[sabloke]

Why MQA when you can do this? Sound quality is amazing and a Roon license cheaper than Meridian's fees

 

[gikigill]

I might not be an IT or Audio whiz but even I can deliver lossy files losslessly if someone desires.

Show me the money Headfi!!

 

[castleofargh]

Did you even read the opening post? You are totally missing the point (and point, and point), confusing the issues of what is normally meant by lossless (digital file) and how the mqa group is redefining it (trowing half the data away before the adc or ddc conversion).

Rephrasing 'a mixed bag of honesty and marketing', is just a very eufemistic way of saying they make loose half-true assertions. Half-truths are even more insidious than straightforward lies.

If you don't see how misleading and carefully phrased the wording is in the mqa narrative (that's the new word for propaganda, ie lies)... I'm lost for words here...

-If they say 'jump' I say 'Why?'
-When you dismiss things that you don't understand then others suffer. Faith is the foundation of every enterprise.

Did I write something that's incorrect? If so, explain it to me so I can be less wrong tomorrow.
Am I supporting mqa when I try to explain some small aspects of their argument? Is this some sort of witch hunt where one must lash out at everything or be called a supporter of the mqa lies?
I clearly mentioned that mqa is lossy and that their marketing has been abusing facts for years. Is that not enough? A quick search on this forum has me placing mqa and propaganda right next to each other as early as 2015(in a post replying to you, how fun is that?).
Here is the clearest thing we'll ever get to read from Stuart and all, and what I was alluding to:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/c9207ae3fbb2bdf725cc/US20150154969A1.pdf
They have at least one method that seems lossless for both encoding and decoding, but it involves some original file that would be like 17/96 and, I think, would have first been low passed with their preferred filter instead of a hard digital cut. so even that is arguable in term of losslessness depending as I said, on what we treat as the reference data. And I don't think that process is being used much, if at all.
Everything else has lossy spamed all over. It's not the best effort to hide it IMO. But yes the marketing side of mqa is like almost any marketing of audio formats claiming audible improvement. Hires at large, dsd, mqa, to me they're all the same, using similar tricks. The best being to sell a different master and have people believe that the sound difference comes from the format. After that, anything else is just icing on the lie cake.

 

[]eep]

Did I write something that's incorrect? If so, explain it to me so I can be less wrong tomorrow.
Am I supporting mqa when I try to explain some small aspects of their argument? Is this some sort of witch hunt where one must lash out at everything or be called a supporter of the mqa lies?
I clearly mentioned that mqa is lossy and that their marketing has been abusing facts for years. Is that not enough? A quick search on this forum has me placing mqa and propaganda right next to each other as early as 2015(in a post replying to you, how fun is that?).
Here is the clearest thing we'll ever get to read from Stuart and all, and what I was alluding to:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/c9207ae3fbb2bdf725cc/US20150154969A1.pdf
They have at least one method that seems lossless for both encoding and decoding, but it involves some original file that would be like 17/96 and, I think, would have first been low passed with their preferred filter instead of a hard digital cut. so even that is arguable in term of losslessness depending as I said, on what we treat as the reference data. And I don't think that process is being used much, if at all.
Everything else has lossy spamed all over. It's not the best effort to hide it IMO. But yes the marketing side of mqa is like almost any marketing of audio formats claiming audible improvement. Hires at large, dsd, mqa, to me they're all the same, using similar tricks. The best being to sell a different master and have people believe that the sound difference comes from the format. After that, anything else is just icing on the lie cake.

no of course you didn't write anything that is incorrect. Neither does Bob, he he is very careful in his wording. Yet it is not the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why do you you think they always make you swear this in court? Because if you do either you can conceil the truth, deceive or frame the narrative.

Im really not going into an argument here. Just read what Linn says about MQA, you can find the link in the opening post. It's really not 'just a filetype'. And while you try to be 'the voice of reason' here you are just the devils advocate in pulling us back into the old flamewar of 'what's the use of high res' with the same old, same old where everybody has long past that station.


Goldensound is trying to make us aware of plain fraud, lies, bad businesses practices, racketeering, strong arming, monopolising the industry and censorship. If you want to be it's advocate with your golden sherif star just think what that does for your status of objectivity. If you really want that you need to at least read a lot more into the subject and shed the 'political correct' high horse.

 

[Lurker0918]

MQA, FLAC, MP4/ALAC, APE, etc... all set their own standards for "lossless". Hence, "lossless," the color blue, or "sound quality" here means what ever the hell they want it to mean under their standard.

There is no industry standard for "lossless" as codified for say redbook standard (IEC 60908), AES3/EBU (IEC 60958), S/PDIF (IEC 61937) or even something like Roquefort (under appellation d'origine contrôlée) or Bourbon (under The Federal Standards of Identity).

