As We See It

Why do this when bandwidth no longer requires compression? Seems like an answer to a problem that does not exist. Why find a solution to a problem you don't have?

Seems prudent to include Goldennote's response (though it may be missing here due to publishing dates). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0

I am not an "internet-libertarian types who think information should be free" and I am willing to pay for streaming, CDs, and vinyl. But I do take issue with a format that trades lossless files for lossy ones with REDUCED choice. Pre-MQA, one could choose her/his filter of choice, implemented on the "master" file - be it 44.1 or a higher rez one. MQA does away with user's flexibility, while at the same time also manages to charge us (either directly or indirectly). So, I don't mind paying, but when I do, I expect to get more, not less.

Why in the world would I want to use any lossy proprietary compression that limits my choice of DAC. I'm sure there is a reason you don't see MQA on any FPGA or R2R top of the line DACS.

https://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19396

Quote:

AES E-LIBRARY
A Comparison of Clarity in MQA Encoded Files vs. Their Unprocessed State as Performed by Three Groups — Expert Listeners

This paper aims to examine perceived clarity in MQA encoded audio files compared to their unprocessed state (96-kHz 24-bit). Utilizing a methodology initially proposed by the authors in a previous paper, this study aims to investigate any reported differences in clarity for three musical sources of varying genres. A double-blind (listening) test is conducted using three groups—expert listeners, musicians, and casual listeners—in a controlled environment using high-quality loudspeakers and headphones. The researchers were interested in comparing the responses of the three target groups and whether playback systems had any significant effect on listeners’ perception. Data shows that listeners were not able to significantly discriminate between MQA encoded files and the unprocessed original due to several interaction effects.

The authors would like to thank.....Bob Stuart and Meridian for providing the MQA-encoded versions of our audio source materials

Libertarians are all about property rights, intellectual or otherwise and privatization. Do you mean "internet anarchist types"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0

"It's better than lossless!"
"It's bigger than infinity!"

I'll admit I'm not an audio engineer but if MQA has nothing to hide (and it very much seems they do ) then why didn't they let GoldenSound upload that third musical sample to vindicate themselves? They and I suppose you as well would rather folks pay for 'useless' at best algorithms and the chips/licenses to decode them.

I saw an absolutely genius thing in my newest Stereophile!

The “Reviewers Playlist” on Qobuz is a fantastic move! I hope it draws many new subscribers!!!

What a tendentious biased column:
A) GO didn't "attack" MQA he calmly and politely tried to demonstrate that it isn't lossless. The fact that you call that an "attack" - reveals a lot about your bias.
B) Wow, you appealed to authority to "prove" how good MQA sounds. So what?
Other experts don't like it. Neither proves anything. Is that your level of argument? Why do feel you need to "prove" MQA sounds good?

You wrote back in 2018 that MQA needs to be properly tested. Yet MQA has never let anyone do that. Why do you think that is? Maybe they have something to hide?

- Considering Internet bandwidth these days can easily accommodate true lossless hi-res audio.
- Considering that lossless (hi-res) audio CODECs for years can encode anything that comes along without the limitations of what MQA has deemed to be "music" based on their limited testing.
- Given that Qobuz has been streaming lossless FLAC for years up to true 24/192 without arbitrary limits like Tidal & MQA.
- Considering that Apple is going with ALAC for Apple Music and Spotify is coming out with their lossless stream (no evidence that it'll use MQA).
- Considering that MQA has never shown evidence for actual sonic "de-blurring" or that their DSP added any value to sound quality.

MQA is very much "last decade" technology developed prior to 2014, aiming at data bandwidth limited streaming and is now anachronistic. Why would audiophiles who by definition want the best quality want MQA now?

Why is this even being talked about in a mainstream audiophile magazine that's supposed to be promoting state-of-the-art fidelity? Jim, if you're trying to be helpful, why don't you start encouraging Tidal to stream true lossless audio and get with the future like everyone else and encourage Tidal to reverse MQA's data manipulation that has affected even 16/44.1 streams?

We know these days that MQA processing has been applied to the vast majority of the files with no actual oversight by the artists or production team so the claim of "what the artist intended" is meaningless.

