Is MQA good enough to get Analog Guys to enjoy it? Or still cause Digital Fatigue?

[Al M.]

It is fascinating we are all still trying to extract the best out of digital audio 25 years on, when at the start of it we were told it was 'perfect' and the answer to all our dreams....

Sure, the 'perfect sound forever' thingy was premature. However, after 35 years I now feel that digital is starting to live up to its promise far beyond what we could have hoped after the first painful decade. It seems to me more and more that digital theory, in particular the Nyquist theorem about sampling rate, was right all along -- there was so much potential in that lowly CD from the start, and we are now just figuring out how much incredible detail information, sheer musical resolution, is buried in those pits.

 

[Yuri Korzunov]

Let me show the analogy from food world.

In my opinion, digital sound (and "dry/dull monitor sound" - sorry, may be I wrongly use English terms) like to taste of usual "natural products" (like banana, apple, cherry and other).
Vinyl sound like to "artifical tastes" (banana, apple, cherry, etc.) like in candies. Because vinyl has more "nice" distortions.

"Artifical taste" may be more bright.

But if you return to "natural product", may be you won't return to "candies".

Howerer, here no single right answer.

 

[spiritofmusic]

Al, at least part of my evolution is like you, in that I've maintained devotion to the "lowly" LOL all in one cdp, evolving from the Roksan Attessa, thru the Marantz SA1, the Emm Labs CDSA w SE upgrade, to my current spinner the Eera Tentation (fave cdp of JackD201, and real giant killer in digital)
This journey has got me to a point where I truly enjoy digital as a naturally vinyl orientated listener, and never not feel "in the moment"
But I have to say my exposure to the SGM, and the extra vibe, naturalness and lack of artifacts presented at 512 w HQP is the only digital presentation that for the first time leaves me unconflicted about my future listening and esp exploring/discovering being 100% digital

 

[EuroDriver]

I was under the impression (which I recently read on the Internet somewhere, no personal experience or testing) that no R2R DAC chip exists that does better than 21-22 bit performance, so I don't see how this RTR DAC has 32 bit performance. Or do you mean it processes the data at 32/352.8 (which is nothing special nowadays)?

The Aqua Formula has 4 units of 24 bit R2R ladders. For the Aqua DAC we find good sonic results with HQ Player set to 32 bits which is beyond the RTR ladders bit depth. However, there is more variation going on than just bit depth changes occurring in HQ Player as one varies the bit depth depth settings

 

[EuroDriver]

Hi, EuroDriver, please forgive me for correcting a few things. I dislike assuming for myself the role of accuracy police. I do so only for the sake of any newcomers who might be reading the thread.

Sample & Hold operation is something apart from the mechanism which produces the repeating ultrasonic image bands. The image bands manifest out of the DAC's sharply slewing discretely stepped analog output. These bands are produced whether or not the DAC holds it's present output level before moving to the next level (sample & hold operation. Also known as, zero-order hold). The DAC's output could just as well return to zero immediately after each sample rather than hold (wait) at each current level. All that upsampling interpolation does is suppress the undesired image bands.

The consequence of sample & hold operation is that it overlays a low pass shaped frequency response mask which softly rolls off the high treble. Most audio DACs are S&H based and require that the inherent treble roll off be equalized to obtain a flat overall response.

Hi Ken,

Thank you for brining these points about sample and hold in to this conversation. Indeed it was Jussi Laako's dissatisfaction with the sonics of sample and hold that started his DSP journey to deliver better sound 19 years ago

Cheers

Ed

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Some in the audio industry claim that vinyl has much higher resolution especially in the crucial midrange. It reminds me of film v digital in cameras. Film has a higher range / tolerance in the highlights and shadow, and can retain more detail. Software can extract as much as there is in the dats, but there is a cliff where there will be nothing, no detail, and in film it can go beyond that in many cases. The problem is it also has grain, just like vinyl has a higher level of background noise. However, it has also been suggested by some audio reviewers that a certain level of background noise in the music (to our ears) can help the perceived amount of detail our ears can take in.

I am quoting from others in the industry here, and have no idea if this is all true, but I have used film in pro cameras for years, and lately big digital backs, and even though digital has equaled, maybe surpassed film in many areas, IMO it hasn't beaten it in all areas. Quite possibly digital audio is the same? And the things vinyl does well still sounds more attractive to the human ear.

