MQA was about that would be a good thing.

Whether MQA sounds better than Redbook or hi-res is certainly a matter of taste. From my listening, I hear some albums that sound better and some that sound worse -worse meaning less detail, “softer” , more artificial, less realistic. I think some of what is getting praised about the sound of MQA is exactly that - a loss of small detail and subtlety that sounds more pleasant, but is actually eliminating fully accurate reproduction.

The 90’s downfall of the traditional recording industry was brought about in large part not by technology, but by the greed of record companies and their lack of response to the needs of the music buying public. The public (mostly young people) wanted the ability to buy individual songs, not just full CDs. The record industry refused to provide this, preferring to force people to buy $15 CDs, even it was just to get one or two songs. Even after the Napster debacle, the industry couldn’t figure out how to make money off of digital music files, even though it was obvious that what the public wanted was the ability to buy any digital songs for under a dollar each. It took Apple to put that model into effect and show that if you give the public what it wants, it will pay money for it.

Why is that history relevant? Because I think the industry is trying to turn the clock back with MQA. Apparently the idea is to remove actual hi-res files (and possibly even Redbook) and leave us just with MQA as a format other than MP3. If you don’t like the sound of MQA, or don’t like having a DAC that can’t turn the MQA filter off when it plays non MQA files (which is often the case so far with MQA DACs) you will be stuck with MQA, and I’m willling to bet that you will have to pay a premium price for it. The industry doesn’t care about consumers and what they want, and it wants to create a closed, monopolistic type environment where it can control the market and charge prices in accordance. That is the real idea behind MQA, not making streaming more efficient or improving SQ.

Dear Jim,

I've been reading your series of articles on MQA and I would like to offer a few comments, none of which relate to the sound of MQA-encoded music, nor to the technical merits of MQA.

In this article, you state:

people who listen to music via computers have come to outnumber those of us who listen through serious home audio systems

and

Computer people... likely have set up sophisticated digital-signal processing systems to perfect the frequency response of their high-end headphone rigs, using command-line tools that look like gibberish to the rest of us.

and

Computer audiophiles like nothing better than to play around with computer audio files

This part of your essay really does a disservice to those of us who are happy to have replaced CD players with computers and music downloads; first by giving the false impression that "music via computers" and "serious home audio systems" are incompatible; second by typecasting those who would enjoy computer audio as most likely to be nerdy software-tinkering headphone-using freaks who only use the music to check their results; and third by implying that what pleases these "others" is not relevant to the more important needs of card-carrying audiophiles and music consumers.

Maybe you didn't intend to say this! But that's the way it comes across, from my perspective anyway.

You also talk about the limitations MQA's patents place on experimentation and innovation.

The fact that you can't mess with the code is a selling point aimed at both music suppliers and consumers—it's not a bug but a feature

and

In an MQA world, the sound of your DAC will be determined mainly by MQA's technology, and not by your own choices of reconstruction filter and design skill.

I understand how music suppliers could think it's in their interest to prevent listeners from "messing with the code". I don't understand how consumers benefit by this restriction. Seems to me the opposite - from the consumer's point of view, MQA limits opportunities for innovation. And this is confirmed by the second sentence. How is this a good thing for consumers?

Finally, you ask how we can judge MQA's potential impact.

If we can't anticipate MQA's impact on the industry—and we can't—then how should we judge it?

Leaving aside the questions of "how does it sound" and "what other benefits does it bring", I respectfully suggest that the most important way to judge MQA is that, should Mr. Chrislu's dream of MQA domination come true, designers and consumers will find themselves significantly restricted by the encumbrances that the MQA patents place on the full enjoyment of the music.

Is that an impact that we audiophiles really want?

RedBook 16/44.1 has been about a thousand times more successful than 33 1/3 Vinyl ( probably a vast understatement ). It appears to have a viable future, well into the next decade.

I kinda wish that God would've given 16/44 to Moses, on the Mountain, along with those 10 Commandments that nobody follows, we would've had all this digital formatting sorted out, by now, wouldn't we?

Still, we're getting close to universal agreement on PCM.

MQA is probably a "done-deal" that remains "Optional" for now and might just remain an Option that quite a few will Opt into once the Smart Phone offers "HighRez" Music to their 2 Billions of Customer Base.