The fact that GoldenOne had to submit his files to Tidal to get it encoded to MQA was the only way non-insiders (unlike John Atkinson) got a chance to examine test signals all these years. If MQA is all that great, why didn't they just encode stuff submitted to them including some true hi-res tracks by folks like Mark Waldrep years ago? I am personally aware of some other test signal material that would likely, relevantly demonstrate significant limitations of the CODEC but of course they would never allow these to be encoded/tested.

Face it Stereophile, audiophiles as represented by the comments above IMO have done the right thing and rejected this abomination which we never asked for. Letting this go "belly up" is exactly what respectable media desiring to promote the interests of the readership need to face up to unless as the title of this message suggests, you can give ONE good reason why audiophiles should support this now. (Promoting the agenda of a highly questionable company so they can make money to pay off their debts is certainly not an appropriate reason of course.)

To defend a technology, which is maybe not the favourite one, but misused by a self-proclaimed expert show real quality of a reviewer. Looking into the details and answers not only from MQA themselves turned golden sound into golden shower. And I am surprised how many of comments ride on losslessness, without ever checking the exact process as described many times in its basic procedure. Also I am surprised how many people dismiss the limits of bandwith still happening in a lot iof areas. And deblurring time smear makes a mqa file better than a lossless blurred one, like it or not .

net-working and net-studying, when all family members are constantly connected, bandwidth does matter for many of us; not that mqa is the last word in bandwidth saving, mind you. I personally find irritating the fact that mqa does not allow for full software rendering, even though it should't matter soundwise. I also think that the "lossy" tag is rather misleading: if I understand correctly, any loss of information takes place exclussively at ultrasonic territory. Allegations for indecency etc do not really concern me as an end-user as long as I can stream freshly sounding hi-res music without having to sell an arm and a leg. Artists' consent and royalties are mostly nominal of course as they always have been. By the way Jack Dorsey (of twitter) is the new Tidal owner, so I guess the whole thing is here to stay one way or another.

disqualifying tests which involve non-musical signals in turn means disqualifying development and oem-internal testing, and, most peculiar, practically all component test results ever published in Stereophile.

I believe your column here requires some corrections.

tx and best regards
HB

My Chord DAC does not support MQA, so I do care about purity of non-MQA encoded files. If GoldenSound's finding is correct that Tidal's non-MQA stream is in fact encoded, that would be a huge downside to Tidal for me, I may very well reconsider my subscription.

I guess that if this is true " ..that a bull in the china shop can damage the china." I would be careful not to be seen as being too close to the china or be spending too much time protecting the china shop. Collateral damage is a real risk for Stereophile who is nurturing those who are in the perfectionist-audio pond with the kind of products they review on a regular basis.

who thinks "everything should be free." I pay for my music. But I am not willing to use a proprietary data format that restricts the equipment I can use to listen, and which demands royalties for that "privilege."

I used it when I had Tidal for a few months (before Qobuz was released in the U.S., I think). It was fine, but I did not notice anything so extraordinary. Then again, I was listening to it on my LG phone at the time, a V30, if memory serves, and Audio Technica headphones. Nothing esoteric or bleeding edge, but reliable for sound reproduction. In any case, I later switched to Qobuz, left MQA behind and have not missed it since.

I have, however, casually followed the discussions around the technology since then, and to be honest, I tend agree with a lot of people commenting here: what is the point?

I'm open to have my mind changed, but it seems that MQA is, as we might say in my native Brazil, a truly ingenious, high-tech, sophisticated, machine to straighten bananas.

“The data gets hashy above 22 kHz!”
- Are you a bat, or concerned about the delicate ears of the bats in your attic? Does your amplifier even cover that range? Can your speakers even reproduce that signal?

“There’s low-level noise below the low-level signal!”
- That’s already lost in the noise floor of your amplifier? Further lost by the distortion of your speakers? Further lost by the noise floor of your room? Or do you listen at a level that reproduces pink noise at 110 dB-A?

