But they are in a tiny tiny tiny minority. Most people are moving to digital streaming. Watch people spend more and more on DACs and digital connectivity and simplification of their set-ups to match.
MQA folk claim MQA can correct it because of digital theory and maths. You'll have to look up (again - I guess it was covered years ago in this thread) how they say it can be done and then work out where there are wrong. I for one would be very interested to read your findings - because I find the ideas behind it interesting. I'm more interested in the technical details than I am if it works to be honest (I have no need for MQA myself).
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Is MQA DOA? - Benchmark Media Systems
Sorry for the strong words but the MQA folks, blow off Q&A sessions and don't participate in careful comparative listening sessions (AFAIK), i.e. they don't act like 100% honest players.
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Yeah, I'm sure they are heavily biased and stuck in their own worlds..
Imagine taking a project so far and involving so much money, time and other people's time and money to find that it wasnt worth it. That is fine on a personal level but on a commercial one, it's death to your career and reputation.
I feel sorry for commercial R&D folks!
For sure I personally don't hear any difference for recordings better than 24/96. In comparison, I do begin to hear a slight hardness to 44.1/16 ... but then that could be the process used to downsample or the implementation of conversion on a 24/96 optomised DAC. Too many variables, despite finding a sonic difference
Imagine taking a project so far and involving so much money, time and other people's time and money to find that it wasnt worth it. That is fine on a personal level but on a commercial one, it's death to your career and reputation.
I feel sorry for commercial R&D folks!
For sure I personally don't hear any difference for recordings better than 24/96. In comparison, I do begin to hear a slight hardness to 44.1/16 ... but then that could be the process used to downsample or the implementation of conversion on a 24/96 optomised DAC. Too many variables, despite finding a sonic difference
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P.S. thanks for that link - a good breakdown and analysis from people who could easily jump on the bandwagon if they thought it was a good idea.
I love the "Limited Edition" claim. On a CD that they could stamp out for pennies like any other CD. I suspect that the only reason it would be "limited" would be if they didn't expect to sell very many.
I’m not sure it needs to be maintained very much. Plus, any random person can do it since it’s open source.
FLAC and ALAC are also lossless, smaller, and more widespread than the AIFF container (maybe).
The size is still an issue for mobile devices or players. I don’t think my entire collection would fit on my phone (256GB) in raw PCM.
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FLAC is, i believe, not necessarily lossless. When space is limited using a non-lossy compressed format can alow more songs, but the decompression can cause power supply pertabations that reduce device quality — why the best players suck the entire song into RAM before playing so that there are few if any changing loads on the PS.
And how much music can you listen too? I could easily fit all the music i would ever need for a trip into a 1/4 TB. I just load AIFF onto my iPod or iPhone.
dave
And how much music can you listen too? I could easily fit all the music i would ever need for a trip into a 1/4 TB. I just load AIFF onto my iPod or iPhone.
dave
Archimago's Musings: MQA Core vs. Hi-Res Blind Test Part I: Procedure
Dont miss (hard!) his list of articles in the above link...
- Initial musings...
- The undecoded MQA file.
- Decoded vs. undecoded Explorer2 output.
- Dicussions of MQA's partially lossy nature.
- Comparison of TIDAL / MQA Decoding with "studio master" tracks.
- Mytek Brooklyn hardware MQA decoding.
- Discussion of digital filters and relevance to MQA.
- Comparison between Meridian Explorer2 vs. Mytek Brooklyn ("Authentication?").
- Dragonfly Black MQA "Rendering" and filter.
- Mytek Brooklyn MQA filters.
- The "full monty" of MQA filters from the Dragonfly Black MQA-enabled DAC.
and so forth...
//
Lossless is lossless.. "power supply pertabations" and other pseudoscience nonsense doesn't enter into it. Any glitches or interruptions to the PCM stream are very very noticable, jitter (which is real, but still very difficult to notice) is handled by the DAC.
Anything beyond jitter is entirely in the analog domain
All that being said, MQA is just a digital rights grab, most likely heavily sponsored, and marketed with pseudoscience, because that's the only chance they would have of popularizing it
FLAC is lossless.. if you want to test a digital chain for consistency, play a DTS encoded wav file through it, to a SPDIF input on a surround sound receiver - if the stream is consistent, it will be decoded in DTS, otherwise it will come through as static
edit: sorry if this all comes out as a grumpy old man rant... i need more coffee
Anything beyond jitter is entirely in the analog domain
All that being said, MQA is just a digital rights grab, most likely heavily sponsored, and marketed with pseudoscience, because that's the only chance they would have of popularizing it
FLAC is lossless.. if you want to test a digital chain for consistency, play a DTS encoded wav file through it, to a SPDIF input on a surround sound receiver - if the stream is consistent, it will be decoded in DTS, otherwise it will come through as static
edit: sorry if this all comes out as a grumpy old man rant... i need more coffee
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Can you provide some details on this? Genuinely interested (and happy to be proven wrong)
I used to claim exactly what you are claiming, until I heard audible differences between different settings of the length of Foobar's buffer. On the same PC of course.
Then I heard audible differences between different RPi distributions.
After that I heard considerable difference between using a PC vs. a Squeezebox Touch as a USB transport.
Then there are the very audible differences between using different quality power supplies to the same RPi, used as a USB transport.
The pinnacle of insanity was when I heard audible differences between different CAT6 cables linking the USB transport to the NAS. Granted, it was not a huge difference and the rest of the system was very revealing (plus 6-figures in cost), but it was there.
All of the above are in fact bit-perfect playback devices. But they all have (very) different noise signatures.
Selective quoting isn't doing you any favors, Dave. My rather old comment was making mockery of Meridian's effort to duplicate Apple's successes.
To refresh your memory, Apple has a long history of locking users into their proprietary systems. Some times that's to ensure a smooth closed system, but a lot of times it's pretty user-antagonistic and anticompetitive.
E.g., Apple Lossless - Wikipedia
It was a locked codec for a number of years.
As far as your assertions about flac not being lossless or or somehow causing some bizarre computational-based contamination, please bring data as you're pretty far in left field about implications that would have on all kinds of software.
Again, flac, bit-equivalent, is smaller and lossless. MQA lacks merit on the users part.
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I think it’s always lossless... I mean, it’s in the name.
I’m not sure I buy into decoding modulating the rails of a decent device either but I understand.
I don’t need that much music but I like to keep it from taking half the device’s storage.
MQA fails on all points for me. It’s a lossy codec with pseudoscience driven adaptive reconstruction filtering.
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