MQA

[Audiophiliac]

If Netflix streams it's 4k video at 15gb\hr, like they said when I last checked, that's a bitrate of roughly 4166kbs. I haven't seen anything released yet at 384kbs, but if you could be getting 192 for your track, good luck with that, Netflix is still roughly 21 times as much. That Netflix plan is 14.99 here, Tidal's plan with the mqa that makes it actually only stream at 44.1, is 19.99.
Tidal was charging double and using folding down then back up instead of downsampling then upsampling, to save bandwidth costs. MQA is folding everything above 16.44 down to 16.44 rate, to be folded up to 96 by cpu, after that you have to replace your 10k dac with the same model with a cheap chip first to go higher. All the extra data is hidden in the base samples, there is no extra size, you can't hear it though. Did they ever mention how they get the 24bit into 16bit? They have to have hidden it in the same size, also. Only on Tidal.
Video game distributors will let you download free games at full speed for the rest of your life, if you want. They don’t see a need to conserve bandwidth costs.
Opera's can smoke the blockhead stuff in performance and content.

 

[Audiophiliac]

It's why you need the guy with the 3-button mouse to handle the recording software. He finds the toggle to raise the bitrate from minimum for the gear, instead of going for a mochaccino and going with all the women. So that they don't have to learn that.

 

[gregorio]

Does that mean they believe snakeoil exists, therefore they should be wary, or do you mean that audiophiles always think snakeoil is better?

Neither. It means that the vast majority of audiophiles believe in some form of snake oil, be it audiophile: Cables, clocks, HD file formats, fuses, etc.

You must think a lot of the threads here are talking about snakeoil.

Clearly that’s the case and has been for many years.

Some people buy dac's with better clocks, and hear a difference the gearmakers put them in for,

People claim all sorts of things; the earth is flat, fairies are real, etc. Claiming to perceive/experience a difference is quite different to actually being able to hear a difference. This is why science has only accepted controlled testing for many decades, rather than just what people claim. And, gearmakers do not put “better clocks” in audiophile gear so consumers can hear a difference, they do so for marketing purposes. You seem to not believe the false audiophile marketing for MQA but do believe the false audiophile marketing for clocks and other things?

and are now including external clock inputs so that you can get as good of one as you want.

External clocks do not improve the timing of the DAC, that’s not what they’re for. At best an external clock will make no difference, at worst they will make the timing/jitter worse.

I bet the files are bigger exactly as they correspondingly should be. Maybe you're only using a 25 year old cd player to measure.

A 25 year old CD player won’t play files other than 16/44.1. Maybe you have no idea what equipment I use? File size does not define audible audio quality.

Do you believe any gear sounds any different than someone playing from their phone speaker?

Do you believe a phone speaker measures significantly different to say a full range studio monitor? Can such a monitor be differentiated from a phone speaker in controlled testing?

They could all just be snake oil.

No they couldn’t, not if the measured differences are within the thresholds of audibility and they can be differentiated in controlled testing (DBT). Don’t you know that?

What if they say it's snake oil if you think anything sounds different, digital is perfect?

It doesn’t matter what “they say”. An “Argumentum ad Populam” is a fallacy and science is not based on what people say, it’s based on reliable evidence. Don’t you know this either?

Sorry if you don't realize it yet, but playing flac proves it's not the original.

How does it prove that? How do you know the mastering studio didn’t create the FLAC or that the FLAC wasn’t created from the original master? And, why would you be sorry that I don’t “realise yet” an assertion that is false?

G

 

[Audiophiliac]

How does it prove that? How do you know the mastering studio didn’t create the FLAC or that the FLAC wasn’t created from the original master? And, why would you be sorry that I don’t “realise yet” an assertion that is false?

When you convert to flac, you now have to uncompress into memory on the fly. The data in memory, that then gets sent out of the port you're using, has noise introduced by the cpu, during the uncompression. If you can't hear it on your gear, you can call it snake oil.

I guess the rest was all the stuff I don't know anything about. The threads I learned them in must have been about snake oil to you. Would you say most things people say are snake oil, because we don't know how your system sounds?

 

[Audiophiliac]

You're dead if you're on Tidal. Nobody wants people like that working for them.
bigshot signed up for Head-Fi with his My First Headphones back in 2004.

 

[71 dB]

When you convert to flac, you now have to uncompress into memory on the fly. The data in memory, that then gets sent out of the port you're using, has noise introduced by the cpu, during the uncompression.

There is not noise by the cpu when uncompressing lossless files. If there were, the files wouldn't be lossless!

