[Joe Bloggs]

I don't think it's actually mandatory here on head-fi to try something before dissing it. Of course, those who don't, always look silly to those who did try it and like it, and those who like it, always look silly to those who think the product is about as much worth trying as a piece of turd is worth tasting. It's not a new conundrum in audio, I must say. I do have access to MQA, from work, out of necessity, but don't have a system that would show it in its best light for me, i.e. with playback DSP such as BRIR for headphones or room correction and surround upmixing and dynamics enhancement for speakers. But, well, that was MQA's own doing (disabling DSP in 99% of cases)

 

[bfreedma]

"I read somewhere it's an incorrect technical claim so now I don't like it" is a little bit different from "I carefully set up a signal chain based on research from others who are enjoying MQA, for what best reproduces it, and even then I did not like it."

While I don't know which is true in your case, your post makes me assume the former?

You really like to assume. My signal chain is "carefully set up", not that how my signal chain could be setup could somehow make MQA's false performance and functional claims fact.

Are you seriously suggesting that how MQA claimed to work, that MQA claimed to be lossless, and that MQA doesn't include DRM are now being called out due to my reading of "incorrect technical claims"? In the real world, we have hard evidence that none of those claims by MQA were true.

I have no issue with anyone who simply "enjoys MQA". The issue is with the continuing false technical and performance claims of the type MQA originally perpetuated and that you now post to as you attempt to technically justify the unjustifiable.

Or more simply, just presenting an alternate view of MQA supported by evidence so that readers of this thread can make an informed decision based on what MQA actually does and not MQA's marketing claims.

That said, I'm out as continuing this conversation is clearly not going to be productive for either side of the debate.

 

[Powermankw]

Am I allowed to not like MQAs tactics and deception if I have had Tidal (still do) for years and never had a Spotify account? (which I don't) For the life of me, I don't understand how criticizing a company for its underhanded dealings... And downfall because of them... Can cause such a reaction like some caffinated Chihuahua lap dog hearing a knock at the door and an equally exaggerated defense the likes of which have not been seen since the Battered Bastards of Bastogne in 1944. (I just thought over the top comparisons were required).

Enjoy you new Bluesound in MQA bliss.

 

[moshe tes]

As a long time former Tidal user, the reason I don't use it anymore has to do with MQA majorly and the fact that Amazon offers the same thing(but better) through my membership.
Even putting all that aside, anyone who says Spotify sounds bad clearly hasn't used it. It may not sound as resolving as a hifi platform, but by golly, if you have a well setup signal chain, it sounds glorious with classical music. Well, and the fact that Spotify does not charge me extra for some confidential voodoo technology.
This brings me to my point, if you dismiss Spotify without properly weighing it against the competition, you happen to be a hypocrite according to your own words.

 

[moshe tes]

Don't hate what you don't fully know. Don't demand other people have the formats they want taken from them. Don't be hypocritical in judging something's flaws when the flaws of your own system are worse. Don't celebrate death, pain, or failure, with gleeful sadism, nor give into baser primitive instincts like mob violence.

"Are you aware of the difference between DATA compression and DYNAMICS compression? Are you also aware of the fact that"
The context of "loudness wars" assumes you know that this pertains to dynamic compression. You are assumed if commenting here to know the difference and to know the compression in itself is value-neutral. It is the kind of lossyness and the degree of lossyness that are what matters, when it comes to data compression; and indeed lossless or "effectively and nearly lossless" compression are possible.

"2. MQA cannot claim any innovation to combating dynamics compression, other than putting out less compressed masters--which literally anyone can do IF the market motivation is there?"
Sorry but you're wrong. It was the sword that cut the knot in that battle. Now that they brought awareness to the problem and it's fading fast, you take for granted the victories it achieved for YOU, and aren't even grateful. At the time, an artist in a session would sign off on how the mastering came out and sounded to them, and THEN it would get remastered and recompressed into oodles of different dynamically compressed formats for distribution. The idea of AUTHENTICATING that what you hear is the MASTER, allowed the consumer to know if they were getting a GMO (genetically modified offering.) Anyone claiming that's evil reminds me of those Monsanto ads they successfully ran to prevent laws requiring GMO labeling for food. Did you ever think that evil people might WANT to pepper your mind with misinformation to cause the defeat of truthful labeling initiatives? Probably not, and probably that's why they defeated the GMO food labeling initiatives also. By letting the consumer CHOOSE, if and when they WANTED, to actually hear the master and not the compressed version remastered by Bubba, the first of two Demons that allowed the loudness war to continue, was damaged and weakened. This is not the place to discuss the second demon that has also been damaged and defeated, leading us to a new dawn and era of non-compressed recordings on our horizon. And the hated MQA played a key part of this new enlightened world you now take for granted.