When the Smart Phone goes Audiophile, vinyl will become a buggy whip. Us old geezers will struggle to justify those 3 thousand pound Record Collections and all that dusty gear needed to play the darn things ( not that anyone takes the time to pull one out to play it ).

It's probably time for us to start focusing on some other Controversy, like Class D Amplification, perhaps even have a Recommended Category for Class D Amplification devices.

And maybe even a "proper" evaluation/review of the "WEL" Signature Balanced Cabling from Audioquest, I'll pay money to read what Herb Riechert has to say about these things.

DACs are so Boring.......

It's time to move on.

Tony in Michigan

"Now, what's all this shouting about? We'll have no trouble here!"
"This is a local format for local people; there's nothing for you here"
(with apologies to Tubbs and Edward)

If movie studios can sell or rent their movies and TV series in full quality, music studios can sell their products in full quality as well. This is corporate protectionism from the studios and Bob Stuart.

"Computer audiophiles like nothing better than to play around with computer audio files. (Sorry.) Take away their ability to manipulate those files and you destroy much of their hobby's appeal."

Sorry but this one stopped me. It reminds me of those who say audiophiles are only into gear and not into music. It misses the mark by just as wide a margin, and simultaneously does an injustice to a large group of listeners who just happen to enjoy their music in a way that might differ from how you enjoy yours.

My experience with computer audio has increased my appreciation of my music library by an *order of magnitude* -- note I'm talking about listening to music, not playing with files. I can hear a piece of music and with a few quick keystrokes, broaden my appreciation by say, finding other versions by other performers, or other music by the same composer. The search possibilities are endless and I get the results in less time than it would take me to walk to my library shelf, much less retrieve a given disc (or set of discs) and put one in the player, then press Play.

And for all this convenience, I trade not a wit of audio quality. Quite the contrary - playback from the computer (I use non-data-reduced, raw PCM for everything in the library) gives me the sound of the digital master. This is something I've never heard from any molded disc, played via any transport, player, or DAC, regardless of price or design. (I wrote about this a few years ago in an article on my blog, which was also reprinted in HiFi Critic.)
Properly rip a CD to the computer and play it back via a fine DAC and what you hear is indistinguishable from the CD master, something no player or transport has to this day, to my ears at least, yet achieved.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.soundkeeperrecordings.wordpress.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com

By the way the main reason for the hdcd/dvd-a/sacd extinction was not so much the marginal or nonexistent audio benefits for a shrinking consumer target, but rather the protection/incompatibility issues that rendered copying and sharing inconvenient.

Quote:

That little blue or green authentication light on your MQA-ready DAC implies that you're getting what the artist intended—although who actually signed off is, for older recordings, open to question.

A Pavlov light for audiophiles. Perfect ;-)

Thanks, Jim, for a really well-written and researched article. I'm not sure Mr. Stuart agreed with your final points, but I think you defined the proposition he and Craven have laid out for all of us. Namely, are the compression and rendering benefits of MQA worth the loss of an open software architecture for future digital audio recording, archiving and distribution. Clearly, the jury is still out on this point. As you have written, the market will ultimately decide, and the LARGEST segment of the market thinks that MP3 meets 99% of their needs. The "high-end" segment of the market is divided into two distinct groups - 2 channel, for which FLAC seems pretty well entrenched, and multi-channel (MCH) which has embraced 5.1 to 11.2 DTS-Master Audio and / or Dolby Digital Atmos.

I think the real future for audio beyond headphones lies in MCH reproduction, which, for classical recordings provides an in-home experience much closer to what I hear in the concert hall. While MQA has concentrated on the 2-channel market, it seems to have ignored MCH, to its competitive detriment. I do not think that MQA will displace MP3 or FLAC, but the data compression and rendering functions it incorporates could be very beneficial in the MCH space, particularly MCH streaming. I am hopeful that MQA and, perhaps Meridian, who understands MCH as well as anyone, will recognize this in time. If not, DTS and Dolby surely will.

