Anyone heard about Meridian's new project called MQA

[TBone]

BTW, that's vinyl limitations, not capabilities. Which in its current state seems just a tad below digital but it's pretty close and neither are very impressive. That is, unless one didn't know what they were talking about. Perhaps a bit like yourself?

But you, being a smart feller, realize that one needs to also look at an objects potential as well as its actual.

is your speculative knowledge of vinyl replay just as speculative as your "knowledge" of MP3, and everything else you've spouted here as fact. (notice no question mark)

 

[esldude]

And why would a feller not assume Tbone referred to a prime cut of steak?

 

[stehno]

And why would a feller not assume Tbone referred to a prime cut of steak?

Or maybe a pork chop?

 

[stehno]

is your speculative knowledge of vinyl replay just as speculative as your "knowledge" of MP3, and everything else you've spouted here as fact. (notice no question mark)

Why do you speculate that I speculate? Did I ever claim to have knowledge of MP3, except to say that the volume of music info you're hearing at your speaker's output (whether analog or digital) is probably not much more than the entire contents of the music info embedded in a "well-engineered" MP3? Are you implying that I'm wrong or way off base with that claim?

Hey, wait a minute. Didn't you promise to turn in your "audiophile" credentials if you were only hearing roughly the total music info contents of an MP3 track?

When I said it's impossible for Stuart's MQA format to achieve the performance levels he or Harley claim or when I said Stuart was barking up the wrong technology tree if he thinks he can achieve his claimed levels of performance, did that sound like speculation or some SWAG to you?

Anyway, surely you're not implying it’s impossible for another or even one (like me) to achieve playback levels of musicality you or others cannot? Isn’t that arrogant and/or closed minded?

BTW, I can prove right here right now that you know very little of what you speak from a performance perspective. No tricks. Ready? Here goes....

You still have in your possession your "audiophile" credentials, right?

All too easy.

 

[Orb]

You want me to respect Bruno whom I do not know? I can do that. It's usually the ones I do know or those whom I may know something about that I struggle with the respect thing.

But along that same respect vein, just because somebody has a certain level of correct intellect about a given technology, by no means does that imply that ultimately they know what they are doing or talking about. Especially if they start to stray from the core of their area of expertise. Let's say there's a well-respected amplifier designer who routinely produces a superior amplifier. What happens all too often with this "respect" thing is that since he's somewhat of an expert at designing amplifiers, instantly he's well-respected for being an expert when he tries his luck at designing a line conditioner, even if his line conditioner is a POS. IOW, we should always be on guard and apprehensive when even well-respected people speak.

You speak of this unnatural aspect of filter implementations not being perfect, causing timing-phase-ripple/ringing, etc. I may or may not agree with that but I get that. My question to you is, are these unnatural aspects discovered by listening to output or by viewing readouts?

Bruno is also exceptional at digital designs, not just for his UcD amp design.
Well I quoted Grimm Audio (has some very well respected engineers and not just Bruno Putzeys) regarding that answers your second question, but not sure who else you would want to answer that in the industry *shrug*.
I do say there is an issue with filter implementations because people have a preference between minimum or linear phase usually more so than steep brickwall (this is especially true when talking about CD), but you also keep missing the other important aspect of MQA and that is the music industry is not consistent in how it applies upsampling/downsampling and files for distribution (this would also apply to CD and not just hirez or streaming), it is interesting where those are messed up the reviewers sound quality rating drops and correlates to Hi-fi News measurements of the hirez (which the reviewer does not know).