It is fascinating we are all still trying to extract the best out of digital audio 25 years on, when at the start of it we were told it was 'perfect' and the answer to all our dreams....

there is a huge difference between digital in audio and the visual which renders the analogy mute; there has been no compelling reason to develop sufficiently high resolution digital audio to compete with analog either vinyl or tape. OTOH with video/still photography etc, etc. you have a universe of development in all sorts of video and image sensors and related efforts. whether it's the movie industry, NASA, astronomy, or whatever.....there are no restrictions on those efforts at all. huge dollars are poured into it.

digital audio development? no one (with investment dollars) gives a sh*t. you have semi-DIY'ers or the Bob Stewarts of the world delving a little. but that's about it.

follow the dollars.

unless someone finds the pot of dollars at the end of an investment in pushing digital audio further.......get use to it being where it's at. which is far short of the best of analog. and analog got where it's at by big business investing development dollars in the mid 19th century that pushed it forward to a high level. digital got started and then it's come to a relative halt only a little past the starting gate. since there were not enough dollars to keep pushing it. and these days the music industry does not generate the throughput of dollars to push change. the marketplace is not asking for it.

our desires in this forum are like flies on an elephant's ass as far as motivating investments in digital audio that would push the envelope.

the one possibility to push digital audio development could come from the whole video gaming direction. there are people with dollars working on competition in that arena. but that's about it.

and btw; I love digital audio and listen to it for hours daily. it's very good and I'm happy with it. but it's not analog.

and I do enjoy my Canon 5DSr 55 megapixel camera.

 

[microstrip]

there is a huge difference between digital in audio and the visual which renders the analogy mute(...) [
/QUOTE]

I will emphasis your point - sound reproduction in high-end audio conditions is such a specific matter that analogies with visual, wine, cars or luxury do not apply and are usually misleading.

Sound reproduction at the subjective perspective must me debated as exchange of opinions, not as proves. The conditions to debate it as prove are so extreme that no one has done it at the high-end level. I only write so many IMHO in my posts because a few people who pretend to make science or use pseudo-science to support their opinions became nervous each time they read something like what seems as an affirmation that contends with their beliefs, but in the end was just an opinion confronting their opinion ... All IMHO, YMMV!

 

[microstrip]

Hi Ken,

Thank you for brining these points about sample and hold in to this conversation. Indeed it was Jussi Laako's dissatisfaction with the sonics of sample and hold that started his DSP journey to deliver better sound 19 years ago

Cheers

Ed

Ed,
As far as I remember oversampling appeared in the consumer audio as a way to improve DAC resolution - philips dac's had 14 bit and in order to overcome it used the DAC at 4 times oversampling. Soon other manufacturers followed with oversampling ah higher resolutions - 16 and 18 bits, mostly to lighten the specification of the anti-aliasing filters and improve resolution. It seems to me that what you are calling the sonics of sample and hold is just a nice name for steep filtering with a cut at close to half the sampling rate. Or are you addressing any other effect?

 

[spiritofmusic]

Mike, I look at the care and enthusiasm put into classic film restoration on Blu Ray.
Directors, DPs, studios, technical teams, all putting serious hours, sweat and tears, into absolutely brilliant remasterings
The truly stellar results on eg Blade Runner, Godfather, Lawrence Of Arabia, etc etc, on Blu Ray are things to behold
Tarantino, Scorsese, Nolan spending serious amounts of their own cash investing in 70mm film stock
And what do we have in the music industry? Hot mastering and brick walling, X Factor, I Tunes
Just no pride in the medium from the people that matter
Thank **** that a silk purse is being made out of what could have been a sow's ear in being able to get past brutal 80s digital sound to where we are today w SGM etc
There was me thinking that SACD was going to be the audio industry's equivalent to Blu Ray goodness

 

[Al M.]

and btw; I love digital audio and listen to it for hours daily. it's very good and I'm happy with it. but it's not analog.

Of course it's not analog. It never will be. The more essential question seems to be, how audibly transparent is it to the direct mike feed?

(The same question can be asked of analog, of course.)

 

[Legolas]

there is a huge difference between digital in audio and the visual which renders the analogy mute;

Fair enough. My point is not so much the finance aspect, it is the 'apparent' higher resolution of vinyl than digital even at this late stage. Another way to look at it is IMO the mass access of MQA may have a positive effect to more casual audio users. And that access and awareness that there is something better than AAC on iTunes could drive things forward. The iTunes growth IMO has severely damaged the quality of audio, as if it was a like for like replacement for CD or Vinyl or even cassette. And the format residing on computers positively encouraged pirating to a degree never seen before. The music industry reacted at first with iron fist format encryption but that seems to have not have had the effect they wanted. I think finally they have realised the bucket is leaking, no way to fix it, so best to try and offer something better than before (better than overpriced iTunes and price hiked CD realises) and grab the fees they can from legitimate streaming services.

A family can have a Tidal account, with AAC or MPEG for the kids and Redbook or higher for the audiophile in the family, that will drive the market forward IMO. Other high res outlets are too niche to make any serious change of direction in the music business.

 

[Ken Newton]

...in particular the Nyquist theorem about sampling rate, was right all along.

I think this is still an intriguingly open question. One that is particularly relevant to audio.

It is not enough that the signal be band limited in order to provide perfect reproduction. There's another interesting stipulation within the sampling theorem. The theorem contains a summation expression which runs from negative infinity to positive infinity. Which means that, yes, the signal can be perfectly reconstructed, so long as, not only does the signal continue forever and has always existed, but has been sampled during all of that time! Obviously, this stipulation cannot be met. All signals are transient to some degree, especially music signals.

