As We See It

this is the way forward...no data can be considered "free" anymore, and tech like blockchain, digital currency, AI (machine learning, if you'd prefer), etc. & the "cloud"-- will ensure that every use of data can be accounted for, certainly in terms of "ownership"....just not the end-user/consumer's ownership...
End-user physical storage & end-user ownership rights to the data on that storage medium, thy days are numbered...

With the Global ( 2.1 Billion and growing ) population of Smart Phone owners, we need an agreed upon "Standard" for our Music.

I hope for "RedBook" or even 24/44.1 to be our Gift to the Next-Generations to base their Music Collections on.

MQA seems a useful method, well-able to serve everyone's purposes !

"Everyone's purposes except we "hair-shirted audiophiles" who will continue to shower praise on the lovely $50 Vinyls we buy ( invest-in ) from Chad Kassam and the Audiophile owners of Exotic DAC design implementations ( FPGA, Ladder DAC and even that Super-Borito thing from the Shit Co., etc...).

I hope the Audio Industry learns it's lesson from all the variations of the Analog Era :

78 with it's varying speeds, 1920 to 1957

7" 45s to replace the 78s 1957 to 1967

33 Mono long play Albums 1957ish to 1965

33 Stereo long play Albums 1965 to 1985

33 180gram Stereo Long play Albums ( adjust the VTA )

33 Quad Channel Long Play Albums

45 Stereo Long Play Albums

45 180 grams Long Play Albums

Compact Cassettes ( coming back now-a-days, I'm told )

El-Cassette for the Radio Stations

8-Track Cassettes

Reel-to-Reel in all it's variations

Phew,

Audiophiles have been thru a lot of Formats

I fell in love with the concept of my entire music collection on a SD memory card the size of a finger nail.

Now, it looks like I won't even need the Memory Card.

Bring on the 21 Century,

I'm all Ears !

22st Century Tony in Michigan

DRM isn’t just about the ability to copy files. It’s about the ability to control how files are presented to the user.
MQA is designed with this in mind, which I’d guess it is one reason the labels like it. The single inventory (no non MQA available) is one, but all sorts of scenarios are possible.

One I fear is that DRM could be used to punish consumers who aren’t on board. MQA could be used to actually deliver a degraded file/sound to the non MQA user-something not just of “baseline” or CD quality, but altered somehow and worse.

Along those lines, it could also be used to deliver various levels of playback quality, depending on how much you pay for the file, or even give you varying playback quality (including degraded), depending on how much you pay for your streaming subscription.

That’s all in addition to the possibility that only MQA versions of files could be made available. And as you implied, what happens to consumers who don’t prefer the sound of MQA (and not everyone agrees it is an across the board SQ improvement)? Will they be left with access only to what the feel are inferior versions?

Low and behold,

We have an actual Audiophile Movie ( documentary ) about a "Record Collector" who's Lifetime Quest to collect all of America's vast Music History has been documented by CUBE Media in 2006.

"Desperate Man Blues" On DVD

Beginning in the 1950s, Joe Bussard begins his Adult Life collecting Records abandoned by his previous Generation of Record collectors.

It now seems that we record ( music ) collectors have a history going back to the 1920s. Hmm. These people even had Record Cleaners!, who could've guessed ?

Geez,
I'm a 3rd Generation Record Collector !

21st Century Tony in Michigan

MQA may have tiny audible improvement. I can't hear it , but maybe it does.
I hear very, very slight differences between 96K downloads and the same recording streamed 44 K on Tidal. Even audiophiles are sick of the imaginary resolution improvements in sound.
Real improvement would be better engineered recordings.
I think audiophiles would get excited about that if they had the choice

well THAT would be something, wouldn't it? If MQA could do away with of all those brickwalled mastering jobs that render recordings unlistenable.

From Stereophile.

Epitomised by the image, with WAV (which is raw PCM in a 'package') and FLAC crossed out. So this time the propaganda has gone totally 'over the top'.

John, MQA is lossy.
'Lossy' means the original cannot be fully recovered, and the original will be PCM or DSD.
WAV isn't a codec at all, it's pure PCM, and FLAC recovers the original complete unadulterated pure PCM one hundred percent.

And we all know that Stuart tried to re-refine 'lossy'. And we also all know that the Stereophile group went along with his efforts to re-define 'lossy' in at least one earlier article.

