Rex81
Well-Known Member
Well, let's not throw out the baby with the inaudible ones and zeros.
There's a lot of theoretical arguments here. I'm trying to focus on the real benefits, regardless of the theory behind them.
Is MQA in your Future?
- Thread starter WobblySam
- Start date
Well, let's not throw out the baby with the inaudible ones and zeros.
There's a lot of theoretical arguments here. I'm trying to focus on the real benefits, regardless of the theory behind them.
Decibel_116
AK Subscriber
To those who believe they are listening to an "original master recording" when that MQA light comes on. As far as I know, not a single recording studio is recording using MQA during the recording process. This is the only way you could even possibly be assured that it is "the way the recording recording engineer intended when he turned off the lights". The MQA files available today are simply MQA converted versions of already existing digital masters. That little MQA light will come on to indicate it was converted to MQA - that's all. Nothing more and nothing less. Now if there was a "originally recorded in MQA light"....
KrisM
Lunatic Member
I just can't see how this would happen. How are they going to control all the artists and labels that are not part of the big music companies? Are the 'boutique' labels going to just go all in? Is a group that is funding their whole situation really going to buy in? Is a group like Wilco, who fought their asses off against the big labels to finally get control of how they operate, really going to buy in?
And even if this did happen, then what? Are all those recordings out there going to get rounded up and land filled? Not a chance.
And even if gets to a place where MQA is "the thing" with purchases, it'll most likely get hacked anyway.
Take a look at the history of content delivery. If there's a delivery method that is locked down by a smart person, there's another smarter person out there who can unlock it.
I also think lost in all this is how small a piece of the pie hi-rez is. It's hard enough to find a Joe Public who gives a hoot about redbook quality vs MP3 when it comes to music, never mind hi-rez. Or hi-rez vs whatever the heck MQA is.
Rex81
Well-Known Member
There are a few errors in your statement:
MQA in the recording process is not required at any step in order to get either an MQA file or an original master. As you stated correctly, MQA is using already existing master files to make the MQA file. That's the point. The light tells you if it's an artist or studio authenticated master file that was either half or fully decoded, depending on the hardware you're using. Of course, you can choose not to trust it. One can choose not to trust the US dollar or the moon landing too.
Decibel_116
AK Subscriber
Digital masters come from many different sources. Many of which do not come from the recording studio engineers - which was my point. So, no I do not trust this claim. The existing Hi Res files out there for sale can make the same claims because they are fully licensed copies. Oh, and they are actually lossless unlike MQA.
lizard84
Abider
“I can’t see how that would happen “
Conspiracy theories, na,the threat is real! It’s completely possible MQA is going to take over the world without your help, for these fiends nothing short of world domination will do. MQA’s evil plot to flood the ears of the world’s music lovers with HQ music is diabolical, this hydra has many faces, searching for master recordings, flooding the world ‘s digital to analog converters with free firmware proves they’re willing to sink to new lows in their effort! Indeed, they have sunk to the level of actually passing on free updates to Audirvana and Amarra, those bastards!
I urge you to fight this monster, get online, post and pass judgment now. Link two and three year old opinions, refer to your questionable testing and methods. When all else fails rely on wild and baseless speculation, it’s an oldie but a goodie. Fight the good fight, It doesn’t matter if you’ve never actually sampled true MQA, hands on experience will only cloud your judgement and question our cause.
Conspiracy theories, na,the threat is real! It’s completely possible MQA is going to take over the world without your help, for these fiends nothing short of world domination will do. MQA’s evil plot to flood the ears of the world’s music lovers with HQ music is diabolical, this hydra has many faces, searching for master recordings, flooding the world ‘s digital to analog converters with free firmware proves they’re willing to sink to new lows in their effort! Indeed, they have sunk to the level of actually passing on free updates to Audirvana and Amarra, those bastards!
I urge you to fight this monster, get online, post and pass judgment now. Link two and three year old opinions, refer to your questionable testing and methods. When all else fails rely on wild and baseless speculation, it’s an oldie but a goodie. Fight the good fight, It doesn’t matter if you’ve never actually sampled true MQA, hands on experience will only cloud your judgement and question our cause.