But as Amir says, this solution is not something to lose sleep over or get over excited about from a sceptical or supportive POV; the concept is something that is interesting and exciting because who knows maybe the music industry as a whole (not just the very small knowledgeable niche segments) will eventually get its act together (same way they moving mostly to using dither/dynamic range-head and footroom/etc correctly)
Cheers
Orb

 

[stehno]

Bruno is also exceptional at digital designs, not just for his UcD amp design.
Well I quoted Grimm Audio (has some very well respected engineers and not just Bruno Putzeys) regarding that answers your second question, but not sure who else you would want to answer that in the industry *shrug*.
I do say there is an issue with filter implementations because people have a preference between minimum or linear phase usually more so than steep brickwall (this is especially true when talking about CD), but you also keep missing the other important aspect of MQA and that is the music industry is not consistent in how it applies upsampling/downsampling and files for distribution (this would also apply to CD and not just hirez or streaming), it is interesting where those are messed up the reviewers sound quality rating drops and correlates to Hi-fi News measurements of the hirez (which the reviewer does not know).

But as Amir says, this solution is not something to lose sleep over or get over excited about from a sceptical or supportive POV; the concept is something that is interesting and exciting because who knows maybe the music industry as a whole (not just the very small knowledgeable niche segments) will eventually get its act together (same way they moving mostly to using dither/dynamic range-head and footroom/etc correctly)
Cheers
Orb

Thanks, Orb.

I'm curious. Have you ever auditioned or heard any of Bruno's designs?

I appreciate your other points though I may not agree (right off) with some of them. Sure, there's always opportunity for industries to mature, clean up their act, improve performance, etc.
But for there to be opportunity to improve performance, there must exist opportunity to degrade performance.

However, in the case of MQA, there is a dramatic push to get it out and it's not just Stuart doing the pushing. Stuart makes it crystal clear he did this (MQA) for performance reasons. Sure there may well be some ancillary benefits e.g. reduced format inventories, increased download speeds, less storage requirements, etc.

But what if, .... , what if Stuart's performance claims are full of soap bubbles? If all the consumers outside of high-end audio buy into the soap bubble performance claims and realize some of these ancillary benefits, do you think they really care about the performance in the end? If MQA gets out there and everybody but the small cottage high-end audio industry believes MQA is superior, but the small cottage high-end sector knew for a fact that MQA degraded performance (worst case), guess what?

Do you think for one second any of the money makers will care what the few in the high-end audio sector care about performance?

Remember, in the end it doesn't matter how much somebody loves analog or digital or how much somebody claims to love music, or whether some tiny industry is upset about poor performance. In the end it's all about power and making money or keeping a gravy train going so certain mfg'ers, distributors, dealers, publishers, and reviewers don't have to downgrade their lifestyles. And I'd guess that since high-end audio has been dying a slow death for 15 years or more, the powers that be are ready to latch onto anything to keep the boat afloat.

Shoot, I wouldn't put it past the powers that be if they actually were to conspire to create a false flag operation that induces a false excitement and some new blood into a dying corpse. Governments do it routinely. Wars are even created to save economies. Industries do too and its done under the guise of creative marketing.

With all the potential oddities of MQA and what appear to be very controlled demonstrations, why shouldn't I use my imagination a bit and think it's entirely possible industry leaders approached Bob to tell him about his lifelong passion to fix a problem?

Remember the new-age marketing guru Tony Robbins? Apparently, marketing types took an absolute nobody and made him into some self-improvement guru and that was 30 years ago. And to this day, he still has his followers.

I find this potential to be far more palatable than the performance claims being made about MQA.

After all, this is the 21st century and people are more clever than ever while also being at their lowest levels of morals and ethics. Already some say we live in an age of lawlessness.

 

[MylesBAstor]

BTW, that's vinyl limitations, not capabilities. Which in its current state seems just a tad below digital but it's pretty close and neither are very impressive. That is, unless one didn't know what they were talking about. Perhaps a bit like yourself?

But you, being a smart feller, realize that one needs to also look at an objects potential as well as its actual.

Perhaps first you can answer T-bone's question about vinyl and then mine which is to tell us about the master or second generation tape vs. LP or digital copy comparisons you carried out of the same recording under what conditions and with what equipment. I assume you did your homework.

I'm also curious why you list yourself as a manufacturer on another audio site but not on WBF? Sure seems like you are pushing something you represent.