While the resulting reconstruction of transient signals is mathematically imperfect, that imperfection represents a negligible error in many applications, and, therefore, is commonly ignored even when, perhaps, it shoudn't be. The transient error increase inversely to the transient's duration. The shorter the duration, the greater the reconstruction error. The reconstruction error manifests as a spreading or smearing of the transient's duration. Thought of another way, an transient signal's reproduction can be essentially perfect in the frequency-domain, and yet be relatively imperfect in the time-domain. That effect is what MQA is focused on minimizing.

 

[Al M.]

I think this is still an intriguingly open question. One that is particularly relevant to audio.

It is not enough that the signal be band limited in order to provide perfect reproduction. There's another interesting stipulation within the sampling theorem. The theorem contains a summation expression which runs from negative infinity to positive infinity. Which means that, yes, the signal can be perfectly reconstructed, so long as, not only does the signal continue forever and has always existed, but has been sampled during all of that time! Obviously, this stipulation cannot be met. All signals are transient to some degree, especially music signals.

This is an interesting interpretation that I haven't read elsewhere and which seems rather unorthodox, but I may be mistaken. Do you have references for that?

 

[rbbert]

It seems to me that that is also what higher resolution digital formats in general, whether PCM or DSD, are trying to minimize?

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Fair enough. My point is not so much the finance aspect, it is the 'apparent' higher resolution of vinyl than digital even at this late stage. Another way to look at it is IMO the mass access of MQA may have a positive effect to more casual audio users. And that access and awareness that there is something better than AAC on iTunes could drive things forward. The iTunes growth IMO has severely damaged the quality of audio, as if it was a like for like replacement for CD or Vinyl or even cassette. And the format residing on computers positively encouraged pirating to a degree never seen before. The music industry reacted at first with iron fist format encryption but that seems to have not have had the effect they wanted. I think finally they have realised the bucket is leaking, no way to fix it, so best to try and offer something better than before (better than overpriced iTunes and price hiked CD realises) and grab the fees they can from legitimate streaming services.

A family can have a Tidal account, with AAC or MPEG for the kids and Redbook or higher for the audiophile in the family, that will drive the market forward IMO. Other high res outlets are too niche to make any serious change of direction in the music business.

Agree, blame it all on Apple.

Back in 2002-2004 multi channel music was starting to get traction with studios since many people had home theatres. SACD had not made it over the hump but there were efforts trying to make that happen....,.and then everything changed with i-tunes.

And that (in one form or another) has been the 1500 pound gorilla in the room since then. Everything else is just background noise. The gorilla, to mix my metaphors, could not be put back in the bottle.

I know there are different offshoots from this but the big picture is set on this course.

A good thing?

 

[dminches]

I would love to see the age distribution on purchases from HDtracks. My guess is that 75% or more are purchased by people who are 40 and older. If that is the case then hires digital (or vinyl or reel) doesn't have a future. It is all about convenience now. Most kids don't have a full system. they listen to music on headphones or their computer of maybe computer speakers. I am nervous that when we are all gone high-end sound will die with us.

 

[amirm]

I would love to see the age distribution on purchases from HDtracks. My guess is that 75% or more are purchased by people who are 40 and older. If that is the case then hires digital (or vinyl or reel) doesn't have a future. It is all about convenience now. Most kids don't have a full system. they listen to music on headphones or their computer of maybe computer speakers. I am nervous that when we are all gone high-end sound will die with us.

It is not that bad. Here are the demographics of ASR Forum which from what I recall is pretty close to WBF:

As you see, there is a solid bucket of younger players here and likely as they get older and get to higher net worth, will keep the lights on .

The labels are apathetic about high-res music. For them it is another source of MGs (minimum guarantees) and royalties so they license them if the distributor is willing to pay. And unlike DVD-A/SACD, they incur zero cost since in electronic distribution world, the e-tailer pays all costs. There is no cost of goods (i.e. the shiny metal or LP).

 

[dminches]

The graph shows 75% at age 40 and older which is what I said.

 

[EuroDriver]

Ed,
As far as I remember oversampling appeared in the consumer audio as a way to improve DAC resolution - philips dac's had 14 bit and in order to overcome it used the DAC at 4 times oversampling. Soon other manufacturers followed with oversampling ah higher resolutions - 16 and 18 bits, mostly to lighten the specification of the anti-aliasing filters and improve resolution. It seems to me that what you are calling the sonics of sample and hold is just a nice name for steep filtering with a cut at close to half the sampling rate. Or are you addressing any other effect?

microstrip,

Above my pay grade ! I am repeating the story that Jussi explained to me about how HQ player software came about. How he was unhappy with the DAC chip and digital filter implementation in his CD player and the start of his search to achieve a better result through digital filters implemented in software. Jussi was not specific about what particular digital routines he found sonically problematic, and I did not ask.

 

[amirm]

The graph shows 75% at age 40 and older which is what I said.

I am saying there is a full bench behind them so there will be no die off. The bar for them is lower in forums like this that are so dominated by over the top systems and people.