MQA are doing an epic disservice to us all by promoting the fallacious nonsense that today's studios' master tapes represent their "crown jewels". This is an outdated concept based on the days when these things were actual tapes, and you couldn't copy them without creating a lesser-quality copy and at the same time marginally degrading the original. So it made sense that you needed to protect those originals fastidiously.

And let's also not kid ourselves that that those legacy magnetic tapes of the pre-digital era were lost or damaged due to the natural degradation of what is an ephemeral medium. Not true. Such losses were almost totally down to the wilfull neglect and carelessness of the very industry that today bangs on the table and yells "Crown Jewels!". Those studios that did treat their legacy tapes very carefully are now sitting on an inventory that remains in excellent shape.

Today, new Studio Masters are all digital files, and we can make unrestricted generations of copies without degradation in either the copy or the original. Let's remind ourselves what the Studios are supposed to be all about in the first place. The only reason you'd want to record a high quality master is that you are concerned with delivering a high quality product to the consumer. If not, why would you bother attempting to create one in the first place? Just so the studio execs can treat themselves to private auditions in the comfort of their own "crown jewel" vaults, accompanied no doubt by only the finest aged single malts?

Today we finally have the ability to deliver unconstrained Studio Master quality to the end user. So what do we think of an industry that says "NO! They're mine, I say! All mine!"? I think it deserves what is coming to it. It can crash and burn and I will personally toast the ashes. Sure, there will be some pain, but from those ashes will rapidly emerge something else that actually functions in the real world. It's the way things work.

If MQA sees its mandate as propping up the industry's "crown jewels" hoax, then they can crash and burn with it.

Why would anyone would care about the "Crown Jewels" if the MQA file sounds the same or better?? Repeating these senseless talking points is what makes people think MQA is a hyped up scam. Evidently, you must believe it, because JA has repeated the same thing in "As We See It" and other columns.

MQA files and DACs have been around for around two years. If there was a good reason for it to change the industry, I think we would know by now.
The USP started out as being able to get 24/192 data in smaller files because of streaming limitations. We’ve been able to stream 24/192 and DSD in Europe since late 2016, via Qobuz and highresaudio, soon coming to the USA. The next USP was sound quality. The best blind test I’ve seen so far was by Archimago, which did not demonstrate any improvement. So the next USP is DRM. The music industry has moved past Napster, they are just looking to provide a good enough service people will pay for. Qobuz allow unlimited protected downloads, so without internet access I can listen to HD audio on the beach with my Kindle and Mojo DAC.
As someone who listens mostly to classical and Jazz, I could happily live with well mastered 16/44 files. For other music, most of it would I suspect benefit far more from more dynamic mastering than MQA.

Of course.
But the world's audio forums are fully aware of what you are all doing. You can run, but you can't hide.
Right, Mr Atkinson?

Jim, this is a thoughtful article, but I can’t help feeling that your thoughts are stuck inside a box built by the recording industry. I understand that you're trying to balance the reality of big-media Goliath versus audiophile David, but let's not throw our hands up and abandon critical analysis.

You freely admit to looking backward, but surely we can imagine more than the 2 options you envision. The belief that we’re either stuck in today's world or might revisit The Good Ole Days via MQA is a false dichotomy, isn't it?

For example, why can’t MQA’s de-blurring & other fidelity algorithms be applied to tracks which are then packed in high-rate FLAC or WAV, rather than origamied? I’m pretty certain any reason’s not technical…

Distribute those open-format files with checksums, and authenticity can be verified without harming the users’ ability to DSP, transcode or otherwise work with their purchases. You needle computerphiles in your essay, but this isn’t arcane technology that requires a thick neckbeard & command-line interface; it already exists in many platforms & operates transparently to the users.

Implementing such a system would have been massively less effort than developing MQA’s origami. An open, documented verification method also would provide greater certainty than MQA’s authentication, which is based on multiple levels of “trust us.” I don’t believe the MQA folks would cheat here, but labels have been caught selling upsampled “hi-res” files at equally upsampled pricing. And we all know that, eventually, some wiseacre will run a listening test & publish, “We exposed sad, deluded audiophiles who ‘heard’ better playback every time we enabled an LED we put in a normal, non-MQA DAC.” What? Some of you hadn’t seen that coming?