 

[JonFo]

All this bashing of one of the paragons of modern audio is getting really tiresome. Bob Stuart, along with Gerzon and Craven, have contributed huge advances to the state of the art in audio.

Every time you listen to a movie in Dolby TrueHD or to a DVD-Audio disc, you hear innovations Bob brought to the table (MLP). And those of us lucky enough to have owned Meridian gear have enjoyed start of the art digital (in their respective generations) and useful soundfield management (Trifield).

As for MQA, I believe it is indeed addressing an issue that has the potential to result in superior in-home reproduction, and to me that is the temporal smearing of the recording / reproduction chain. If that can be minimized, then hurray. I for one will be obtaining and MQA-capable source to see for myself, as I find all the science behind this quite solid.

For those that are bothered by the lack of before/after comparisons, well, real soon now you can run your own tests at home. A Meridian Explorer is a couple hundred bucks.

But the best test would be to trot down to a Meridian dealer and use a full Meridian Digital system where the final MQA step happens in the speaker DAC's. Then use the same recording, one MQA processed and the other not to hear the differences. Hopefully the room is acoustically good enough to not mask anything.

 

[TBone]

Why do you speculate that I speculate?

I'm NOT speculating! Let's examine some facts, you joined AA 2001, yet you've never posted to VA. That's a 14yr span of silence, yet suddenly, you're an eggspert. When I ask you about this, you claimed...

"Oh, last time I listened to vinyl was 3 years ago at a distributor's home on his $300k showroom system and about $250k spent on his gaudy room. This distributor routinely get's write ups from reviewers visiting singing his praises and talking about this level of performance is only attainable by spending this level of money. Frankly, it sounded like crap but he was mighty proud of the sound as I'm sure you would be too. Whereas I'm too embarrassed to even say I was there."

Well, something gives me the impression the distributor was just as embarrassed, to admit YOU were there.

You contradict yourself constantly; ie: you continually mention money as being a non factor in performance, yet you use a "$300k system" as your singular trump card.

Did I ever claim to have knowledge of MP3, except to say that the volume of music info you're hearing at your speaker's output (whether analog or digital) is probably not much more than the entire contents of the music info embedded in a "well-engineered" MP3? Are you implying that I'm wrong or way off base with that claim?

Actually, you claimed this:

"What nobody seems get or at least admit to, is that listening to even the most well-engineered high-rez recording on a well-thought-out $1million SOTA-level playback system, the listener is not audibly hearing anything more than roughly the equivalent music info capacity of a well-engineered MP3 recording."

Since we don't "get" it, and you apparently do; then why were you corrected using common knowledge available free to anyone over the net. Obviously you had no idea what you were talking about concerning MP3, so why should anyone believe your "knowledge" in regard to other formats?

When I said it's impossible for Stuart's MQA format to achieve the performance levels he or Harley claim or when I said Stuart was barking up the wrong technology tree if he thinks he can achieve his claimed levels of performance, did that sound like speculation or some SWAG to you?

You inferred B.Stuart with potential charlatan behavior, by continually twisting reviewers claims to suit your obvious agenda, and at no point here or anywhere else have you added anything of actual substance.

Anyway, surely you're not implying it’s impossible for another or even one (like me) to achieve playback levels of musicality you or others cannot? Isn’t that arrogant and/or closed minded?

Why do you continually twist words, because I've NEVER implied anything like that. Remember it was you who called my system "rinky dink", and it was you who referred to my VA buddies as ...

Maybe you can get one one of your latex, er vinyl buddies to explain it to you."

(sigh)

I can prove right here right now that you know very little of what you speak from a performance perspective.

You can "prove" a lot of things using lies & speculation, perhaps you should try using facts.

BTW, TBone is actually TB1, I'll let you speculate what protein that may, or may not, refer ...

I'll try to refrain from answering any dribble you'll post in response, I'm certain it will be more nonsensical bs. The floor is yours ...