MQA is very clear that it chops up the signal and repackages the data in areas where the music signal is only a few bits deep — at the higher frequencies. So GoldenSound’s tests seem designed to exploit and exaggerate this design using signals that aren’t representative of anything anyone listens to for musical enjoyment. Using Bach’s Toccata and Fugue seems a better full-frequency-range and high dynamic range test file. Konstantin Reymaier has a recording of it from 2020 in MQA on Tidal and 24/96 on Qobuz. Maybe GoldenSound can do a follow-up analysis of both of those files and then listen to them and decide which he likes better.

And isn’t which one you like better the point? Because neither version is “accurate” and neither version will put you in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, but perhaps in my room and system MQA sounds best to me and perhaps it’s non-MQA for you, and how can you dictate to me which I perceive to be best?

As for Tidal, almost every album for which I can select MQA I can also select a 16/44.1 version. If the CD quality version is actually encoded in MQA my Bluesound Node would show the MQA signal, but it doesn’t so that argument seems like a red herring.

In his reply to the reply, Golden Sound repeatedly entreats MQA to "work with him,' of "let's work together."

I like how he only wants to be their colleague.

It's a great counterargument to the anti-MQA crowd about this latest bit of research. I enjoy MQA in how it sounds, but also agree people should have a choice and they do.

Our industry is rife with people wanting to achieve "lossless", "original", "as intended" or "perfect sound". I haven't found any of those yet, but in MQA I have found filters and a sound I enjoy and appreciate that.

I had compared MQA on Tidal and Spotify (Premium) with the same tracks (Yo-Yo-MA Bach Trios) with the result of minor differences between the 2 streaming providers. So I prefer Spotify due to the better prices for streaming.
If MQA has one better resolution on high frequencies (> ??kHz) that is one other story, considering my age (60 I don't care), the differences I recognize between the 2 providers are minimal.
My opinion about Hi FI enthusiasts regarding recordings is the following.
Only small ensembles can be reproduced in a nearly perfect way.
A big Orchestra unfortunately never will be reproduced at home as live. Here your HiFi system after one visit to one live concert and you will close it.

"I am not a partisan" does not ring true. Gratitude to GoldenSound for exposing MQA. Canceled my Tidal. Qobuz sounds better to my ears.

On one side we get "relentless", "predators", "impartial jellyfish", "internet-libertarian types", "attack", "unfair", "bull in the china shop".

And on the other side "genuinely clever", "legitimately new", "post-Shannon developments", "controversial, for good reasons", "the interest of making the sound better", "esteemed", "Grammy Award–winning", "love", "very careful".

The people you don't want to see the video are sharing it, executives in the music industry.

My issue with MQA is that it is a proprietary technology that adds costs at various points in the music chain. MQA also gives control of the MQA processes and standards to whoever owns MQA. What would happen to MQA if Google, Sony, Apple, or some other large corporations bought out the rights to MQA and changed the MQA specifications or jacked up the MQA licensing fees? That would not be good for audiophile listeners or musicians. I will stick with Qobuz/FLAC.

I hesitate to even comment, it feels like wasted breathe. This whole MQA issue is part of a broader issue, arguably intertwined with the broader currents of IP, earnings, monetization, etc. The (hifi) audio industry has arguably been on its way out, catering to a diminishing demographic (in the mortality sense), saddled with a reality that innovations towards a "golden sound", catering to the "golden ear", is diminishing. We can argue this last point, but speakers and amps and tonearms, et cetera, haven't really changed, while prices have more than kept up with inflation. And we talk about masters and sound quality and other, frankly, non-falsifiable attributes, at least on the consumer side. In a parallel universe SPhile could have lead this discussion and evolved with the external realities, with merit or not. I am not saying MQA is the cable debate. But for someone that can tell trickle-down use cases, etc., it seemed superfluous, lacked transparency, suffered from hyperbole in the press, etc. In a lay-cum-scientific space there's a simple attribution from lossless to MQA that could have been championed by it's creators and adherents and, while still debated, less so. Maybe if there wasn't all this history it would have been easier. Maybe a CBA validates all this nonsense from BS, Meridian, Tidal's perspective. But it doesn't help. The credibility isn't there. I can't help but think this echoes the current "beyond experiment" argument in fundamental physics, in that audio (im)perfectly timed having it's moment when the rest of the collective unconscious was ready for "beyond experiment" and subjective trumps reality. This will all play out, arguably predictably, but it just seems stupid to me.