So, the origami technique addresses neither sound quality nor authenticity, which means it exists to produce smaller files and/or to lock (some) bits away from the customer. Are there other possibilities? Smaller files matter solely for streaming, and the 2nd reason is DRM. (Those who claim that open access to CD-quality bits means there isn’t DRM aren’t thinking clearly. Would they make the same claim about “CDs” that delivered Redbook resolution in certain players but MP3 otherwise?)

Which is pretty much what all of the blather about “giving away the crown jewels” implies. I apologize for sounding dismissive, but protecting the jewels offers nothing to the customer, and the comments really do come across as a load of... something stinky. Here’s why.

First, Chrislau’s intellectually dishonest when he twists “sell” into “give away” by hedging with “basically giving away.” This is polished rhetoric, but it does not persuade. When a company takes your money, it ain't giving anything away. And, if they’re not selling the crown jewels, they are – by definition – not selling as high-quality a product as they could.

Now, let's suppose MQA truly delivers on the claims that MQA files:
1) sound at least as good as high-rate PCM masters,
2) contain no DRM,
3) can be copied freely.
These points cannot all be true while simultaneously protecting the data. *PCM* masters might not be available to consumers, true, but what happens when they copy their MQA files? Anyone with a copy simply needs an MQA decoder to enjoy all of the same benefits as the original purchaser. Crown jewels, indeed.

When I realized that MQA cannot reduce the quality of pirated files, I was stunned that any music label would give it a moment’s consideration. After all, MQA adoption would seem to benefit its developers far more than the studios. Unless, perhaps, MQA’s actually aimed at a streaming-only world, one in which the studios’ requirements for DRM aren’t quite so high. Perhaps my reasoning’s flawed, but it certainly seems that MQA is incompatible with music ownership. Not technically incompatible, mind you - the problem is the business model. If the studios won't sell their PCM jewels, how could they justify selling persistent MQA downloads? The vast majority of consumers would find them equivalent to full-fat PCM, at least once they upgrade their playback hardware. Piracy won't be reduced, and the pirated files might as well be the jewels. Studios that fear losing the ability to keep reselling their back catalogs couldn't possibly justify it.

Of course, none of this matters much in reality. Illegal copiers with enough technically savvy or financial motivation will tap into MQA DACs’ I2S lines to obtain unfolded bits. Others will loop analog from MQA DACs to their ADCs and accept the generational loss. And non-pirating audiophiles who value quality over convenience – you know, the nerds who bother with all that DSP – will have some difficult decisions to make.

It’s a damn shame the major labels don’t want to sell high-quality music in a format I can trust I’ll own & control forever. Or at least as long as they keep my money.

But that’s okay. There are plenty of small labels that aren't afraid of high-res PCM. There are plenty of excellent, unsigned artists, both locally & on the net, who produce their own recordings. And – just like you, Jim – I like browsing & buying physical media. The prices on used CDs are really great.

Jim,

Well written piece, thanks!

I think the big problem with the anti-MQA camp is they can tear apart the technology on the output side. But they have no freaken idea how the data is encoded and that is where their bubble bursts!

Also not everything should be "open sourced"! I have been programming for 41 years in tons of industries. Some things are better off closed.

Thanks again,
Gordon

A big source of my concern regarding MQA is that the Audio Industrial Complex is foisting an altered musical source upon listeners just as we reach the point where we can access the highest resolution levels of a recording.

There may be some skilled "audio origami" algorithms that would beat MQA, but we are being cut off at the knees when it comes to the CONSUMER making the choice regarding his or her preferred encoding and decoding.

MQA could fully exist as a stand alone device that a CONSUMER could decide to input and then output based on sonics.

Another company may find an even better path and could produce a "Better Quality Algorithm, or BQA" and, as a consumer, I could input my original rez file and then output BQA's sonic magic. MQA is insinuating itself between me and the original recording and wants a monopolistic hold on how we decode our signals.

I can choose my cartridge loading, but now I am forced to deal with MQA?

Why?

Keep the source original and make these digital gymnastic devices AFTER MARKET.

_

The course of this product's arc has been interesting to see as a hobbyist, it really feels as if my 'representatives' in the audio press are out to sell me rather than report to me.