 

[Fitzcaraldo215]

Here is the problem with your bolded statement: Stuart called digital musical recording an unnatural act because music is analog in nature-it's not digital. Analog may and does have its warts, but at the end of the day, it's analog. It used to be against the law in many countries (and still is in many countries) to commit an unnatural act and if we still had archaic laws on our books in the U.S., everyone who converted analog to digital would be serving time in jail where they would be further subjected to other acts that could be considered unnatural by those who stand in judgment of such things. It's a complicated time in a complicated world, but analog is analog and music is analog in nature.

Well, Stuart is not here to explain what he actually meant by "unnatural act". I think he was using the term metaphorically. Yes, digital signal is not continuous like analog signal. The digital process is also more complex, more abstract, newer, not as fully mature, and not as intuitive or well understood by laypeople as opposed to analog. So, in a sense, it is a technological wonder that digital can record and reproduce music at all, even forgetting about MQA. That is what I think Stuart meant.

But, I have heard the same remark about analog vinyl reproduction: that it is a wonder that a little rock being dragged through a canyon of plastic can reproduce music at all.

But, let's just focus on what is "natural" and what is not. Yes, continuous sound pressure waves in air are natural. Don't know what your dictionary says about "natural", but in mine anything that is a man-made, technological and industrial process, like analog recording is not natural since it does not occur in nature. Microphones, tape machines, tape head bias current, record cutting heads and lathes, record stamping machines, inverse and normal RIAA curves, etc., etc., etc. do not occur in nature, therefore they are not "natural" any more than digital recording and playback is. That is all I was saying.

Just because analog recording has been around for a little over a century and even though it existed at our birth, there were many millennia of human existence before that where it was not to be found anywhere on the planet. It did not grow on trees. It had to be invented, engineered and developed by us humans. Hence, all recording, analog or digital, is unnatural.

 

[Tony Lauck]

A The only noise floor I've ever cared about the one generated by my playback system.

You have demonstrated a lack of perspective by this statement. A good working knowledge of audio requires familiarity with both the recording process and the playback process.

With all formats and media there are tradeoffs between what can be done in the recording side and what can be done in the playback side. For example, with magnetic tape, the noise floor depends on the level at which the tape is recorded, the media and speed, etc., plus the noise pickup of the playback head and playback amplifier. The distortion level depends on the level at which the tape is recorded. In addition, the musical dynamics depend (a bit) on the level at which the tape is recorded because of compression as the tape reaches saturation (running out of magnetic domains to flip). In addition, the audibility of the noise depends on frequency response and equalization issues.

One of the differences in tradeoffs between analog recording and digital recording is that the noise floor on playback remains limited when playing back analog media, but the noise floor on digital playback is governed by no such limit, being limited only by available electrical power and cost factors rather than fundamental physics. Considering noise to be a distortion, one will hear slightly different distortion each time an analog recording is played back, but this effect is much less prevalent when playing back digital, unless one has deliberately raised the noise floor of the playback chain for some reason. (I suspect, but have never seen proven, that this lack of variation makes it easier for listeners to pick up on digital distortion.)

 

[Tony Lauck]

All this bashing of one of the paragons of modern audio is getting really tiresome. Bob Stuart, along with Gerzon and Craven, have contributed huge advances to the state of the art in audio.

Every time you listen to a movie in Dolby TrueHD or to a DVD-Audio disc, you hear innovations Bob brought to the table (MLP). And those of us lucky enough to have owned Meridian gear have enjoyed start of the art digital (in their respective generations) and useful soundfield management (Trifield).

As for MQA, I believe it is indeed addressing an issue that has the potential to result in superior in-home reproduction, and to me that is the temporal smearing of the recording / reproduction chain. If that can be minimized, then hurray. I for one will be obtaining and MQA-capable source to see for myself, as I find all the science behind this quite solid.

For those that are bothered by the lack of before/after comparisons, well, real soon now you can run your own tests at home. A Meridian Explorer is a couple hundred bucks.

