Will MQA drive hdtracks, acoustic sounds, and other hirez sites out of business?

caesar

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I would not anoint any winners or losers at this point.....including MQA.

i'm not for or against Andreas Koch; but we need some leading true digital experts independent of the MQA entity to bring light on the full-court-press MQA inertia.

only time and the marketplace will tell whether MQA ever becomes any more than a streamer's delivery tool. for media possessors will be make their experience better? I've not yet seen one case of that. and until that happens then it's got a narrow area of value.......at best.

I think I agree with you. But guys like "worthless to the audio fan" Harley and computer audiophile were marketing MQA 18-24 months ago, while these digital gurus have been silent...
And now that MQA has made it into Tidal, the damn may have broke... even if guys who record refuse to pay the fees, there is already so much MQA music to be consumed via streaming that the war may already be over, and Koch sounds like Baghdad Bob
 

Legolas

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The self interview by Andreas is set out and 'question' and 'answer'. It is set out as fact, as though his replies to himself is actual proven fact. I can spot holes and I am not a tech in this at all. For example, he is claiming many studios has recorded at 44.1 or have created master at 44.1 for CD release, and those are then used for high resolution releases. I am saying, how does hoe know the extent of that claim? He has a few known instances, no idea how widespread that is. I am saying, if all studios have a master tape, or more recently a digital master post studio performance, surely HD Tracks or MQA would in the first instance make an effort to use that copy.

And as Warner has signed, I would suggest they would put some effort to allow that access to the higher quality / resolution original. IUf not, they are shooting themselves in the foot and the whole project is dead in the water.

I have heard some MQA on Tital is is better than the Redbook version on Tidal or my local drive, and some that are no better. Non so far that are worse, though I am still testing / searching tracks. So there is something going on IMO that is right with MQA.

The other thing Andreas says is, why bother with MQA as we already have enough bandwidth? Well, I would say bandwidth costs money for the supplier (Tidal) and there user (Client). And the delay or potential hang-ups in the data (music stops) will be more of a problem if you get close to the average 10 meg limit (as he states is average). And of course, in the real world, in a house setting the rest of the family may use the enter net at the same time, or the person listing will maybe reading the news online.

So, I think Andreas argument is weak, too late (as already posted above) and IMO hr is rattled by his dev and investment in traditional high resolution formats.

Better to button up and suit up, get on with it and accept it.

The success of MQA is going to be dependant on the exposure level (Tidal signups a large part) and MQA compliant DACs. The failure of previous HD formats was lack of exposure and lack of mainstream DACs that could play those formats.

Having said that, if MQA gives folk a sound quality boost in non compliant DACs as well, which it appears to do IMO, that will help to keep the snowball rolling...
 

still-one

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I would not anoint any winners or losers at this point.....including MQA.

i'm not for or against Andreas Koch; but we need some leading true digital experts independent of the MQA entity to bring light on the full-court-press MQA inertia.

only time and the marketplace will tell whether MQA ever becomes any more than a streamer's delivery tool. for those with large file collections (like me) will it make their listening experience better....where file size does not matter? I've not yet seen one case of that. and until that happens then MQA's got a narrow area of value.......at best.

We don't need any experts to tell us whether MQA sounds better or not, our ears tell us. This is just another thread like the power cord thread. Experts tell us not to believe our ears. So much for "experts"!!

There are already over 2600 titles available on Tidal plus others for sale on a couple of other sites. The real flood of title will hit when the Universal catalog starts hitting the services.
 

FrantzM

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We don't need any experts to tell us whether MQA sounds better or not, our ears tell us. This is just another thread like the power cord thread. Experts tell us not to believe our ears. So much for "experts"!!

There are already over 2600 titles available on Tidal plus others for sale on a couple of other sites. The real flood of title will hit when the Universal catalog starts hitting the services.

still

What is your position regarding MQA? Very honest question.
 

audioguy

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Apr 20, 2010
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All of this begs the question: How many who think MQA sounds better would think so if they did not know they were listening to MQA? On this forum, I understand that this is probably a rhetorical question, but if this is more "marketing" than "technology", not knowing what you were listening to might help answer the question.
 

Yuri Korzunov

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All of this begs the question: How many who think MQA sounds better would think so if they did not know they were listening to MQA? On this forum, I understand that this is probably a rhetorical question, but if this is more "marketing" than "technology", not knowing what you were listening to might help answer the question.

