Today on Tidal, perhaps not for too much longer I have been told (by Tidal)
MQA is also available on some CDs, perhaps the perceived commercial reasoning for the need for bandwidth management?
I hear nothing objectionable with MQA playback whether single unfold in the main system or double unfold on the one DAC I have that supports MQA provided of course that the source recording was decent to begin with.
I am a deaf old man, sometime meter reader, so you can ignore my comments about finding the sound quality not too objectionable and sometimes better than 16/44.
If it sounds right (to me) I am happy regardless of sample rate and bit depth. (=> 16/44)
MQA is also available on some CDs, perhaps the perceived commercial reasoning for the need for bandwidth management?
I hear nothing objectionable with MQA playback whether single unfold in the main system or double unfold on the one DAC I have that supports MQA provided of course that the source recording was decent to begin with.
I am a deaf old man, sometime meter reader, so you can ignore my comments about finding the sound quality not too objectionable and sometimes better than 16/44.
If it sounds right (to me) I am happy regardless of sample rate and bit depth. (=> 16/44)
Storage is practically free these days. 10 TB enterprise drives are $200ish/each. FLAC compresses music quite well ... without loss of information.
Tom
I'm going to start an open-source project to revive MQA: I only want to listen to folded music from now on.
This was the seminal article by archimago.
https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/mqa-a-review-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/
There was some else doing analyses about 2020s, can't find it right now. He uploaded files to Tidal and than compared their version to the original upladed version. Bottom line: it corrupts the 16 bit data, and even if you set tidal to play back only 16/44.1 PCM, this "CD no MQA" file is worse than the 16 bit original.
Edit: found it: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/
Definetely worth reading as it proves that the 16 bit data are corrupt.
And there is also a video by Amir who looked at spectra in various formats:
Now I really hope that Tidal went back to the high res masters and is not simply providing unfolded MQA.
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Maybe this uncovered the quality of equipment used, not really the bits as such, so the reason why it was taken down quickly.
Personally, I prefer to stream directly from the internal drive of a server and not over the network from a NAS. So, storage costs more expensive this way …. Roon advises something similar re: Nucleus server
Sounds great to me, my hearing is fine (I think😉). Roon unfold only, perhaps better with DAC (9039MPRO) final unfold/rendering next time. Hopefully, this album still around in MQA when I get the speaker upgrade to Sibelius next week🙂
Could be, but if an audible difference is real then most likely its caused by things like power supply EMI/RFI noise changes in the computer as its doing an unpacking of the lossless compression (maybe it is doing more reads/writes from/to a memory device, etc.). Audible effects can happen by such means given that USB bus can carry common mode EMI/RFI noise that may not be properly filtered/isolated out before it gets into some susceptible dacs. IME, intermodulation of EMI/RFI noise with an audio signal can be pretty audible in some cases.
That said, when such problems occur, it should not be assumed out of hand that the underlying cause is a problem with a software lossless compression algorithm.
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This is the Goldensound youtuber how has now used his welcoming by fellow MQA bashing ultra-objectivists to launch a youtuber career for measurement based audiophile reviews (an emerging scene on the internet since .. Pono's release? ) . Perhaps the guy has always wanted some notoriety and that has been motivation to bash MQA? Who knows .. but it has got him that attention .
It was not a test of MQA however .. it was a test of Tidal. One cannot eliminate Tidal's service from the results - assuming that there are not also other errors or assumptions being made along the way - so the claims by Goldensound are on shaky ground. It's playing at science, essentially, but being arrogant about it (to insist their conclusions are The Truth .. like some terrible, ego driven scientists do too, before being called out by peer review) .
Now ... as with real science, poor science does not prove that the claim is actually wrong either .. I'm not saying that.
Why "most likely" ? That sounds like a belief based assertion?
I personally would guess that they only believe they can hear a difference between flac and wav ... but again, that's based on my belief that they should always sound the same.
But the same bits come out as went in... last time someone claimed that someone got banned ;-)
//
.. claimed that the same bits that come out as went in .. got banned??
.flacs have to be decoded - we don't know how the audio playback software has been written. I bet there are ways poor software coding can cause differences in playback of formats that shouldn't be there ... I'm just not a software engineer to know if that's realistically possible or not.
When we are talking about people's subjective experiences you cannot apply 'theoretical' understanding to the circumstances to tell people what they hear is wrong! That way is just the usual tribal internet "We are right and you are wrong!" nonsense. No curiousity, no science .. just ideology.
As the Archimago person points out, there may well be factors that cause differences to be heard, nothing to do with the formats or compression :
"
Do lossless compressed formats all sound the same? YES, they should, and in this test, they do.
Based on what I'm hearing and measuring, it's obviously not hard to get good bit-perfect sound. If a piece of equipment is producing audibly different output from say WAV vs. FLAC (that is, assuming the difference isn't cognitive/perceptual bias), then I think there's something wrong with the setup since this was not the intent of the creators of lossless compression. Either the settings are wrong (eg. transcoding to lossy format, ReplayGain tags being applied, or DSP turned on) or there's something 'broken' in the decoding process (eg. CPU too slow, data transfer speed issue, or poor software unable to keep up with the relatively low processing demands). This is a problem and diagnostics should be run to determine how to fix it. "
http://archimago.blogspot.com/2013/05/measurements-do-lossless-compressed.html?m=1
So, I would sincerely hope that no-one got banned for saying what they heard and the conclusions they came to based on that experience .. just because they concluded wrong! That's like a thought crime .
Why not? Not all probabilities are necessarily equal, nor should they be. Besides, I have seen computer noise problems often enough in various systems already. OTOH, FLAC has been pretty well tested and generally outputs the exact bit patterns put into it, which is what all its supposed to do. Could also be a music player app is not working properly with the FLAC decoder plugin (IOW, maybe the player app is at fault). Thus, if I were to troubleshoot a system where there was an audible difference using FLAC, I would look for the most likely cause first, and the least likely cause last. Usually that leads to finding and fixing the problem faster rather than slower.
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Ha - someone should try to recover MQA's original encoding engines, hardware or software .. whatever they had.
I'd be fascinated if a studio still had some original test or research gear somewhere .
Wasn't MP3 encoding illegally modified and distributed but at a better audio quality than that originally intended (kept at a lower quality originally, to appease the music industry)? Stolen from the university servers where it was developed..
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