Why the urgent love for MQA that we have been seeing squeezed out and the "shut up, MQA is better" vibe?

I don't agree with most of the assertions within it.

Audiophiles are concerned about far more than sound quality. MQA wouldn't really be a hot topic based on just its sound. 'Cause hardly anyone's heard it unless they spend their days on Tidal HiFi.

They are concerned with being presented Holy Grails, which is why for example we LP lovers also have a stake in this topic.

We feel as if we have been trickle-truthed regarding some very fundamental aspects of the product which impact us in ways we can't yet know.

-- Lossy was a simple question unanswered for far too long, because lossy = bad. Now it's OK that it's lossy. "Innocuous," sorry.

-- Claims about MQA sound quality rely more on faith than audition. Even where someone says they've compared MQA against straight PCM, their experiences aren't transferrable in ways available to other formats and files. Certainly not to any scale.

Audiophiles in particular know mainstream music listeners don't care about sound quality, so "offering" it to them is disingenuous given the label backers, who suddenly "got faith" yet somehow still create 24/44.1 dynamically-challenged recordings of major artists and distribute them almost universally as MP3 or AAC without a second thought. Labels have zero credibility regarding their stated intentions for sound quality. Don't get me started on LP reissues cut from digital files, where superior analog masters exist.

-- The goal is to replace PCM, to save an industry that "died" due to reasons far worse than Napster or Pirate Bay. There is a strong sense their hurt is self-inflicted, having killed every physical format with hardly any effort to educate buyers as why they should care.

That's why the attitude of "this is a good thing now, so relax" is unwelcome. It's not the quality, it's not even really the DRM. It's the trust that's shot.

MQA's strategy is straightforward. They're gonna be the next Dolby Labs, but for music, so that questions of what's best are no longer relevant. "Brilliant!"

I admittedly don't know exactly what MQA does and have never heard a single MQA file, so I don't pass judgment on the audio quality, but as a recording artist and a music lover, I have two fundamental problems with it, as described in the piece above:

1. As someone who takes great care when recording and mastering records, I expect and consider normal to have the final sign-off on what gets distributed. I personally sign off on every single uncompressed version of what gets distributed of a record of mine. For my last record "The Turn", that means vinyl, 192/24, 44.1/24, 44/16 (CD). It is true that I have no control over compressed versions (iTunes etc), other than making sure I give the powers that be the best possible version for them to encode, but still I make a real effort to have control over the way a record of mine sounds when someone buys it.

As a mostly independent artist, I may be in a position to do this but a lot of artists and engineers take great care in what they do. I don't think any of them would agree to blindly submit to an audio process in which it's not even clear what happens, and take at face value the claim that it will somehow be the same or "better". Nothing in my experience is plain "better" in audio. Everything has a sound, everything is a trade-off. I would expect MQA to be as well.

Bottom line is that personally, I want to make sure people hear what I signed off on as an artist. MQA is not that. Nobody seems to even be sure of what it really does and how it does it.

2. As a consumer, I mostly buy vinyl if it looks like it was done well or the highest resolution file I can find (if not upsampled). I resent the fact that the MQA people seemingly wish to make disappear the 192/24 or 96/24 versions of recordings to replace them with MQA encoded versions. First, as mentioned, I doubt that the MQA versions will be the same. Second, is my hard-earned money not good enough to buy the best quality audio possible? What is wrong with allowing people to buy high resolutions files?

Spencer Chrislu, MQA's director of content services is quoted as saying "If a studio does their archive at 24-bit/192kHz and then uses that same file as something to sell on a hi-rez site, that is basically giving away the crown jewels upon which their entire business is based": I profoundly disagree with the logic that this quote implies.

The high res files are expensive enough, especially in an age where everyone can stream music for free. It's fine to allow people to buy - fairly expensively too - the high resolutions files of a recording. In fact, it's what everyone should do! What's not fine is to expect the consumer to buy files encoded with a new and still fairly unproven, mostly proprietary technology, in the hope that they will have to buy everything again when the next technology comes along, or just be locked into the MQA approved universe. Regardless of the audio merits, or lack thereof, it just seems needlessly greedy, sorry.