Jesus Christ! Can't you just go away already and end this insanity?!

 

[gregorio]

When you convert to flac, you now have to uncompress into memory on the fly. The data in memory, that then gets sent out of the port you're using, has noise introduced by the cpu, during the uncompression.

What “noise introduced by the cpu” and even if there is introduced noise, how could that affect the output of a DAC?

If you can't hear it on your gear, you can call it snake oil.

Again, you don’t know what I can hear or what my gear is. However, this is irrelevant because no one can hear noise that doesn’t exist! It makes no difference how much noise is introduced by the cpu (or anything else in the digital signal path) as long as it’s not such a massive amount of noise that it causes bit errors, because only a faulty/incompetently designed DAC would allow that noise to affect it’s output.

I guess the rest was all the stuff I don't know anything about.

Best not to argue about it then wouldn’t you say? If you don’t know, it’s better to ask.

The threads I learned them in must have been about snake oil to you.

I don’t know what threads you’re referring to, so I can’t say but there are quite a few threads in other forums on head-fi where they are talking snake oil clocks. Jitter has been a typical audiophile marketing falsehood for many years, EG. Take a non-existent or inaudible “problem” and then sell audiophiles a solution.

Would you say most things people say are snake oil, because we don't know how your system sounds?

None of what I’ve stated has anything to do with my system or how it sounds. It is about the fundamentals of what digital audio is and how it works. So the answer to your question is “of course not” and for the same reason, it’s also not because you don’t know how my car feels to drive.

G

 

[71 dB]

If Netflix streams it's 4k video at 15gb\hr, like they said when I last checked, that's a bitrate of roughly 4166kbs. I haven't seen anything released yet at 384kbs, but if you could be getting 192 for your track, good luck with that, Netflix is still roughly 21 times as much. That Netflix plan is 14.99 here, Tidal's plan with the mqa that makes it actually only stream at 44.1, is 19.99.
Tidal was charging double and using folding down then back up instead of downsampling then upsampling, to save bandwidth costs. MQA is folding everything above 16.44 down to 16.44 rate, to be folded up to 96 by cpu, after that you have to replace your 10k dac with the same model with a cheap chip first to go higher. All the extra data is hidden in the base samples, there is no extra size, you can't hear it though. Did they ever mention how they get the 24bit into 16bit? They have to have hidden it in the same size, also. Only on Tidal.
Video game distributors will let you download free games at full speed for the rest of your life, if you want. They don’t see a need to conserve bandwidth costs.
Opera's can smoke the blockhead stuff in performance and content.

What is your point?

 

[71 dB]

Have you tried touching mqa?

No I haven't. I have zero interest in MQA. It is snake oil, a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and a scam.

Don't blame me, you're the one who made a message pop up saying I got an email saying you decided to say that, probably to see what I say. Nothing I can do about it. Probably wouldn't tell you anyway.

I'm not blaming you for posting here. I am saying to me personally your posts do not make this board better.

44.1 can be all you need don't worry. Remember, 96kbps 22khz mp3's are all the perfect part, too.

Yep. Considering I am 52 years old, I don't hear hardly anything above 16 kHz. I "need" something like 35 kHz sampling rate (2*16 kHz + reconstruction filter bandwidth) and 13 bits (or even less if shaped dither is used) of dynamic range. CD quality nicely covers that for me.

96 kbps mp3s at 22.05 kHz can sound surprisingly decent I believe, but they are not audibly transparent. People can tell them apart from original CD quality files in proper blind listening tests. People can tell that the frequencies above 10 kHz are missing even if it lowers perceived sound quality very mildly.

That said, I don't know what your point is. You just write sentences listing different audio formats and make weird claims...

 

[Audiophiliac]

There is not noise by the cpu when uncompressing lossless files. If there were, the files wouldn't be lossless!

Jesus Christ! Can't you just go away already and end this insanity?!

It's not my problem that you can't hear that. It's much more relaxing uncompressed.

 

[sander99]

why would I not want to still be talking about how Tidal is still presently charging double for a scam

Nobody is saying that. But some of the other things you are saying...
Look, you probably don't realise what this sub-forum of Head-Fi, the Sound Science forum is all about.
This is the only place on Head-Fi where it is allowed to discuss actual facts and science about audio rather than marketing bull and pseudo science. And also the only place on Head-Fi where statements contradicting the actual facts and established science are allowed to be (and will be) questioned.

Regarding downsampling a file to 44 then upsampling back, why should I even want to do that?

Because you might be surprised about the result and learn something.

Even if you say you can't tell the difference between 32k and 64k, does that mean there isn't?