For correct (as possibly) answer this question need sophisticated e?periment.
 

opus112

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The self interview by Andreas is set out and 'question' and 'answer'. It is set out as fact, as though his replies to himself is actual proven fact. I can spot holes and I am not a tech in this at all.

One glaring hole (which doesn't have much if any bearing on the arguments about MQA) is that he's claiming anti-aliasing filters for PCM necessarily introduce pre-ringing. Well that's completely wrong, they can be minimum phase with no pre-ringing at all. They will always ring but all the ringing can be arranged to be after the event.
 

Mike Lavigne

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You are quite mistaken. Bob has superb knowledge of signal processing and psychoacoustics. He is an AES Life Fellow, a title that is not easily given. Andreas doesn't have any of that.

I also read his article and it was hard to make much sense of what he is saying as he obviously has no inside knowledge. What is there is just sour grapes as I explain here.

Andreas has been a digital designer since the 80's when he was with Studer. I'm not debating tech awards, but I can say I dramatically prefer the products Andreas has done the digital design on, to anything Bob Stewart has done. hence the street cred rank from me.

and I'm not for or against MQA. but what it really is, and what it really is not.......has value to high end media consumers who already are heavily invested in high rez files and hardware to optimize it. there is a good pipeline of high rez sources and will MQA blunt that? is that a bad or good thing if it does? those questions are important and guys like Andreas can be helpful to bring the proper dialog for the right long term outcome.

and can MQA even compete head to head with what optimized HQ Player can do with a (non-MQA) streamed redbook file to optimize it to your dac of choice without any MQA-like hardware add on? I seriously doubt it.

and then there is the specter of.......MQA.1, MQA.2, MQA.3 (as, I'm sure, it's already planned).......and so on as we continually upgrade our hardware. (follow the money as always).

it will be interesting to watch what happens.
 
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Yuri Korzunov

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One glaring hole (which doesn't have much if any bearing on the arguments about MQA) is that he's claiming anti-aliasing filters for PCM necessarily introduce pre-ringing. Well that's completely wrong, they can be minimum phase with no pre-ringing at all. They will always ring but all the ringing can be arranged to be after the event.

Minimal phase filter have 2 times more energy in post ringing. So total energy of ringing is approximatelly constant.

So for ringing minimization may be applied "lazy" filter, as done in MQA, as far as I know.
 

caesar

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Andreas has been a digital designer since the 80's when he was with Studer. I'm not debating tech awards, but I can say I dramatically prefer the products Andreas has done the digital design on, to anything Bob Stewart has done. hence the street cred rank from me.

....

Interesting how the world works - and personal tastes work. I think Meridian may be the most under-rated DAC. I have never heard Meridian sound bad... Yet they have no buzz online. Maybe I don't go to enough sites, but the brand may as well be dead
 

caesar

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Gentlemen, are those who have DSD DACs that convert all PCM to DSD (Playback Designs, EMM, PS Audio Direct, etc.) out of luck when it comes to MQA? Is the MQA file downloaded and uncompressed and then converted to DSD? Seems like a lot of gymnastics. Is there a point to doing this?
 

amirm

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Gentlemen, are those who have DSD DACs that convert all PCM to DSD (Playback Designs, EMM, PS Audio Direct, etc.) out of luck when it comes to MQA? Is the MQA file downloaded and uncompressed and then converted to DSD? Seems like a lot of gymnastics. Is there a point to doing this?
MQA is a PCM system throughout so I suspect all the content they go after has been PCM. As to the DAC, it can have any design it wants. It is certainly "legal" to convert PCM to sigma-delta stream and convert to analog that way. If it is a good DAC, it is a good DAC. Whether it relies on that technique or not doesn't matter. MQA will succeed in extending the bandwidth above 22.05 Khz limit of CD. And increase its bit depth.

If that DAC doesn't perform well with PCM at all, it is not a DAC that I would buy but sure, that might be an issue.

Ultimately the point would be whether we can hear/need more bit depth/wider bandwidth when streaming content. If we do, the MQA seems to fit that bill in absence of any other technology that can do it.
 

amirm

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Andreas has been a digital designer since the 80's when he was with Studer. I'm not debating tech awards, but I can say I dramatically prefer the products Andreas has done the digital design on, to anything Bob Stewart has done. hence the street cred rank from me.
I know his background well. His article though is not an engineering or design one. It has two components: market realities and theoretical benefits of a signal processing algorithm. You can be the world's best electronic designer but have no clue in either one. I can build a blu-ray player for example without having any idea whatsoever how content is compressed.

