Same here. I've been buying CDs again, for the first time in years. I've been making my own mixes and I can't bear to use mp3s off of amazon.com, even though I know I *probably* can't hear the difference.
Correcting some wrong statements from someone a few pages ago, FLAC is always lossless. It is WavPack that has high quality hybrid lossy options.
For me MQA CDs have missed the boat, there are no shows selling CDs left where I live. HiFi shops still sell these "audiophile" compilations, but I would rather suffer Kenny G in a lift
For me MQA CDs have missed the boat, there are no shows selling CDs left where I live. HiFi shops still sell these "audiophile" compilations, but I would rather suffer Kenny G in a lift
How would MQA act as a form of DRM?
Does the MQA encoding somehow not copy over when you copy the encoded audio file? How does it stop someone editing an MQA encoded audio file? And how does the tech prevent use of an MQA file (other that a playback device refusing to play it?)? Those are the basic use, modification, and distribution uses that DRM is supposed to control.
It's been said before in the thread and in the odd anti-MQA blog post but I personally don't understand it, not too clued up on it.
Exactly - subjective assessment of it's worth, not about the engineering / maths. If they may claim improvement and yet no-one else can hear them, that doesn't make the engineering/science wrong, only that it's effect is pointless. That is a very very different thing to pseudo-science.
Not sure how defeatable it is but, essentially, they have enough room in the noise shaping file for a lock on the higher resolution substream. So not a total block, but compromising the quality pretty heavily.
MQA explained: Everything you need to know about high-res audio | Ars Technica
MQA explained: Everything you need to know about high-res audio | Ars Technica
My mobile contract is 30Gb limited and is $23/month.
Metered limits are large these days..
Thanks for that link. So it's not DRM for the consumer in any form, just licencing for the technology (i.e. a company has to pay for a licence to provide the option).
A bit like Nespresso licence to use their coffee pod shape (except someone can easily physically look and copy it in a DIY way) and in the same way, the patents will expire and licences no-longer needed (in 20 years time when MQA is obsolete anyway) .
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First, 30 Gb is 3.75 GB which is tiny. Even if you mean 30 GB it's still not going to be very much for streaming.
The bitrate of stereo MQA is around 1.5 Mbps according to various sources. That is 90 Mbps per minute, which is 11.25 MB per minute and 675 MB per hour. If you streamed 2 hours per day on average, you are already looking at 1.35 GB per day, which comes out to something like 40.5 GB per 30-day month. People will enjoy wasting their entire data plan on MQA I am sure.
It is DRM, what do you think DRM is?
The content is encrypted - see:
https://www.infosecurityeurope.com/__novadocuments/266589?v=636078256117430000
If you want to play it on a non MQA-approved device you get a lower resolution form. This is just a more clever form of "Hybrid SACD".
You need to pay Meridian to develop a decoder, you need to pay Meridian to encode any content. It is DRM. It might not be the worst kind of DRM, but it's almost exactly like HDCP.
That is the only reason they got anyone to sign on to this little scam; everyone in the chain can get their cut and the labels hope to have a higher margin service than what they get from the likes of Apple. Maybe they aren't tracking individual files right now, but there is a lot more DRM related stuff they can add in the future. They learned well from the HDMI cartel.
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The engineering / science is wrong. It is plainly obvious if you understand sampling theory. Someone linked observations and comments from Bruno P earlier, you should take a look - they are spot on.
When Linn is calling you a fraud, you're probably a fraud.
MQA is Bad For Music. Here's Why.
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"When Linn... " No way .. hahaha. A school friend's father was a hifi dealer in the 80s and the lies and underhand workings of Linn and the "training" or their sales reps are notorious from that time. Same again when Tiefenbrun piped up to defend his analogue empire against digital and all the similar arguments of whether people can hear differences and denying the results of loads of blind and double blind tests that found no discernable difference when a digital A->D->A conversion stage was inserted... Linn has traditionally been full of BS as part of it's marketing plan.. and it served it very very well (whilst some great ideas and products ended up panned because of the influence Linn had over British reviewers e.g. DC motors in turntables and anything that sounded better than the LP12 - severe pressure was put on reviewers who didn't state the LP12 was their reference.. ).