Judging from the above, apparently not.
Apparently not what? You mask your question then put words in my mouth and mind to make it seem I'm apparently not something. Strawman trick doesn't work here. The context of this comment is my observation that MQA is a far less lossy format than Spotify uses, and that there is a hypocritical irony in Spotify people getting "holier than thou" over lossless/lossy, when attacking MQA. If you wcant to give a scientific refutation of Spotify being less lossy than MQA, go for it. If you want to re-educate me on the meaning of hypocrisy or what "pot calling the kettle black" really means, then go ahead there also. But "apparently not" with zero explanation or discussion, doesn't qualify as productive discussion.

"Does the solution consist of MQA charging for every step of it and then pretending to do something about it?"
People get paid for their jobs. Artists for performing. Producers for producing. Recording engineers for doing their stuff. Distributors for distributing. And quality authenticators for authenticating. So people getting all self-righteous over someone being paid for a quality service doesn't move the needle.

Dumb people tend to conflate things. For example, when speaking about a technology, they'll hate it and call it bad because, what, a marketer or someone made an exaggerated claim? Are computers in general bad because someone did a cyber crime? Should we outlaw your favorite pizza after we found someone falsely marketing pizza? Did people in business roles make mistakes in marketing and execution of MQA when doing their uphill fight against the demons supporting a status quo world of giving people lossy MP3 from non-original and dynamically compressed remasters? Yeah. Doesn't mean we should celebrate their death instead of take a quiet assessment of their victories, defeats, and what are the new battles ahead in the ongoing fight to prevent the industry from using lies and misinformation to compress us back into the darkness.

"It most certainly does not matter to me because my reference home system simply does not play anything above a 48kHz format"
That's fine. The whole discussion wasn't about you. It was about people who take their own reference and preference and want to force it on others, take formats away from others, bash others for using a different format, and celebrate when their amateur hate-memes succeeded at defeating other people's preferred formats and systems.
So please tell me that just because YOU don't want more than 48kHz, that you want to take away other people's freedom to go 96k and celebrate with sadistic glee when the internet memes and pseudo-misinformation successfully kills it off. Remember the Monsanto analogy and the precaution to always question mob rule. Whenever you are hating something that's trying to be better and give more freedom of quality choices, ask yourself how sure you are and where your information came from and who are the people who benefit from getting you to join the chorus. Because in a billion dollar industry, you're naive to think someone doesn't benefit from success and failure and won't try to sway how people think, somewhat selfishly, to achieve their own monetary goals which are prioritized OVER any goals of higher quality and freedom of choice.

So the discussion is not about what matters to you. This was about people CELEBRATING the demise of MQA and HAPPY their campaign resulted in the destruction of a format that many enjoyed for its benefits it brought to THEIR music-lifestyle.

Are you listening through headphones by any chance? If so, I strongly advise you to try out BRIR headphone virtualization before pronouncing any one recording format as superior over any other. Because for me not having a BRIR in the playback chain is like leaving the room lights off in comparison.
I'm not against BRIR or anyone else's attempt to bring new technologies to improved recordings. I might not like all of them, but this discussion was about fighting mob mentality that takes glee in destroying and defeating and taking away other people's freedom to try those things out and use them. I am interested in binaural recording and other types of recording that will better emulate realistic soundwave timings across 2 or more channels, and thank you for bringing the subject up to promote it.

You seem to have this obsession with the idea that only losyness or losslessness is the reason for a degradation in sound quality. The claim from MQA was a certain level of losyness with the quality of lossless music. I don't care how much more lossless MQA is/was than Spotify. I care that it delivers on the claims and that it not charge an arm and a leg for something it can't explain in a non-controversial manner. MQA clearly did not live up to the hype and any attempt at salvaging a non-existent reputation will only fall flat on its face.
Think of the ridiculous assertion from MQA about the reduced streaming bandwidth requirement with MQA. In what world does a person with the means to afford a proper MQA setup lose sleep over inadequate bandwidth with FLAC?

