I remember when Tidals offering was either lossy or lossless, did they replace the lossless offering with MQA or can you now choose from CD quality or MQA?
Unfortunately for any track that carries the 'MASTER' badge, you cannot stream lossless.
Even if you do not have a Hifi Plus subscription and your quality is set to 'hifi', it just streams the MQA file but with flagging/metadata removed so your DAC does not recognise it as MQA.
I found something like what you are saying a year or two ago, but I'm not sure what flagging/metadata you're talking about.
Over USB it seems like the MQA DACs I have don't need metadata to know the stream is MQA, but the Oppo 205 doesn't recognize music files on CD or disk without the header.
The first post was incredibly hard for me to read, as I have not audio knowledge (not technical one), plus I'm french, call that "double high kick". Anyway, what I was hearing three months ago when I have tried Tidal subscription, and as I never ended my qobuz account, was to my ears weird, because some songs I know well enough where not sounding identicall, and I do mean a bit less good on one side.
If I understand things well, this is not just my mind playing tricks on me, or my 47 years old ears saying goodbye to frequencies...
It depends a lot on which album. I have Elton John's Captain Fantastic on vinyl (several versions) and I always give this as an example of what MQA album to listen to on Tidal Hifi. I have listened to that album thousands of times since 1975 and the MQA version is wonderful and captures the analog sound perfectly.
The problem with all these services is you usually don't have any way to know what mastering you're listening to so you can't compare the same album on 2 streaming services. Even on Tidal, we found the offerings vary by region. In another thread we compared Metallica albums in a few countries and we had varying sample rates on Tidal. It makes it very hard to get a valid comparison.
It depends a lot on which album. I have Elton John's Captain Fantastic on vinyl (several versions) and I always give this as an example of what MQA album to listen to on Tidal Hifi. I have listened to that album thousands of times since 1975 and the MQA version is wonderful and captures the analog sound perfectly.
The problem with all these services is you usually don't have any way to know what mastering you're listening to so you can't compare the same album on 2 streaming services. Even on Tidal, we found the offerings vary by region. In another thread we compared Metallica albums in a few countries and we had varying sample rates on Tidal. It makes it very hard to get a valid comparison.
I would like to try Qobuz but it is not offered here even after they said for 3 years they will soon be here
I'm happy with Tidal but I would like to add another bit-perfect service, especially if I can get uncompressed hires to enjoy along with the MQA albums I like.
I would like to try Qobuz but it is not offered here even after they said for 3 years they will soon be here
I'm happy with Tidal but I would like to add another bit-perfect service, especially if I can get uncompressed hires to enjoy along with the MQA albums I like.
I can't say for Tidal, Apple lossless or others, since I took Qobuz full years service for two, which offers all lossless and hi res catalog. But, even if the catalog is way thinner than others, I can find most of what I like, and that include death metal, french songs, musician from my native country, Reunion island (they have Ziskakan, Zulu, Daniel WARO^^), and that is enough for one man's life to fullfill I guess. Didn't know Qobuz was not offered in Czech Republic, that's a surprise..
I can't say for Tidal, Apple lossless or others, since I took Qobuz full years service for two, which offers all lossless and hi res catalog. But, even if the catalog is way thinner than others, I can find most of what I like, and that include death metal, french songs, musician from my native country, Reunion island (they have Ziskakan, Zulu, Daniel WARO^^), and that is enough for one man's life to fullfill I guess. Didn't know Qobuz was not offered in Czech Republic, that's a surprise..
That is the key. There are guys always looking for something new but I listen to mostly the same albums for the last decades. As long as they have what you want, you don't need to search more
I had read around and mounted suspicions about MQA, but this was the gold-mine post that we all needed. Pure class of an effort, thanks for your contribution.
edit: Tidal subscription cancelled -- and long live Qobuz.
Sometimes they have Redbook (CD) and MQA versions but that has been disappearing fast.
I found something like what you are saying a year or two ago, but I'm not sure what flagging/metadata you're talking about.
Over USB it seems like the MQA DACs I have don't need metadata to know the stream is MQA, but the Oppo 205 doesn't recognize music files on CD or disk without the header.
For the last question,
they are the "MQA encoder" and "original sampling rate" tags in the container's metadata.