And you say "MQA-encoded files tend to sound better than the PCM originals from which they are derived".
So you just admitted that the MQA files aren't "the original direct from the studio" as MQA claims, didn't you :):) :)

MQA cannot be "better" as it discards data, and also reduces the bit depth to about 17 rather the original 24 (in 48K and up files), and also introduces possibly audible aliases in the 20Hz-20KHz band.
MQA may sound different, but it cannot sound "better".

Why do you persist in saying that MQA is "better" when you can only mean that you personally prefer the sound of it's losses, bit depth reductions, and distortions?

Taking all the above, which is entirely factual, into account, I can only conclude that you and Stereophile are taking us for fools. And you must have a motive for doing that.

"If an MQA file is played without MQA decoding, the sound quality will be that of the baseband file—ie, the same as a CD—meaning that the record company need stock only a single inventory."

That was not at all my experience it sounded much worse than red book more like mp3. Actually I prefer mp3 at 320 to what I heard from MQA files not decoded.

Yes, the same arguments can be made for HDCD. I am now stuck with a bunch of HDCD-encoded CD's that I am unable to play with decoding. This pisses me off as undecoded playback results in obvious inferior sound to that with decoding. People who supported HDCD with their dollars got "had." This is one reason why people do not trust MQA. However, HDCD was never going to be incorporated into every recording available for purchase. This is huge if you are talking about taking away a person's ability to choose between MQA and Non-MQA.

if we don't start with something better than how most albums are made now then we will always be getting less than the original performance. To me this is just another layer of "control over the music" that is less destructive than most other forms of "encoding".

I love tracking at 2496 as it sounds so smooth to me and more "real", but my old ears know that 24192 is better, but I just can hear it anymore...99% of the time I try. The math doesn't lie, but the converters must be pristine to hear it.

It is sad that SACD just really never caught on as the the masses could really care less about quality, so this will be fine for them and many others. I had always hoped for an affordable, portable SACD player, but it was just not to be. I have 4 home SACD players, but not enough new titles of what I would love to hear to make that matter anymore. I have to give BlueCoast credit for keeping the DSD dream alive. I do support HD Tracks, Linn Music, and eClassical often downloading 2496 files and burn then DVD-Rs.

Well done. I could quibble (e.g. whether unencoded MQA through what Mr. Stuart calls our "legacy DACs" is CD quality, if MQA is the DRM equivalent of HDCD, MQA's bandwidth savings, etc.) but consumers need to give credit to Mr. Atkinson's explicit recognition that MQA is not just another audio product.

Your mention of Net Neutrality is especially apt. However in some ways if MQA (or anything like it) were to ever become the standard format in audio, that would be even more of a limit to consumer choice than our now tiered and throttled (based on application/service) internet. At least in theory, we can always choose another ISP, another Telecom, etc.

Appreciate the balanced tone of this piece.

I've always wondered if MQA is working on technology that would deliver 16/44 quality at the same file/stream sizes seen in lossy applications. It seems like the mainstream streaming industry would welcome a way to deliver conventional lossless (maybe with the timing fixes) in the very small sizes of mp3 and aac.

Philip Bloom is a Professional Cinamatographer ( and an Englishman ) who reviews Pro level Cameras.

Jan. 6th, Philip Bloom published, on YouTube, his lengthy Review of the new EV Panasonic Camera.

This man reviews Cameras with the same level of competence that Alex Dykes reviews Cars.

I might suggest that our Tyll comes the closest to these highest levels of reviewing professionalism and competency, up there the air gets pretty thin.

Cameras have always been part of my Professional Life.

Tony in Michigan

..give me a decent digital equalizer and I can make any recording sound “better” than the original master; I could even do it just by looking at a spectrum analyzer without ever having to actually listen; now let me also alter the "original" and you'll never know what hit you in the first place while you keep fighting another man's little "format war".

Downloads.

I buy them. So they are mine. I can therefor do anything I want with them.

Sell them, give them away, copy them and then sell the original, anything I want.

On copying, the local state run library has a copier. I can copy pages from books, sections of books, and even entire books. If I don't know how to work the copier a member of the library staff will show me.

They also have CD you can borrow, just like books. So on exactly the same basis I can therefore take a CD home and rip it, then return it.

And in the UK your contract is with the seller, nobody else.

So if I buy a download from, say, HD tracks, only HD tracks might be able to sue me if I copy it and then sell it. Not the 'manufacturer' (which is presumably the record label) as I have no contract with them.