 

[Lexxie]

You really like to assume. My signal chain is "carefully set up", not that how my signal chain could be setup could somehow make MQA's false performance and functional claims fact.

If you recall, every statement you ever made is about technical claims and your counterclaims about their correctness, never once talking about the signal chain that you tried it on, for how long you tried it, and so on. So that COULD lead one to assume your focus on MQA is coming from technical claims and not any effort to try your hardest to get a great MQA signal chain and a long period of evaluation of it. Thus, I jokingly tried to make yourself obvious to yourself, when it comes to yourself's apparent biases. I did not actually assume anything, which is why I phrased it more as a question to see if you would then go off on a longer discussion of sound quality comparisons, or by not doing so, reveal the truth indirectly to us and nail it down for us to see the bias exposed.


Are you seriously suggesting that how MQA claimed to work, that MQA claimed to be lossless, and that MQA doesn't include DRM are now being called out due to my reading of "incorrect technical claims"?
No, I am entertaining the possibility that you're thinking square and are a parrot of other false claims made against MQA, without being sure of it, because everything you say has the same general melody of unbacked claims as they make. So let's dice it down
1. that MQA claimed to be lossless -
Yep, this is mass-marketing and in the strictest verbatim interpretation, false. However, truthful marketing of its degree of lossy- and gainy- ness would fly WAY over the heads of consumers and you almost can't fault them for simplifying it to say "lossless". Instead of "lossless in everything but frequencies inaudible to your ear which are then used as data zones to compress a higher-than-CD resolution to get you MORE information than a CD in the AUDIBLE RESOLUTIONS in order to deliver to you MORE information than a normal FLAC in just as much space, but with the loss of a bit or so of resolution that the recording didn't even use but in some extremely rare cases would result in lossyness but 99% of the time not, such that for 99% of music we are not only NOT lossy but are actually GAINY and that FLAC is actually lossy compared to MQA!"
Try selling that mouthful to your marketing team and watch them say "Look, let's just call it lossless." Turns out to have been a big mistake when they let them go that road. They should have forced the marketing team to come out with a new word like "More than LOSSLESS, it's GAINFUL!" or something like that. But we're arguing about marketing here and not the tech. The whole point was that arguing about marketing instead of the tech, is a bad mistake, and by you doing so here, you are only proving that point.
2. and that MQA doesn't include DRM
Depends what you mean by DRM. If you mean that it protects itself from someone else making a FALSE claim that you're hearing a master, then by definition it has to be DRM. It NEEDS to authenticate the claim of being a master or else anyone can compress and degrade audio and just rubber stamp it as "master". If you mean that record companies would never allow us to hear the ACTUAL master (rather than the release), without some kind of protection and assurances, then sure. If you mean that marketing claimed it's not DRM so that dummies wouldn't then propagandize it with false lying conspiracies that "they're trying to take over our music and gain more power for record companies" when they were in fact doing the opposite so much so that record companies were making shills pepper your mind with lies, then sure. At the end of the day I was happy as hell it did NOT allow people to hack and fake a false master, and happy that the fact I couldn't decode it myself, meant that I was now allowed to save my whole collection on my phone, whereas if it didn't have this protection, it wouldn't be allowed. How this becomes any kind of damnation of MQA when it's actually the golden strength of what makes it great, I fail to see. The argument is not made well and seems to be saturated in the conspiracy lies people were feeding to everyone.
3. are now being called out due to my reading of "incorrect technical claims"?
To be fair, some of the exaggerations and half-truths of the marketing deserved to be called out. What was not deserved is an absolute falsification of what any of that means and turning it into a total myth where your average person who reads this drivel walks away thinking MQA was created by the devil to take over and monopolize the record industry and to do so with a format that will replace their nice CD-quality music with lossy trash, forever damaging and lowering the standards of fidelity in a monopolistic grab motivated only by GREED! I mean OMG, that is so further from the truth it makes your head spin, since it's almost the exact opposite. MQA was draining the swamp. Threatening the jobs and income of compressionistas who were feeding you degraded pig slop. Threatening the media distribution that was paying the artist fractions of a penny and hoarding the money for themselves, by making a more direct connection straight to the artist to get MORE money when the consumer RIGHTFULLY CHOOSES to hear the MASTER the artist WANTED them to hear but the content distributors were PREVENTING you from hearing. You "true believers" of the misinformation campaign are singing the song that turns this model of white knight of goodness, into the biggest mythic lie of some kind of greedy demons trying to damage hi-fi forever with a lossy format, while taking over the industry with greed and lies. It's absolutely criminal and it's why I'm talking about mob mentality so much, cautioning us all against it. This incident with MQA is a human tragedy of propagandized violence against the people who brought us the Renaissance of Uncompressed HiRes Streaming. Is this the best gratitude we can give them for their sacrifice? C'mon people!