Jerome Sabbagh
www.jeromesabbagh.com

Whew! Very long and passionate discussion.

For an examination of physical vs digital economies, "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte is a good read.

Over on AVSForum there is a recent thread on MQA. A poster there provided graphs and links to sites showing the noise MQA adds and wrote that once trained he was reliably able to distinguish an MQA vs non-MQA recording. Worth a read.

One of MQA's purposes is to provide Hi-Res quality at CD bitrates for streaming. In the world of 5G, gigabit-to-home, and 4K streaming video, I find trying to save a few MB/s a losing proposition.

Another feature is the "authentication" or DRM. One of the things I've read in Stereophile is that when a studio creates a master and sends it off to wherever for duplication & distribution, those people often mess with the master, so the listener does not get what the recording engineer intended. MQA seems to add some provenance to the distribution chain. That seems like it has value. And there are certainly other ways to do that - checksums and the like, but MQA is tackling that problem.

I'd like to know what the folks at Dolby Labs have to say about all this. This sort of thing seems well within their area of expertise.

As for vinyl vs digital, that is another whole religious war. My take is that digital products tend to be mastered at higher levels with squashed dynamics, whereas the physical limitations of vinyl doesn't allow for that sort of manipulation, so the consumer ends up with a worse product in digital. It has little to do with the digital medium, and everything to do with production choices. See the Dynamic Range Database.

Thanks for your comment. I actually wrote a lengthy response, which is now quoted in the "MQA offers provenance" comment (a good point, by the way). It seems to be in the hands of the moderators. I don't know why, as it first appeared as a response to your comment. I kept editing it for clarity and then got a message saying it was being moderated. I hope it will reappear, as it took me a long time to write and there was nothing even remotely offensive about it.

Jerome Sabbagh
www.jeromesabbagh.com

I think that it's very difficult to maintain credibility when arguing faith against fact (for example, from everything I've read, believing in MQA's "deblurring" is faith, not fact). Judging by the nature and number of critical comments, Stereophile hasn't seemed to have made a dent in the MQA critics. Rather, like banging one's head against the wall, the damage done is not generally to the wall.

I don't think it's that readers and commenters who are critical of MQA don't understand it. Perhaps they do and just don't like it.

MQA,MQA,MQA,MQA,MQA,MQA,MQA,MQA,you're on repeat. The only real outlet for MQA is Tidal, which doesn't even call it MQA, to them it's "Master." So many words spilled on MQA, and wasn't Spotify supposed to feature MQA last year? If MQA is such hot stuff why aren't their more outlets for it? Bob Stuart is a smart guy, definitely, but his clumsy handling of MQA's roll out makes me think MQA's chances in the wider than just us audiophile world is right up there with DVD-A and HDCD.

Last weekend John Atkinson noted I haven’t posted in a while. The reason is I don’t want to interfere with the contests going on. A couple of side notes. The first two winners have donated their prizes to a Foster Children Organization in Arizona. I matched them as did two foundations whose mission it is to support foster children in Arizona.

So let’s review a few things. There still aren’t to my knowledge 10,000 unique albums converted to MQA and only a very small number of albums recorded directly into MQA. My nine very common reference albums still aren’t available in MQA. The six albums I picked to do preliminary testing last year were available in Europe still aren’t available in the United States. The MQA decoder has been cloned and one version has many claiming it is better than the licensed versions. The DRM in an MQA file can be removed and an open source program will be available soon to make it easy to do. The blue light authenticating an MQA file can easily be tricked. For example removing bits 0 to 7 the high resolution portion of a 24 bit MQA file it will still be authenticated. And may still give you numbers on your DAC indicating the output is 24 bit when we made the file sixteen bit.

And finally a personal favorite issue. Adding MQA to an open source music player used in many network audio players violates the license agreement for the player. There has already been one company forced to make changes. I think there will be more.