Rex81
Well-Known Member
No, existing hi-res files cannot broadly make this claim, nor do they try to. They're not selling an authenticated master. They're selling a hi-res version of what's already been published. Could be derived directly from the master, just as likely that it's not. That's not part of the selling point for them. For MQA, it is.
One could argue there are two distinct sales pitches:
- With Hi-res, you get to purchase the track and keep it forever. You also know it's lossless.
- With MQA, you can stream tens of thousands of high resolution tracks (along with 45 million Redbook tracks) for $20 a month. The file is lossy, but those losses are inaudible. You're also guaranteed that the file is derivative of the master without any post processing done to it after it was cut.
KrisM
Lunatic Member
So why haven't you posted your listening impressions of the files that I linked so we can all see if we can hear the same things at home with our non-MQA DACs?
Why is that so hard for you to do? It will take you less time than all this typing...
Here they are again:
http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html?
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A waste of time? Don't be mad but that statement coming from the most passionate and frequent poster on this thread kinda sounds like a cop out.
At least we got somewhere, you're saying that the MQA files "sounded closed, screechy and thin" on you non-MQA DAC.
What about the rest of the contributors on this thread from both sides? I think that any other member that has more than a couple of posts in this thread should try it also. Can anyone detect the difference that botrytis claims to hear between the MQA file and the 16/44 file on your non-MQA DACs out there? Be honest.
http://www.2l.no/hires/index.html?
Yes you are right, today it seems inconceivable that they could control the music like I alluded to in my earlier post. After all, mqa is backwards compatible anyway, right? Right. Their new format would never have gotten off the ground and would be laying in the digital scrapyard alongside SACD had it not been. I get this.
However before you send the guys in the white coats out to take me away, consider this for a moment. What is the one thing that the recording industry hates about the digital delivery system as it stands today? What would they change about it if they possibly could? What has cost them untold billions in lost revenue due to lack of copy protection according to RIAA? Now what if they decided to do something about it? After all we are talking about billions here, so the incentive would be there would you agree? How would they go about it?
You say anything they come up with can be hacked. Well aside from SACD's physical alteration requiring a player that is, I agree with that, so far anything that they put forth can be hacked. However, would that still be the case with MQA 2.0, or 3.0? Once the world has stepped innocently on board, with all DAC's sporting MQA technology, would it be a stretch to one day find that the latest music being produced has restrictions that can't be properly decoded without a MQA chip which suddenly requires a quick check with some online server to make certain that piece of music is registered and that the true owner is actually playing the music file on his own machine, and not being played in hundreds of other places around the world?
Forgive me, my wife says I have an overactive imagination, but they seem to do a pretty damn good job of controlling software today this way. This I ran into a few months ago, using the app "Power Amp" while on the road in northern Canada. I had been out of Cellphone range for a few hours, and suddenly that app refused to play music with the message that I needed to be in range to reconnect in order to confirm my license. If some POS Android app could do that, I can see the day coming when they can do it with music.
OK, now all have a good laugh at my stupidity here, I am done. I just hope everyone is still laughing about it 10 years down the road!
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DaveVoorhis
Addicted Member
I'll try it when I get a moment later, but what it sounds like is rather irrelevant here. What is relevant is that it's an unnecessary proprietary format that -- as @Alobar articulately pointed out -- might be the thin edge of a wedge that eventually leads to higher costs and restrictions, with no compensating gain for us consumers. There are open, non-proprietary alternatives -- some lossless, so we don't have to worry about whether the format has audibly lost signal or not -- that perhaps we should be demanding.
Decibel_116
AK Subscriber
Because of the noise (I mean filters) applied during the MQA "unfolding" process to reconstruct the signal, the final result is different from the original source. This has been shown over and over again in the testing already done by several analysts in published papers. As a side note, this process is different for every DAC chip (which must be accessible by the MQA chip). The resulting sound may in fact sound better to some folks as sound quality is extremely subjective. It may in fact sound better or more pleasant to many listeners. I for one will not make the claim that it doesn't sound better or worse to anyone else other than myself. My issues with MQA are not in the perceived final sound quality but more with the way it is being marketed.