If we were talking about his DAC versus one that Bob had designed, maybe you could make that point. But in this context it is inappropriate. Bob walks all over him on both of those factors above. He fought his way through the massive politics of DVD forum to get his MLP codec adopted for DVD-A and then cleverly got Dolby to license it and make it their own in the form of TrueHD lossless audio codec for Blu-ray. He got there by convincing the content companies they must have it and they in turn put pressure on the forum for adoption.

On the technical side, he knows his signal processing and has done his homework in MQA. By for example profiling what is in ultrasonic range of music which tends to either be just noise or very low level musical content, he figured out that it can be represented with far fewer bits and thereby saving ton of bandwidth.

I am personally apathetic on MQA. I have done one comparison and didn't do much for me so it is not something I like to defend. If you are into high-end DACs though, I think the pressure is already on to get the feature into the codec. The royalties that they have to pay for it pales compared to MSRP of these products. After all if mass market products pay for Dolby TrueHD, surely these guys can afford to pay too. Is it fair and good? I don't know but seems to be the cost of doing business. If a year or two goes by and you don't have this feature in your DAC, it is going to cost you business.
 

rbbert

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Paul 'McGowan and Ted Smith have posted several times in the PS Audio forums about the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of incorporating the MQA algorithms into the FGPA of the Direct Steam DAC's. Offering partial software unfolding in the Bridge may be as far as that can go.

And that is really illustrative of the bigger question; can other digital designers accomplish what MQA does by other means, not requiring an end to end system?
 

amirm

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It is not possible unfortunately. Once you truncate the bit depth and sample rate in encoding for CD, nothing can restore it. It is a one way function that eliminates whatever was there. Many times there is nothing useful there so no harm done. But if there is something, conversion to CD format gets rid of it for good.

MQA restores that portion albeit using a lossy algorithm. And that process requires knowledge of the original high-resolution source so it must be end to end. Ditto for the conjugate filter they use.

DAC companies should use this as an opportunity to sell all new hardware than how to retrofit the old. That should put a smile on their face if they think about it. :)
 

Mike Lavigne

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Paul 'McGowan and Ted Smith have posted several times in the PS Audio forums about the difficulty, or perhaps impossibility, of incorporating the MQA algorithms into the FGPA of the Direct Steam DAC's. Offering partial software unfolding in the Bridge may be as far as that can go.

And that is really illustrative of the bigger question; can other digital designers accomplish what MQA does by other means, not requiring an end to end system?

can they?....they already did. HQ Player.

give me a native file, or a mic feed, and let the 2 processes do battle. HQ Player gets to use the highest resolutions of digital out there both pcm and dsd. MQA....not so much. and no special hardware required for HQP other than a top level server environment to be optimized. and no fees....except nominal to start.

now as an efficient streaming product maybe MQA has some advantages. but maybe not then either...a closer call.
 
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BruceD

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I have never heard Meridian sound bad... Yet they have no buzz online. Maybe I don't go to enough sites, but the brand may as well be dead

I have-- the Heathhrow Penta UK show ground floor Meridian Demo suite full house Digital system--source to Speakers-- how the designers could go so over board for a "Digititus Horrendous sound" I've never been able to figure since.

Digital fatigue after a couple of minutes--my ears had to leave--me too of course !

Never on my watch:(

BruceD
 

Mike Lavigne

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I have-- the Heathhrow Penta UK show ground floor Meridian Demo suite full house Digital system--source to Speakers-- how the designers could go so over board for a "Digititus Horrendous sound" I've never been able to figure since.

Digital fatigue after a couple of minutes--my ears had to leave--me too of course !

Never on my watch:(

BruceD

well, I'm no Meridian fan (although my first 'high end' gear in 1994 was the 'nice' 500/563 trans/dac) at all, and agree on the dull/one dimentional sound of a full Meridian suite. but you have to realize that as elegant as the spendy Meridian speakers look, they really suck. so the electronics, particularly the dacs and digital players are decent to good if used in a good system. was it the dacs in the speakers? the amps in the speakers? or just bad design? who could ever tell?

Meridian embraced PCM's nasty's and was never aware or would admit they needed fixing. until now; when they suddenly got religion seeing the cash at the end of the rainbow. of course; with those speakers, how could they ever know which end is up.
 
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