I think the main reason for tech guys is the problem in measuring because all the measuring is mostly based upon sine function. According to the Bob Stuart, he does not use sine function, but function that correlates to the natural sound, then treated by SN theorem of double the frequency for the desired frequency range. And that is only one part of the tech apart of the other features that are discussed lively. But nobody discusses about that part - the function. And I have never understand that SN theorem apply only and exclusevly to the sine function. It is the difference between engineering and fundamental math. Prople who knows hiw live instrument sounds are fans of MQA. Like JVS who is mentioned in the article. So, he uses knowladge the recognize what is wrong with adopted trueth and that is always the hard way no matter how does it end. So it is common conflict between faith and ratio.

I think that MQA is an acronym for the Master Quality Authenticated and what I have read so far itmeans that Mastering engineer gives his final blessing upon end version of what the audience should hear. General misconception among audiophiles is that all the music then should be audiophile grade. Misconception. But MQA ia a tool for musicinas and crew to express themselfs and their values. So MQA does not alter the music, quite the opposite - mastering engineer authenicate its version and locks it.

It’s a good thing Stereophile pushes MQA.
I take note of the reviewers that try to push MQA and I ignore them later. I do not read any review written by them.
I see the real faces of some reviewers.

Is that really what MQA is trying to do? So it's not just trying to replicate hi-res in a smaller file than the equivalent FLAC (still not sure why, but OK) - but it's actually trying to make the original master "sound better"?

Defending MQA keeps getting harder and harder.

so many scientifically inclined people who happily wear masks like second skin and do what they are arbitrarily told to do interested in Bob Stuart conspiracy theories.

Jim writes:

Quote:

MQA ... would replace open standards with proprietary ones—a big step backward, especially for internet-libertarian types who think information should be free (a perspective I respect but don't fully share)

The issue with proprietary formats is not that the information they contain is free or otherwise.

The issue with proprietary formats is that they are bad for the consumer. They limit the consumer's choice in that only devices and software that license the the format and technology can be used to fully enjoy the content provided therein.

FLAC (for example) specifically does not limit ANYONE's choices, which you can easily see since MQA uses FLAC to package its data.

People who build software and hardware to decode FLAC (for example) don't have to worry about whether the good people who invented FLAC are around tomorrow or not, because all of the FLAC intellectual property is free for anyone to use.

People who buy music encoded in FLAC don't have to worry about whether or not some company will be around tomorrow, like those of us with HDCD encoded music who have to rely on reverse-engineered HDCD decoders of suspect quality to deal with HDCD format data.

Entertaining exchanges!

..in the meantime and while waiting for the outcome of the 'war', I will put another record on my ClearAudio deck..

Happy days!

GoldenSound says he was trying to evaluate what MQA does, and whether it can merit the marketing claim of "lossless". His long video discusses this question on many fronts, not just in the context of the trick files he uploaded in order to probe what MQA does. JA2 only responds to a few of the points that GS makes (and the same is true of MQA's response).

Jim does not discuss facts such as these: (1) MQA claims to use knowledge of the production chain to implement its "de-blurring" magic, but in most cases this is clearly impossible (many aspects of provenance unknown, multiple D/A/D steps in the original mastering, etc.), and in the case of GoldenSound's files, MQA never contacted him to ask about the equipment used in creating his digital masters. (2) Files that are altered and damaged can still light up the blue "authenticated" light, which shows that it is not authenticating anything, it is just checking for a flag inserted during MQA encoding. (3) MQA's claims about the alleged virtues of the encoding have evolved over the years, while never leaving the realm of impossible-to-verify marketing-speak. I could go on, but hopefully I've made my point.