Unless I am mistaken here, can someone point me to the official/industry designation for "lossless" as illustrated above? Or "high res?" Or "sounds good?" If the only standard of argument is you can yell loudly and get a bunch of people to support your position, you better be prepared to accept the opposition's definition when they raise even more partisans in support of their position because that kind of sounds like what is going on here.

 

[gikigill]

Generally speaking, 16/44/1411 is considered lossless.

 

[omegaorgun]

Any of the Hi-Res stuff is good enough for most.

 

[davidfrance]

Yesterday there was a bit of a tune that I wanted to listen to ten times. I have it in a .flac file.

I loaded the .flac file into Audicity, and cut out all but the part I wanted, and exported to a .wav file.

No big deal. But I said to myself that I doubt I could do anything like that in the MQA world.

 

[castleofargh]

MQA, FLAC, MP4/ALAC, APE, etc... all set their own standards for "lossless". Hence, "lossless," the color blue, or "sound quality" here means what ever the hell they want it to mean under their standard.

There is no industry standard for "lossless" as codified for say redbook standard (IEC 60908), AES3/EBU (IEC 60958), S/PDIF (IEC 61937) or even something like Roquefort (under appellation d'origine contrôlée) or Bourbon (under The Federal Standards of Identity).

Unless I am mistaken here, can someone point me to the official/industry designation for "lossless" as illustrated above? Or "high res?" Or "sounds good?" If the only standard of argument is you can yell loudly and get a bunch of people to support your position, you better be prepared to accept the opposition's definition when they raise even more partisans in support of their position because that kind of sounds like what is going on here.

The only notion that can stand on its own is that encoding decoding several times will keep giving the same data. That codec will be called lossless. It gets rid of the question of reference or the possible fact that the resolution(or anything else) was initially changed before encoding.
So if I save a giant file in jpeg, it's a lossy operation. But if I save a 5 by 5 pixel version in TIFF, TIFF does it losslessly. Same thing for mp3 and wav.

 

[]eep]

MQA, FLAC, MP4/ALAC, APE, etc... all set their own standards for "lossless". Hence, "lossless," the color blue, or "sound quality" here means what ever the hell they want it to mean under their standard.

There is no industry standard for "lossless" as codified for say redbook standard (IEC 60908), AES3/EBU (IEC 60958), S/PDIF (IEC 61937) or even something like Roquefort (under appellation d'origine contrôlée) or Bourbon (under The Federal Standards of Identity).

Unless I am mistaken here, can someone point me to the official/industry designation for "lossless" as illustrated above? Or "high res?" Or "sounds good?" If the only standard of argument is you can yell loudly and get a bunch of people to support your position, you better be prepared to accept the opposition's definition when they raise even more partisans in support of their position because that kind of sounds like what is going on here.

you are asking for something that can't exist. You can't standardize logic. There is no standard for booleans, it's either yes or no. There is also no need for a standard for something that is obviously either true or false.

What we are dealing with is calculations, coding and decoding and compression. You can use different methods of calculating but the result will always be the same if the calculation method is logically correct. Lossy codecs are like sports scholarships; jocks suck at algebra but they're good at playing games. But I guess NASA isn't going to hire any after their sports career.

You can recode any lossless file to any other without losing any information (other than tags, coverart, lyrics and replaygain information included in the container file which are not audio). You can do it a million times and it will be the same. So lossless file formats do not set standards. To be or not to be, that is the question.

Also, there is a difference between a codec and a file format and a container format. You could patent a file format. That is why Flac is called 'FREE lossless audio codec'. When it's patented means you do something different than others and you can ask money for it. That's the reason why MQA does things different. Not because it is better but so they can legally shield it off. The more parts of the process of recording to reproduction is shielded off from the free market and competitors the more money they can demand. This doesn't have anything to do with sound quality or using research money to improve it, but monopolizing the market. The only ever way to obtain a monopoly is to make and enforce laws that exclude competitors.

Like always... follow the money.

 

[Lurker0918]

Huh? I am asking for a definition that can't exist (even though I think you were trying to provide yours as did someone else)? The key point to this whole discussion doesn't exist? Is it not OP who is positing that MQA is make a fraudulent claim by saying they are lossless when they are not? So if there does not exist a definition of lossless, MQA cannot be making a fraudulent claim then. Got it, thanks.

 

[chef8489]

Huh? I am asking for a definition that can't exist (even though I think you were trying to provide yours as did someone else)? The key point to this whole discussion doesn't exist? Is it not OP who is positing that MQA is make a fraudulent claim by saying they are lossless when they are not? So if there does not exist a definition of lossless, MQA cannot be making a fraudulent claim then. Got it, thanks.