Here are some things I've discovered so far, using a Macbook with the Meridian Explorer-2 DAC (updated to v1717 firmware), playing different copies of the Steve Reich/Pulse album as noted below:

Reading the FAQ at Meridian Audio, they show the MIDI output settings as 24 bit/192 khz. With that setting, the 44 khz FLAC download I got from Arkiv (and the CD I ripped as well) would not display the MQA-authenticated green light on the DAC. When I changed the MIDI setting to 44 khz, the green light did display. Naturally I reset everything, restarted the computer, repeated every combination several times, and the green light will not display until the MIDI setting is 44 khz, for those files anyway. I haven't determined yet whether I'm losing quality at that 44 khz MIDI setting when the player plays a 24/96 non-MQA FLAC file in the same playlist.

It turns out that I didn't need to buy the CD from Arkiv/Nonesuch, because the 44 khz FLAC download they have is MQA'd. I hope in the future that these MQA releases are labeled as such.

I described my preliminary impressions comparing the music quality of the 24/96 files versus the 44 khz MQA'd files elsewhere, but I can see that I'll need more recordings to experiment with. There's also a possibility that hardware changes can make evaluations of the MQA aspect of the sound unreliable. People who do this full time are in a better position to judge.

Edit--sound quality note: It is clear that the Meridian DAC did a better job with the MQA files than the DF Red, but that's obviously because the Meridian is a full decoder/renderer while the DF is just a renderer.

Today I bought the Buena Vista Social Club album from HighResAudio, where the cover photo has a blue sticker saying "MQA Studio". The blue light on my Meridian DAC does come on, and the second light in white indicates that the data rate is 88-96 khz, although my non-MQA player says 24/48. To get that blue light, the Macbook's MIDI screen has to be set to 48 khz exactly.

It would be good to know if any of those MQA players can force the correct MIDI setting on a Mac, or bypass it entirely, because the Reich MQA album I purchased requires the 44 khz setting to get the green light.

The tracks I added to my playlist are 452 mb in size, and the total time 35:44, so where CDs play at about 180k bytes per second, these files consume 210.7k bytes per second, but of course the unfolding or whatever means the actual data rate is much higher. Comparing these FLAC sizes with some non-MQA 96k FLACs that I have, the non-MQA FLACs consume about 290k bytes per second, so if that ratio would hold for other samples, the MQA FLACs are about 73 percent the size of non-MQA FLACs.

The sound quality seems very good, but I don't have another version to compare to at this point. I did conversions of these FLACs to WAV and MP3 to see if there were conversion issues (none) and whether there was any blatantly obvious degradation of the sound. All is well. Next I'll see if I can find a 24/96 copy of this album to make comparisons.

Comparing the HDTracks 24/96 copy of Buena Vista Social Club to the MQA Studio version I got from the HighResAudio site, using the Macbook and Meridian Explorer-2 DAC, the MQA Studio version is slightly brighter on the high end - especially noticeable on vocal sibilants ("Amor de Luca Juventud"). One effect of this that I hear is a quieter background on the HDTracks version, so the brightness (or whatever) extends across much of the treble, and doesn't sound like a narrower EQ'd range.

This is consistent with what I experienced with the Steve Reich/Pulse album, using the Meridian DAC. I no longer place any significance on what I heard with the DF Red DAC, because it's just a renderer and I'm not using an MQA music player.

The Meridian DAC lights reported blue-white-off with the MQA Studio version, and white-white-off with the HDTracks version, as long as the Mac's MIDI settings were correct (48 khz for Studio and 96 khz for 24/96). Both of the lights displays were correct for each version, and represent high-res music (88 to 96 khz). Unknown to me at this point is whether any of the well-known MQA music players are able to force the correct MIDI setting on the Mac when MQA and non-MQA tracks are present in the same playlist and are played randomly (i.e. the player doesn't know anything about the tracks' contents in advance of playing them.

Lastly, I have no idea which version is the best, or audiophile-preferred in terms of the treble, as these are different masterings at some level. Secondly, although I can increase the volume to more clearly discern minute differences in the uppermost treble to ~15 khz, if there is anything going on above that, or any low-level anomalous sounds that got past me in normal listening, I can't report on those.

Edit: I have more than a few recordings that are edgy, sibilant, or contain minor irritations here and there, but I don't hear anything in the MQA'd albums that suggest other than a high quality mastering.

Very thorough article posted on Computer Audiophile! Refers to this article also.

https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/reviews/mqa-a-review-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/