JA2 is the one who missed an opportunity here, to frankly discuss the full range of awkward questions raised by the GS video, and keep Stereophile neutral on this incendiary issue. (Or move it towards neutrality at least... the early history of cheerleading for MQA has not faded from my memory.)

Maybe MQA encoded files do, in general, sound as good or better than lossless counterparts. If this could be demonstrated in an unbiased context, that might sway me to keep Tidal. But as things stand, I will be moving to Qobuz this month. The straw that broke the back of this camel was learning that Roon has to pay MQA something every time I stream an MQA encoded song in Roon. I would rather keep Roon financially healthy than MQA!

JA2, good article, thanks. When listening to Tidal, I usually prefer MQA. However, I'd been reflecting lately on good outcomes from the pandemic, thinking that one of those good outcomes was that "The Great MQA Debate" had been killed off...but I see now that it had just been lying dormant, or perhaps mutating like a virus variant, judging by the number and length of the comments...but I shouldn't be surprised...I just "upgraded" part of my digital sources, and now I'm torn by the fact that greater detail is (apparently, to my ears) now accompanied on many Tidal recordings with some harshness and glare..so, now I'm off to Qobuz to check and compare...such is the nature of the Audiophile hobby...the variants always get you...
Thanks again and Cheers!

P.S. Thanks to you and all the staff for ALL that you do for us, music, and our hobby! Much more than only equipment, I have discovered so much new and wonderful music thanks to your reviews, as well as the comments sections. Blessings!!

Lou G in Clinton, NJ

The biggest problem I find with the GoldenSound video is they used only one dac to do the testing.

Personally I like the sound of MQA. If you don't or find a differential in sound between say a download, MQA or other streaming services then sure.... go with what you like.

Really all this bickering is dragging down this hobby. Why are people spending thousands of hours pissing and moaning over stuff when they could be doing something positive.

This is suppose to be fun!!!
Gordon

I have a few issues with your article attacking the Goldensound review of MQA.
1) You say "I am not partisan, for or against MQA." You are clearly defending it in this entire article without any criticism. This reads much more like a damage control article written by MQA.
2) If your product does what you say it does, it should be able to be peer reviewed and the reviews should confirm its performance. Instead they lock it down in such a way it is nearly impossible to do so, and when someone finds a way to test it they shut it down and hide behind marketing wank.
3) When anyone or any company says "trust me" but dont verify you should be highly suspicious.
4) If you dont like how Goldensound tested this product, perhaps you can work as an intermediary to allow a test that both parties can accept, since you seem to be on MQA's payroll. Prove your truly impartial.
5) There has been many other reputable people critical of MQA, ie. Paul McGowan (PS Audio)

...makes cars, then get a Toyota.

Like everything else reviewed here, MQA is a consumer product.

Yeesh!

I'm not familiar with the samples referred to by the article. It sounds like they are probably BS. I dame to the same conclusion about this article within the first two paragraphs as he defends MQA by listing the people who endorse it. Hey, remember Von Karajan's "All else is gaslight" when the first mostly wretched DG CD's came out? I've heard it sound good. I've heard it sound like you are spending money for a log. I think it's largely marketing but don't really care that much about it either way, this after attending several MQA demos. The DAC's are never the same. How the hell do you really tell anything. My 2/192 stuff sounds great, I don't need MQA for storage savings so why worry about this article? Because it struck me as biased and somewhat dishonest, much like what it is criticizing.

It’s all just semantics. JA1’s previous articles have pointed out that nearly half the bits in a 24/88.2 file are noise, much less the higher sample rates. So MQA claims lossless because they don’t lose any music data while origami folding in those noise bits. GS, and others, claim it isn’t lossless because you lose those noise bits. Both claims from MQA and GS are true, from a certain point of view. None of that is obfuscated by marketing.

But what matters for sound quality: musically lossless or empirically lossless? Judging by the comments on this thread and the dearth of comments on the music reviews also posted within a day of this article, most of us care about empiricism rather than music. That’s fine, but loving our 24/192 FLAC doesn’t mean others can’t love MQA or dragging a rock through a ditch.