Many MQA-capable player, which integrate the player-app (if Android/Linux-based) or the interface (like a physical traditional CD player) with the DAC (or the FPGA chip alongside the XMOS chip), decode the MQA solely by recognising the tags in metadata, like Sony WM1 series.
Very few like Android app UAPP recognise the MQA embedment from the LPCM wave compressed in FLAC files.
This kind of MQA recognition resembles the way of how MQATagRestorer app provided by MQA does.
For MQA itself, it can be 16-bit or 24-bit FLAC where the 16-bit can be made by truncating the 24-bit to 16-bit because MQA data is stored at the last few bits of the first 16 bits. It is the way how 16-bit MQA works on MQA CD.
That means, MQA-capable players, as such MQA decoders, recognise the MQA data by checking the 13/14th to 16th bit of a LPCM stream from either 16-bit or 24-bit files.
It depends a lot on which album. I have Elton John's Captain Fantastic on vinyl (several versions) and I always give this as an example of what MQA album to listen to on Tidal Hifi. I have listened to that album thousands of times since 1975 and the MQA version is wonderful and captures the analog sound perfectly.
The problem with all these services is you usually don't have any way to know what mastering you're listening to so you can't compare the same album on 2 streaming services. Even on Tidal, we found the offerings vary by region. In another thread we compared Metallica albums in a few countries and we had varying sample rates on Tidal. It makes it very hard to get a valid comparison.
It is about subjectivity on how listeners anticipate the sound to be.
On Mathematics perspective, a single error or mistake in billions of data means it is not perfect, that means it is not lossless.
On audiophiles' perspective, a rather decent sound means more than perfect bit-to-bit reproduction, even though it can be distantly different from the original source.
It is very interesting to see someones praise the sound quality of an audio files obtained from a re-issued album, that was originally recorded in DAT, remastered in some "high" sampling rate processes, putting a lovely technological sticker on top of the album case and claiming it to be better than the original release, which was also a redbook CD.
That does not change the fact that a FLAC file was exchanged for money/profit. Or does twisting oneself into a pretzel really help? Okay, straight from XIPH's own LICENSE page "The FLAC and Ogg FLAC formats themselves, and their specifications, are fully open to the public to be used for any purpose..." What authority are you citing for your interpreation?
And no you don't need to purchase a product to decode MQA files (if that is the nexus you are trying to draw to the violation of the spirit of FLAC that is floating around in your head). As pointed out to me, they come in a FLAC file. Okay to indulge, I got a MQA track. Played it via JRiver through four different DAC's and a ten year old DAP. None of which are MQA compliant. The track played fine. I didn't need to buy any new equipment did I? It played the FLAC layer (I don't know the properly terminology), just not with whatever special MQA sauce was supposed to be there. As per MQA's own site: "MQA will play back on any device to deliver higher than CD-quality. When paired with an MQA decoder, the MQA file reveals the original master recording".
FLAC is a container, free of charge, like you can use WAV freely, but it has a higher lossless compression rate.
MQA on the other hand is a patent-protected proprietary, which is also a container, but you have to pay to use it, in both encoding and decoding ways.
So the claim about the JRiver in the second paragraph of yours is untrue. Whatever can decode the MQA stream must have certain degree of commercial relationship with MQA company. And most importantly, I don't believe how they claim about the reveal of true original master recording. As I have said, an imperfect bit out of trillions of data means lossy.
On the other hand, arguing about how lossless the audio provided by distributor is meaningless. If they insist to give CD-quality only, then the CD-quality is the best we can get, even though the original master could be in 24bit or even in 768kHz. But for the time being, the CD quality is what I can get the best from the distributor for now.
(disclaimer: I haven't followed the discussion for a while so I'm not up to date on all conversation, and I don't have a degree in math so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong)
A slight correction. WAV is not compressed at all. It's like bitmap or bmp for images. So there's no IP for any codec to consider. It is the 'don't think, just tell me what numbers you see' method (not taking into account the left right channel information switching). WAV is just the naked audio, so it doesn't have pockets to hold any tag information.
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FLAC is not just the audio codec but it also means the container. If you want you could put WAV inside a flac container but that makes no sense. Other codecs usually also provide a container. Like WV, ape, mkv/mka and the motion picture layers, ie MP3 and M4A. And of course Apple wants to mark it's territory by peeing on it too. (btw: the Apple logo is a reference to the Genesis account of the Fall and the Garden of Eden only from a luciferian perspective of giving the gift of 'enlightenment of man' and freeing him of his ignorance transgressing natural law and establishing corporate law, to lay out the groundwork for those who care about origins).