Then remember that Meridian (Bob Stuart) and Linn have been traditional rivals since then too, Meridian embracing digital whilst Linn was pushing coloured and antiquated turntables and claiming they were accurate.
I think the culture within Linn is very likely very coloured by its past and likely to be biased.
I shall check out Bruno P's comments for sure. I'm only au fait with basic sample theory so again I'll have to check it out.
Dithering is a mathematical thing in my mind and not related to sample theory and so is encrypted code within noise.. I don't see it as part of sample theory at all - unless you're talking about another part of the MQA engineering?
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Digital rights management - Wikipedia
You can argue that it's similar to say Apple's Fairplay but it's not the same. That's as close as MQA gets to the describitions and examples of DRM on the wiki page in my opinion.
I can see why you think it looks like DRM but I don't see any other way Meridian (or the MQA company) can get back their R&D costs and make profit - it IS a profit making exercise, it's not an altruistic exercise.. politics and current public sentiment is such that collective, social enterprise for the good of the people is frowned upon by many in the west in the name of free markets.
It is not to control the use of the content by the consumer. It's to encode something into a dual-use file, one that will continue to play on non-MQA gear. Whilst also licencing (and protecting the licencing) the tech to the *equipment manufacturer* - not the media consumer.
For the record, I don't think MQA is a good idea because of the lowering of quality for non-MQA users and it's unnecessary (just encourage studios to use good converters and good recording technique - a much larger influence on the sound) given the quality of standard hi-rez. But I find the engineering / science and maths behind it interesting.
DRM disagreement aside, if you actually look into the engineering and math behind it, you’ll see it doesn’t hold up. That’s the point of the exercise, to look as legitimate as possible. Other parties have gone along with it because the structure benefits them as well.
It is clever because not every part of it is a bad idea.
My point with Linn wasn’t to give them any credit, more that it’s rare you see public pushback among high end vendors when both can benefit from MQA. It’s true I’m not intimately aware of the history of Linn vs Meridian.
I hope AKM and Cirrus do not support MQA like ESS.
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I'm kind of working through the points in this article about the maths/technology: MQA Time-domain Accuracy & Digital Audio Quality | and checking though to see what bit could be considered pseudo-science.
Is it the apodizing filter part that you disagree is possible?
Is it the use of some kind of form of wavelet theory in relation to sampling, theory that moves away from Nyquist?
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This looks potentially relevent as an abstract: A Hardware Prototype for Sub-Nyquist Radar Sensing | Request PDF I'd have to search more for the actual paper (.pdf) for free somewhere.
hmm, I felt exactly the same as this excellent audiophile poem.
However, what I can say with confidence is that my initial impression of what I heard was of a generally more believable and realistic sound stage, with instruments and ensembles appearing more vibrant and genuinely three-dimensional in a way which exceeded anything I’ve heard with conventional hi-res audio on high-quality monitoring systems. Everything was located within very natural-sounding and acoustically defined spaces, and transient-rich instruments — cymbals and drums in particular — became noticeably more tangible. Overall, I think there was just more innately meaningful positional information coming from the speakers.
We are talking about band-limited systems. Reproducing a perfect looking impulse implies it is not. Gibbs phenomenon is not an artifact of an imperfect filter, it is reality. Square waves don't look good coming out of your filter? The answer is not to make your filter worse. The answer is to not do dumb stuff and put square waves through your system. If you want to capture crazy signals then you should just sample faster. This is music, though, so there is no need.
There should be free course material from various Signals and Systems courses online if you're curious.
Not relevant at all I'm afraid, unless I misunderstand. This sounds basically like another implementation of undersampling.
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slaa594a/slaa594a.pdf
More importantly don't use waveforms that can't by definition exist in any recording to prove some point, the point BTW is invariably "look at that doesn't that look un-natural?" It's easy to create a .wav with a plus to minus full scale transition in one sample, but that could never exist in any actual recording without violating Nyquist. In fact creating a fast acoustic transition is very difficult even with a high energy spark discharge there is little energy >30kHz.
Even so pseudo-science might be too strong a word, more like blinding with science.
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