What JA2 was pointing out is that you can’t embed a full-scale test signal at 20kHz as a test of MQA and then call the results into question; it just proves you didn’t take the time to learn how MQA works in the first place. Questions on IP, long-term support, provenance, etc. may remain, but do not suddenly validate GS’s flawed technical hypothesis or results.

By the way, I listened to the organ music I referenced in my earlier post via Tidal Masters and Qobuz at 24/96. Tidal won using iPad > DragonFly Red > Sony MDR-7506. Rhiannon Giddens’ “Calling Me Home” was also more natural through Tidal Masters. Both those and Ma/Thile/Meyer’s “Bach Trios” were a draw on my main system, but I also know my acoustic environment is still lacking optimization.

MQA is just another scam for our hard earned $$$. Spare cash? Send it to a charity that looks after the millions of poor and suffering people who make up the majority of the world!

Try this test -
http://abx.digitalfeed.net/spotify-hq.html

90% of us won't hear a difference.

And that's before even MQA!

PEOPLE CANNOT HEAR THE DIFFERENCE. This is how I've proven it: I show my audiophile friends my collection of 16/48 CD rips in raw WAV but play the 320kbps MP3 versions for them. They leave saying how great my system is!

Not sure who is actually following the original content. I had watched the original video around the time it came out. Based on a response from MQA there's another, more recent, video. It also touches on some of the Stereophile position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0

i haven't heard MQA yet, but i'd like to know how mr. fremer thinks it compares to LPs. after many years of ignoring vinyl, i've discovered that with a modestly good turntable and phono preamp and cartridge (total under 1K), even high rez digital doesn't compare to a clean record. an $8 2-LP set of The Doors vs the remastered hi-rez of the same is easy to demonstrate to anyone: the hi rez sounds wonderful, and is a great experience of listening to a recording of The Doors; however the vinyl is a great experience of listening to The Doors actually performing, as a band of musicians, and somehow what each of them is doing is much more obvious and less "blended". does MQA bring any of that back? i don't know if the technical explanation is due to noise, time-domain performance, transient response, or what. but when michael listens and compares, what does he hear? i'm willing to invest in MQA if that same "un-blended" performance can come through in a digital format.

As mentioned before, MQA is a solution for a nonexisting problem.

There is no such thing as post Shannon. What a nonsense. I suppose Austin studies digital signal processing.
Its absolutely clear that MQA is damaging the signal.
HighRes, the aim is to extend frequency range and bit depth. People claim you can hear ultrasonics. So HighRes PCM just reproduces ultrasonics in a perfect manner. MQA does not.
If you do not want HighRes, PCM gives you that as well. CD 44.1/16Bit or 44.1/24Bit.
So you get what you ever wanted with PCM today. Hardware (DAC) are perfect in regards of the ability to hear. So technically there is no need whatsoever to go for MQA or any othere strange stuff.

it's been for some years I started to take music quality seriously. I've tried hard to improve the rig, and since digital became more affordable to not only buy but to understand I've learnt many things in the journey, like for example that dacs chips are not the only thing, I can now "see" my old cds with open source software and I can see what the big labels did with volume to fool us.

During these years I've seen many companies claiming better specs, SNR, THD, jitter.. some of them implementing new technical approaches for amplifying...

An interesting found was to finally admit that it is not a sin to use the EQ in my DAC, after all we all have a taste, and a little bit here and there is fine, that's how I like it, so what ?

What I have not seen in these years is what's happening with MQA. After carefully watching the GS videos, and some other staff, I already had it clear, MQA to me is suspect of trying to cheat the market, I'm not listening MQA, nor buying any hardware saying it supports MQA, I simply don't want to pay a bit of loyalties for something I don't want, I am not paying a bit to MQA, either directly or indirectly.

Anybody in 99% of cases can adjust treble or bass or loudness, or even do some EQ, to improve their experiences with our own tastes. These are honest adjustments, we know what we're doing, we know how to get more air, or bass or..., so I do not need anybody to do "I do not know what" saying "trust me this is better for your joy, but I can't tell you how I do it, because I want to earn money with that", I prefer to stay in the ground of professionals that say "I mastered this LP, and made it sound gorgeus", not the same thing.