Now just assume for a moment that there is no audible difference between high res and standard res, do you think then it is okay that people are told that high res sounds better, and that they pay extra thinking they will actually get audible better sound while they are not? It seems to me that we essentially have the same motivation, only you are not aware yet how far the deception by the audio and music industry is going. You assume because you (think) you hear a difference, and because many, many other people also (think they) hear a difference that there is an audible difference. It is however an indisputable scientific fact that people can (think to) hear differences, even night and day differences, when there is no audible difference (or actually even no difference at all). For example there is a studie showing that telling people a change from A to B is made while it is still A results in the same change in which brain areas are active as when a real change from A to B occured (while being told about it also).
And no, not everything sounds the same, not "everything digital" is audibly perfect, 44.1 kHz 8 bit PCM for example is not, but there is a point where the human hearing abilities are fully covered and any further improvement is inaudible.

Just do the test I proposed and then you will be a lot wiser!

It's not my problem that you can't hear that. It's much more relaxing uncompressed.

Nonsense. You can not hear it. You perceive it. Your brain constructs your hearing experience and uses the knowledge that you listen to FLAC and your believe that it is audible (plus 100+ other things besides the actual sound going into your ears).

 

[Audiophiliac]

No I haven't. I have zero interest in MQA. It is snake oil, a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and a scam.


I'm not blaming you for posting here. I am saying to me personally your posts do not make this board better.


Yep. Considering I am 52 years old, I don't hear hardly anything above 16 kHz. I "need" something like 35 kHz sampling rate (2*16 kHz + reconstruction filter bandwidth) and 13 bits (or even less if shaped dither is used) of dynamic range. CD quality nicely covers that for me.

96 kbps mp3s at 22.05 kHz can sound surprisingly decent I believe, but they are not audibly transparent. People can tell them apart from original CD quality files in proper blind listening tests. People can tell that the frequencies above 10 kHz are missing even if it lowers perceived sound quality very mildly.

That said, I don't know what your point is. You just write sentences listing different audio formats and make weird claims...

Sorry for making you have to read this thread.
I don't know why you think higher res than cd means you have to be able to hear higher. At 96, I find slightly more fluidity to electric bass notes, too.

 

[Audiophiliac]

What “noise introduced by the cpu” and even if there is introduced noise, how could that affect the output of a DAC?

I can only help you hear it if you try uncompressing a well known file to wav, then compare what playing that sounds like to what you are used to. I find uncompressed to be much more relaxing. If you can't hear a difference, lucky for you, your collection takes 40% less space.

Again, you don’t know what I can hear or what my gear is. However, this is irrelevant because no one can hear noise that doesn’t exist! It makes no difference how much noise is introduced by the cpu (or anything else in the digital signal path) as long as it’s not such a massive amount of noise that it causes bit errors, because only a faulty/incompetently designed DAC would allow that noise to affect it’s output.

There are many people shopping for Raspberry pi's with audio OS, network streamers, and disc transports to replace their laptop's with cpu's with something quieter. You should go to their threads and tell them they can't hear cpu noise, there are lots of them.

Best not to argue about it then wouldn’t you say? If you don’t know, it’s better to ask.

I don’t know what threads you’re referring to, so I can’t say but there are quite a few threads in other forums on head-fi where they are talking snake oil clocks. Jitter has been a typical audiophile marketing falsehood for many years, EG. Take a non-existent or inaudible “problem” and then sell audiophiles a solution.

None of what I’ve stated has anything to do with my system or how it sounds. It is about the fundamentals of what digital audio is and how it works. So the answer to your question is “of course not” and for the same reason, it’s also not because you don’t know how my car feels to drive.

G

You should just tell people it's theoretically impossible for more expensive gear to have anything it improves on. Then you won't have to hear a twice as expensive dac's snakeoil techniques.

 

[Audiophiliac]

What is your point?

Probably that Tidal trying to save money on bandwidth won't save them very much money, anyways.

 

[gregorio]

It's not my problem that you can't hear that.

That doesn’t make any sense. Of course he/we cannot hear something that isn’t there and doesn’t exist.

It's much more relaxing uncompressed.

As they’re both identical, how can one sound more relaxing?

I don't know why you think higher res than cd means you have to be able to hear higher.

Exactly “you don’t know” so why are you arguing based on ignorance and in a sound science forum of all places?

At 96, I find slightly more fluidity to electric bass notes, too.

The bass notes at 96kHz are identical to the bass notes at 44.1kHz, so again, how can one have more fluidity (or more of anything) if they’re identical?

It’s just all nonsense!

G