But the best test would be to trot down to a Meridian dealer and use a full Meridian Digital system where the final MQA step happens in the speaker DAC's. Then use the same recording, one MQA processed and the other not to hear the differences. Hopefully the room is acoustically good enough to not mask anything.

How is MLP different in any significant way than WMA lossless, Applelossless or FLAC? As far as I can tell, the main thing about MLP is that it is proprietary.

I assume MLP uses the same general techniques as other lossless compression algorithms use, namely preprocessing, linear prediction, generation of a correction signal to reflect the errors in prediction, followed by traditional data compression algorithms on the error signal. This technology was developed well before digital music by people working on digital transmission of voice. (The ideas were known at least as early as 1970.)

Note links to the FLAC spec and a 1970 IEEE paper. In the earlier version of the post these links were present, but on my browser hard to see.

 

[amirm]

Posts edited. Guys, do not get personal. Stay on topic. There is no reason to get emotional over a topic like this.

 

[stehno]

Mod: Post deleted. Next action will be formal. This is not how we conduct ourselves on WBF. Please discuss the topic and not get personal.

 

[TBone]

beware the endless loop ...
http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?16281-Anyone-heard-about-Meridian-s-new-project-called-MQA&p=323429&viewfull=1#post323429

 

[stehno]

beware the endless loop ...

sippi. I'm right again. As usual.

 

[TBone]

sippi. I'm right again. As usual.

yep, guys "like" you are always right, dog gone it ...

 

[Kees de Visser]

Attempts to improve ADC filters was already done in 1986 by Apogee.

These could be installed in several multitrack recorder brands. To me it makes sense to apply the correction as early as possible in the chain. Especially in modern music production where many (different) ADC signals (and even sample rates) are mixed to each final track (2, 5 or more). I can't see how MQA correction can be effective after different ADCs were combined to a (stereo) mix.

 

[JonFo]

One of the best analogies for what MQA does with the characterization of the ADC of the recording process is to think about this as the audio equivalent of what happens in modern digital photography, where the optics of a camera have inevitable issues like chromatic aberrations or other optical distortions. These can be reliably characterized by the manufacturer and an 'anti-aberration' correction can be calculated and loaded in the camera systems DSP processor. That way, when a picture is taken, the aberrations can be reversed before the image is stored on the CF card.

Likewise, MQA can propagate whatever 'characterization' profile is necessary to model the recording system and have the playback end use that for correction during playback.

Now, I think your question about whether this characterization is limited to just a single ADC or the entire chain is a valid question. I'd like to know that as well. In the analogy I used, the correction models the entire optical path, even if it involves multiple lens elements, so I wonder if it's possible to model an entire recording chain.

 

[amirm]

One of the best analogies for what MQA does with the characterization of the ADC of the recording process is to think about this as the audio equivalent of what happens in modern digital photography, where the optics of a camera have inevitable issues like chromatic aberrations or other optical distortions. These can be reliably characterized by the manufacturer and an 'anti-aberration' correction can be calculated and loaded in the camera systems DSP processor. That way, when a picture is taken, the aberrations can be reversed before the image is stored on the CF card.

Likewise, MQA can propagate whatever 'characterization' profile is necessary to model the recording system and have the playback end use that for correction during playback.

Very good analogy. If there results are one tenth as good as it is in photography, it would be a major advancement. I worry that it won't be though.

Now, I think your question about whether this characterization is limited to just a single ADC or the entire chain is a valid question. I'd like to know that as well. In the analogy I used, the correction models the entire optical path, even if it involves multiple lens elements, so I wonder if it's possible to model an entire recording chain.

Going back to your analogy, knowing the lens and its focal length, allows one to make the correction irrespective of anything else in the chain. By the same token, they just want to know which A/D converter was used and make the correction based on that. THey are not attempting to correct for anything else in the upstream chain (there is also correction for the DAC in the player).