I belong to the amount of people that looks forward to listen to music recorded the closest to honest original masterings, whatever the release, some of them sound better than others, but they all have on common one thing, the mastering process is "hand made", and I pay for that, they generate open music formats using processes widely understood and accepted by the community, where everyone fights improving their own implementations in all the phases of the path.

To me is pretty surprising that having access to all kinds of tools to adjust the music to our tastes, even including room conditions, people is accepting to pay for this obscure thing called MQA,

I am keeping an eye to GS, to see if anybody is capable to convince this guy of the contrary. Up to now what I have seen in his videos is light years ahead of any other stuff I've read, including the article that pushed me to write all this insane long post, this Stereophile one.

best
Enrique

I have a fine LP rig, my digital system can play CD, SACD, DVDA, PCM (Red Book or Hi-Rez) and DSD. I need another format like I need a hole in the head.

Does anyone else who buys into more digital signal manipulation of a high-resolution file to be damning of digital period?

These frequencies don't occur in music, waah waah. This guy has clearly never heard of electronic music (or maybe he considers himself too good for that "filth".) I can find thousands of songs that don't follow these "rules". And this guy works at a magazine dedicated to music? Holy shit, allow me to laugh. I see why old media is dying with people like this around.

EDIT: I missed the sentence where he actually said this. Holy shit, of course I was right. That is hilarious. I am sure music exists out there that don't follow these archaic rules I just made up, but I am too good for that music. Get the fuck out of here, man. MQA is useless. Just like you and your "journalism".

EDIT2: This "magazine" is hilarious and employs children. They even edit others' comments when you trigger them enough (as they don't know what satire is, among a plethora of other things they don't understand.) If I type "These frequencies don't occur in music, waah waah" no reasonable person reads that as anybody actually saying literally that. But, sure, I'll make it "[These frequencies don't occur in music, waah waah]" and add an /s on top so even the children running this circus of a magazine understand.

I am trying to think back to any of JA1's measurements of digital playback devices and can't think of any that used music. They are all based on test tones and non-musical parameters.

As I think about it more, I can't even recall any measurements of any gear in Stereophile that use music as a basis of measurement.

Not mean in a pejorative way. It seems no measurers actually use music. Why be mad at Golden Sound?

Hell, is he really doing anything different that most of those old vinyl 'track records' from Shure and other manufacturers used to sell?

I don't feed square waves into my amp, but JA1 loves to measure with them.

_

Related question: does Stereophile regard MQA as a high fidelity (high end) means of reproduction, or as an enhancer for compressed streaming when true Hi Rez is not available?

In a recent interview with Bill Leebens , Bob Stuart confirms that MQA cannot be technically lossless and does use B-spline sampling for de-blurring.
https://www.strata-gee.com/mqa-the-praise-from-proponents/

Sitting here reading everyone's comments about an utterly useless and entirely non-enriching controversy. Honestly who cares?

Sitting here, with a 30yr old Sennheiser HD600 strapped on, plugged into a LG V40 phone (w/ ES9038 DAC) running USB Pro and streaming a NAS stored version of Robert Plant's MQA re-mastered "Digging Deep". It sounds phenomenal!! Do I care about if Robert cares that his recordings may not sound the way he listened to in the mastering room? NO. Jimmy Page might care...

Do I care if MQA stays or goes away like so many other formats from the past, like HDCD for example? NO, I don't care. It is very predictable that it will fade. Good riddance...but in the meantime Robert Plant sounds simply AWESOME in MQA

So much wasted energy. Who cares, really.

GoldenSound test files were intended to show that MQA was not a lossless encoding system. They did just that.
A true lossless system produces the exact same output file when decoded regardless of the input file. MQA does not. So MQA is not lossless system. Now the important question is if MQA's "modification" of the audio file is always a improvement or not. Again to be fair to GoldenSound MQA seemed to respond to that question with "trust us". That is also red flag.

I guess keeping a format proprietary and requiring hardware companies to provide engineering insights, all while never fully demonstrating the benefit of the product may not have been the keen business decision that it seemed at the time.