Definition is a bit perfect representation of the original master. As was stated you can change lossless codecs back and forth without loss from the original master recording. Example. Wav to flac to alac back to wave and everything is bit perfect.

"Lossless compression is a class of data compression algorithms that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data."

 

[gikigill]

Huh? I am asking for a definition that can't exist (even though I think you were trying to provide yours as did someone else)? The key point to this whole discussion doesn't exist? Is it not OP who is positing that MQA is make a fraudulent claim by saying they are lossless when they are not? So if there does not exist a definition of lossless, MQA cannot be making a fraudulent claim then. Got it, thanks.

Does MQA have higher loss of information than FLAC/WAV?

There's your answer.

 

[]eep]

again you are confusing things. You are right that something like 'high res' needs a definition because the boundaries need to be set. But lossless already has clearly set boundaries since it's a boolean; it is or it isn't.

Also you are confusing filetype and codec. An MQA encoded file is delivered as a flac file. The flac container just delivers the fingerprinted MQA encoded file 1:1. Here is a quote from Wikipedia that is often treated as holy writ (it is not canon, just pc):

MQA-encoded content can be carried via any lossless file format such as FLAC or ALAC; hence, it can be played back on systems either with or without an MQA decoder. In the latter case, the resulting audio has easily identifiable high-frequency noise occupying 3 LSB bits, thus limiting playback on non-MQA devices effectively to 13 bit. MQA says that nevertheless the quality is higher than "normal" 48/16, because of the novel sampling and convolution processes

So if you think you play a generic 16-44 file and upsample it without an mqa decoder you don't just get only 13bit but you get junk in the bottom 3bit. So when Tidal switch to mqa completely and you are using a non-mqa dac you won't even NOT get cd quality but high frequency crap to boot for free.

 

[Lurker0918]

Got it, I was dense and did not understand MQA material is delivered in FLAC format. Then if MQA material does not meet FLAC (Xiph.org's) standards, it is not lossless as per FLAC's standards. With that said, I will continue to be a jackass here. Since we now have a standard to debate under, let's go to Xiph.org's license page:

They hold no patent or control over the FLAC standard. In fact it states: "The FLAC and Ogg FLAC formats themselves, and their specifications, are fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance). They are free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write FLAC or Ogg FLAC software which is compatible with the specifications for no charge and without restrictions of any kind. There are no licensing fees or royalties of any kind for use of the formats or their specifications, or for distributing, selling, or streaming media in the FLAC or Ogg FLAC formats."

"Neither the FLAC nor Ogg FLAC formats nor any of the implemented encoding/decoding methods are covered by any known patent."

So without any control which they gave up, anyone can call their product FLAC and define it as is. Xiph states they reserves the right to set set FLAC specification and certify compliance. Without any patents, mechanism for control or enforcement, those are just hollow words. Then that MQA is free to call whatever they want, what they want ("lossless").

In the FAQ section:
"I compressed a WAVE file to FLAC, then decompressed to WAVE, and the two weren't identical. Why?
I compressed a WAVE file to FLAC and it said "warning: skipping unknown sub-chunk LIST". Why?

WAVE is a complicated standard; many kinds of data besides audio data can be put in it. Most likely what has happened is that the application that created the original WAVE file also added some extra information for it's own use, which FLAC does not store or recreate by default (but can with the --keep-foreign-metadata option) (see also). The audio data in the two WAVE files will be identical. There are other tools to compare just the audio content of two WAVE files; ExactAudioCopy has such a feature."

Using JRiver, I took a random 56.4 MB (59,183,422 bytes) WAV file and converted it to a FLAC file. That FLAC file is now 39.3 MB (41,282,455 bytes). Converting that FLAC back to WAV, it is now 56.4 MB (59,187,524 bytes). There are no further changes in size in conversions. This seems to be minuscule size difference and it seemed to increase the size of the original file for some reason. Again, audio data is said not to be lost but in a conversion back and forth there was a difference. It appears some data was lost that their protocols don't consider important. But still troubling, they aren't sure what was lost. However they are assuring us the audio data is fine. When you lost (or in this case gained) something, that would seem to be incongruous with any definition of lossless? I'll stipulate that no audio quality was lost (as Xiph claims) but data was lost was it not?

You just assume I use Tidal. I don't, nor use MQA and quite frankly could care less about either party here per se. I don't care about bits, rez, format or any buzz word du jour. I've lived through records, reel to reel, cassette, laserdisc, redbook, Minidisc, DAT, DCC, whitebook, MP3, AAC and scarletbook off the top of my head. If MQA becomes the future, so be it. Been there, done that this is nothing new.