From a signal purity perspective, I do not want my music processed through anything that changes the original. Can a signal be processed to "sound better"? Sure. Is it more true to the source, no. Does the little blue light mean anything to me? Yes! It means the original signal has been tampered with - by MQA.
BTW - MQA is hard at work in the recording industry establishing themselves as a standardized recording format. They are a major contributor to the 501C organization AES as an "AES Standards Sustainer". Like it or not, it seems to be well on it's way.
From a signal purity perspective, I do not want my music processed through anything that changes the original. Can a signal be processed to "sound better"? Sure. Is it more true to the source, no. Does the little blue light mean anything to me? Yes! It means the original signal has been tampered with - by MQA.
BTW - MQA is hard at work in the recording industry establishing themselves as a standardized recording format. They are a major contributor to the 501C organization AES as an "AES Standards Sustainer". Like it or not, it seems to be well on it's way.
KrisM
Lunatic Member
No laughing here, I get where you're coming from. I find the general 'controlling-ness' of things disturbing, too.Yes you are right, today it seems inconceivable that they could control the music like I alluded to in my earlier post. After all, mqa is backwards compatible anyway, right? Right. Their new format would never have gotten off the ground and would be laying in the digital scrapyard alongside SACD had it not been. I get this.
However before you send the guys in the white coats out to take me away, consider this for a moment. What is the one thing that the recording industry hates about the digital delivery system as it stands today? What would they change about it if they possibly could? What has cost them untold billions in lost revenue due to lack of copy protection according to RIAA? Now what if they decided to do something about it? After all we are talking about billions here, so the incentive would be there would you agree? How would they go about it?
You say anything they come up with can be hacked. Well aside from SACD's physical alteration requiring a player that is, I agree with that, so far anything that they put forth can be hacked. However, would that still be the case with MQA 2.0, or 3.0? Once the world has stepped innocently on board, with all DAC's sporting MQA technology, would it be a stretch to one day find that the latest music being produced has restrictions that either can't be properly decoded without a MQA chip which suddenly requires a quick check with some online server to make certain that piece of music is registered and that the true owner is actually playing the music file on his own machine, and not being played in hundreds of other places around the world?
Forgive me, my wife says I have an overactive imagination, but they seem to do a pretty damn good job of controlling software today this way. This I ran into a few months ago, using the app "Power Amp" while on the road in northern Canada. I had been out of Cellphone range for a few hours, and suddenly that app refused to play music with the message that I needed to be in range to reconnect in order to confirm my license. If some POS Android app could do that, I can see the day coming when they can do it with music.
OK, now all have a good laugh at my stupidity here, I am done. I just hope everyone is still laughing about it 10 years down the road!
I just don't see this gang grabbing hold and controlling the music industry. I don't see how they can wag the dog when it comes to Apple, Amazon, Google, Spotify, etc. Music distribution has been a gong show for them since the likes of Napster, and I can't see how they can catch up with it by imposing something like MQA on people.
Also, I'll admit the old man angle here. If new music gets to a place where this is a thing, I'll gladly say I don't care. The new music I enjoy is (mostly) outside of this situation, though.
I'll also say that the first time I go to a blues or rock club or festival with $20 to buy someone's music, and they say I need to buy into some controlling bs, I'll put that $20 back in my pocket and walk away. I don't see that happening. The people I've talked to at the side of the stage over the years(or via email/text/the net) would laugh at this topic and want no part of it. People that make a living with music via playing live have to hustle. Turning down sales by the stage or online because the big company's interests aren't at heart isn't on their radar.