Everybody is trying to come up with a smart algorithm for compressing as much as possible because it saves space and bandwidth. Unfortunately any compromise comes at a price, in this case computing power (electricity and decoder hardware).
Intellectual property
Now that's all perfectly fine as long as you keep all data and just use smart technology. But with the so-called 'intellectual property' or IP we leave the domain the natural law of technology. Enter the corporate law. Here is no common good, it's just 'mine, mine, mine'. It's the big pissing contest. Every corporation wants to leave their scent. Because here is perpetual income without anybody noticing that they're being bled. Just like parasites do.
If you want to find the reason for much of the evil in this world explore 'natural law vs corporate law' also known as 'the law of the land vs the law of the sea'. I'm not saying patents are bad. Innovation needs investment and that needs to be paid for in some honest way. But... monopolies are only possible through the protection of corporate law.
And this is what MQA is secretly all about. It's licence is like a cancer that spreads into everything it touches. MQA hardware? You pay. MQA recording? You pay. MQA medium? You pay. MQA streaming? You pay... You get it. And once you payed for your hardware licensing fee of course you want your money's worth. And soon, since you are committed you can't get or want anything else.
But is it really worth it? I don't (just) mean the extra money. But does it improve intrinsic value? Does it deliver more information? (ie sound quality). Or does it allow you to conserve more information you can use, to be exact (as people state emphatically that you can't hear beyond 20kHz anyway). Intrinsic value is something that has value of itself, not just attributed value. The intrinsic value of a dollar bill is lighting a small fire or wiping paper, a lot less than the promise that is printed on and attributed to it.
Experiment
So, take a 16-44 file. Where are you going to put compressed >20kHz information without taking up room in a compressed file (let's say flac). You can't delete information. Once it's gone it's gone. You can't magically make it reappear. You can try to reconstruct it, but then we're in lossy codec area. We want to contain the original natural acoustic information. Not a facsimile. (well, unless your girlfriend is a Balenciaga SM teddybear-handbag, then you'll agree to anything). You can only do that by cutting space where hopefully nobody will notice: the 2 least significant bits. But that's not lossless. That is defrauding your customers.
If you have a 24-48 file, (heaven forbid a true 'master file') you might consider using bits 24-17 that has no useful information anyway (or does it?). You are not going to invent new information to make it sound 'better'. Or, well, that's called upsampling. That's not new information. That's more 'stretching the truth' if info=truth.
So, try this experiment with a real 24-96 (or 24-192, doesn't matter for the experiment) recording. Recode it to one 24-48 flac and to a 16-96 flac file. Yes: you throw away information! Then look at the file sizes and compare. Now isn't that interesting!? It's about the same filesize! Now listen to them and compare. And compare to the original 24-96. Which one would you consider (more) worthy of the designation 'high definition'? I know from experience 24bit doesn't bring anything, 96 kHz makes an immediate recognizable and repeatable difference.
Profit
So, why would you do all the 'song and dance' , or 'licenced magic' to cut and paste a 16-96 file into a MQA 24-44 file? WHERE IS THE GAIN? Qui bono? That is the most important question for any investigative detective. Yup, it's the financial gift that keeps on giving.
And because it's so lucrative, it is also pushing out all real high res material of 24-88 and higher. Because 'it's the same quality, only smaller' which is a blatant lie. You should not want to endorse such platforms. The music entertainment industry is already totally corrupted (not all persons, although it's very hard to remain integrity). MQA is just another scheme.
(didn't follow the discussion)
Just my 2 cents.
Have not and will not do MQA because for this reason: If you have 4G/5G in your phone or 100MB/s (at least) in your home, why go MQA? Streaming stereo @DSD512 is around 6MB/s, DXD @ 2.3MB/s uncompressed. 20yrs ago maybe...Storage is another. But nowadays 20TB HDD is around $400 so...
It is about subjectivity on how listeners anticipate the sound to be.
On Mathematics perspective, a single error or mistake in billions of data means it is not perfect, that means it is not lossless.
As usual this is degenerating into a MQA bash and hate fest. There is no point in your vitriol. If you don't like it, don't pay for it. Just stop whining about something that has nothing to do with you and doesn't affect you at all.
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