And in UK law it is a civil case, not a criminal one. And the only people, from the above UK law, who might try to sue me are HD tracks. But they won't succeed as I own the download, not them.

As for any 'terms and conditions' I might have agreed to before they transmitted the downloads, in the UK we can't sign our rights away even if we want to, so such agreements have no legal validity.

At many of the download sites, I think they only have one version of an album, the highest res one. When you order a lower res version, it converts on the fly to the format you ordered.

A big issue with MQA is that it totally screws up DSP as done by MiniDSP, Holm Acoustics, Classe, and other manufacturers. MQA can't be output to full-resolution digital, and DSP needs that to do its work best. Though audiophiles have been slow to adopt DSP, it seems to me that it is the future of good sound in many cases. MQA puts a knife into its back.

Thanks for sharing your opinion, with which I disagree. You can read numerous reviews of DSP systems in which respected professional reviewers report startling improvements. In my experience, improvements far outweigh any issues in most domestic rooms. If we all had ideal rooms, DSP would be far less valuable, though I think digital crossovers are the way to go.

But more to the point, the type of DSP I'm talking about is under control of the user, who can turn it off if he wants! The opposite is true of MQA, and a criticism that has been raised is that its DSP (yes, it is a form of DSP) does impose the same sound signature on everything.

On what? They weren't in the studio when the original was laid down so their so-called "improvement" means "to my personal preference" and nothing more. They don't have any reference for their "improvement".
And always remember magazines and commercial websites depend on 'keeping the pot boiling' with 'new things' for their very existence, and if they report negatively on them they won't be given free access to much new stuff.

"under control of the user". You mean you are going to switch it on or off or alter it for every piece of music you play? Very few people will do that which is precisely why it has not been widely taken up. We listen to music, we don't fiddle with switches and knobs, not even software ones.

I use the JRiver player software, which has very powerful DSP options, including Sox, and I have tried all of them. I can make some files sound more to my personal liking but I am always aware that I am deliberately selecting a 'falseness' so I have given up on them.

However, I agree on your MQA 'imposing' its signature on everything. I have been listening to it a lot lately and am not impressed. The differences are small but always a degradation over a 'straight' high-res file. MQA files can have a false 'livelyness' probably due to the 'aliasing' that MQA splatters over everything it touches.

Quote:

If an MQA file is played without MQA decoding, the sound quality will be that of the baseband file—ie, the same as a CD

John, can you cite the Telecommunications Union document ITU-R BS1116-3 standard listening tests, as you mentioned here https://www.stereophile.com/content/simple-everything-appears-simple
for the above claim, thanks.
If I recall, when Bruno Putzeys questioned Bob Stuart about such listening tests for MQA, he stated there were none.

Another month, another opinion piece shoving mqa down our throats. This is starting to sound like Trump's Twitter account around here. How predictable.

Don't know when to quit, do you?

Yeah, we get it. Your opinion is that it sounds good...and apparently, woe to those who don't agree. Opinions aren't worth the pixels they are typed on.

Meanwhile, consumers find two things suspicious:

1) Why is the audiophile press cramming this down our throats, so hard and so often?

2) Why does bob stuart or anyone from mqa go cowering any time their feet are held to the fire? (*cough* RMAF *cough*)

Those of us in consumerland smell a rat...well, a few of them. Maybe if the high-end press would back off for a change instead of being so obsessed and annoying about it, consumers might actually want to see what it is all about.

My system at home has been all digital for twenty years, but the best sound I ever heard in my life on a home system was a direct-to-disc all analog vinyl called "Dave Grusin discovered again". It was new about 35 years ago. The only time in my life that I thought the musicians were playing in my listening room, for real. You could hear the physicality of the wood that the piano was built with. I no longer have the LP. Don't know what happened to it, I guess I just lost it along the way somewhere in there with two divorces and everything else. Maybe pure perfect analog really can sound superior to digital. All I know is I've never heard anything like it since.

Quote:

"The record company will no longer be selling a clone of their hi-rez master. Instead, they are selling something that might well sound identical to the master, or even better than the master, but doesn't allow the master to be re-created."

You don't actually believe this, do you??

wow, so MQA is a time machine that can go back to the original recording session and improve THE ORIGINAL MASTERING OF THE RECORDING!!!!!!!