You are correct in that it couldn't be done with software alone. That will always be hacked. It will take hardware to pull this off, and an MQA DAC is hardware. Maybe in its current form it doesn't have the ability, but maybe it can, I don't know. But this type of control is coming, and a vehicle is needed. SACD tried to do it all in one big step, and failed miserably. It has taken this long, but thus far, if I am correct, MQA is exactly how I can see it happening, in small increments. The ducks are starting to fall in line.. Start with the audiophile as that is a tiny wedge to get a beachhead footing. Then the next thing will be an improved sound for the masses. It might be an unfolding of the 320mp3 that turns it into a lossless file, with the help of a cheap as dirt chip. This one might even be free of charge, after all even though most people couldn't tell a 320 from a CD, if they are told, or rather sold that they can have CD quality from their cell without a data hit that might be the in it needs to break out of the audiophile market (After all from a business standpoint, Hi Rez MQA is probably a terrible investment alone, if that is all there is to it). Then it would be easier to EVENTUALLY copyright protect all music, device by device. That would probably be enough to drive all stragglers onto streaming anyway which is really what the industry wants. Then those who don't pay the escalating prices for streaming will be forced to discover old music on CD (as long as the CD players keep functioning), or take up singing..
Keep in mind I am talking about the future, not tomorrow or day after future, but the inevitability future. Maybe it won't be MQA, but it will be something and MQA certainly has everything needed to incrementally accomplish this goal.
It may not be up to the artist at that point. The control of music I am talking about will have to be hardware activated. If the industry manages to get the hardware in our players, our drives, our phones, it wont matter what the small artists want.
Yes, I am 62 as well, and maybe it wont matter to me, although it might, depending on how fast things would progress. It is a fast paced world now, and in 10 years I still hope to be buying new music..
KrisM
Lunatic Member
I sure hope it doesn't get that gloomy.
The thing with musicians, real ones, is that they are artists. They are performers. The days of the big ticket contracts by major labels are over for the most part. The good new music is being done by those that give a crap. And would cringe at this type of thing. They'll get their music out there.
As for the hardware/tech side of things? I still don't see how the music companies can dictate how tech goes forward. The tech companies have nothing to gain by crippling their gear.
SACD is a different topic for me. I think its failure was a lack of software, and too big an expectation on Sony's part. It was/is a niche format. I should have stayed that way, but supported with software.
It wasn't an attempt to lock down sharing. If it was why would they have included hybrid capability?
Yeah, I'm gloomily optimistic! I know, weird.. As for the rest of your post, I think the music industry may be the driver in much of this going forward, from behind the scenes. Maybe the big ticket era is over, but what if 10 years down the road I want to buy a CD (or download) from a recording made in 1972 say. Will all newly manufactured disc's be just CD's or will they also contain the hook in it. We all know the drill, when the disc gets to me from Amazon, or where ever, and I plug it in, there will be a new little box with a 6 letter code, and after I enter it, that disk is wedded to me and my device, and after it sends a burst of one's and zeros to the server, it will play on that machine, forever. Next machine, with a different MQA (or similar) DAC chip, and it will ask for the code again, enter it and maybe it will play, OR maybe it will come back with a message saying I have "exceeded the allowable devices this music can be played on".. This is not a stretch here guys, all it will take is HARDWARE to be on all machines. Billions of dollars in losses, lobbying Congress, a few laws enacted.
Before they used the punitive hammer to control piracy, for lack of the tools to do it on players. Expensive to prosecute, and thus their bark was always worse than the bite although $250,000 fine and 5 years in prison was a very loud bark alright.
Well I have made my point here. Most don't care, as long as their music is playing now who cares about the future..
lizard84
Abider
Actually, all of my comparisons were to Hi-Rez files, HD Tracks DSD or ALAC 24/96 to an actual Tidal Masters MQA Studio stream. Have you ever even listened to a Tidal MQA track streamed through a MQA equipped Dac?
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lizard84
Abider
Post#180
These from your earlier post? post 119 I believe "I didn't set it up. But the gent who did said they were from the same master. Most were 44.1/24 since that is what most of the MQA's he could get were."
Doesn't appear to be an apples to apples comparison.
These from your earlier post? post 119 I believe "I didn't set it up. But the gent who did said they were from the same master. Most were 44.1/24 since that is what most of the MQA's he could get were."
Doesn't appear to be an apples to apples comparison.