In the real world, we have hard evidence that none of those claims by MQA were true.
"We"? What claims? The only thing I've found is violently ruthless misinformation campaigns designed to KILL the people who saved hi-fidelity from DECADES in the wasteland of degraded sound quality. No proof anywhere. People who can't even design a DAC saying that people who literally were involved in the invention of D/A technology, are incompetent and know nothing.

My signal chain is "carefully set up", not that how my signal chain could be setup could somehow make MQA's false performance and functional claims fact.

Great, tell us the best possible attempt you made at a best MQA signal chain, and your objective testing of the subjective listening pleasure it gave you vs. the non-MQA played on the same system. Because I keep seeing CLAIMS it can't be done as if you KNOW this without even TRYING. This really seems to go against everyone I have ever
encountered in REAL LIFE where I just casually played A/B volume matched and didn't even ask which is better or tell them what it is, and just asked "what do you think" and they're always "Yeah, that one is better, sounds more real like you're in the room." NOTE that I am not claiming MQA unfolded to 24/192 is better than a 24/192 on a highly resolving DAC. Because in apples-to-apples, MQA is about getting a 24/192 in situations where you'd otherwise only have a 16/44 available due to bandwidth, data limits, speed limits, usage limits, storage limits, and so on. A 24/192 MQA clearly spanks the 16/44 FLAC and everyone is running around yelling and hating about every irrelevant thing in the world while not mentioning the one thing that matters most, the fact that when delivering 24/192 MQA in situations you'd normally only get 16/44, MQA sounds better. No other claim matters or should matter.


I have no issue with anyone who simply "enjoys MQA". The issue is with the continuing false technical and performance claims of the type MQA originally perpetuated and that you now post to as you attempt to technically justify the unjustifiable.
That's great. Because if true, you'd love MQA and be saddened by some of the exaggerated half-true marketing and be pained by the hate campaign leading to the downfall of consumer choice for the best quality compressed HiRes currently invented. My post is not about justifying anything, honey bunny. It's about standing up against mob rule and "internet truths" that created out of misinformation and turn into a life of their own that then proceeds like a tsunami to damage innovative heroes in our culture who deserve praise for their achievements. We've literally won the loudness wars and have HiRes streaming all over the place, because of what Tidal and MQA started. Show some gratitude for heaven's sake.

Or more simply, just presenting an alternate view of MQA supported by evidence so that readers of this thread can make an informed decision based on what MQA actually does and not MQA's marketing claims.
This thread is for lovers of Tidal and MQA to discuss that and it's people like you who make this thread totally uninhabitable to the citizens to whom it is targeted. You have not picked apart a SINGLE fact about MQA, you literally just have a mushy parrot conception of things others have said but give NO TECHNICAL DISCUSSION on it AT ALL. This is literally how mob-hate-mentality functions and you got fooled by the bad guys who wanted to STOP the low-bandwidth HiRes revolution.

That said, I'm out as continuing this conversation is clearly not going to be productive for either side of the debate.
OK, and nothing personal. I have sometimes been swayed by "mob truth" myself until I went down the checklist of "what do I really know" and "who benefits from this version of truth and why would they want us all to believe it?" It is out of love that I try to defeat the misinformation campaigns that try to spit on the grave of the people who helped end the Loudness War and the delivery of pigslop compressed non-master material to the masses. THEY DESERVE OUR GRATITUDE. MQA is dead, long live FLAC, but let's keep our eye out from what we just learned. The enemy wants to COMPRESS you again and has actually won this battle. Be watchful!

 

[bfreedma]

If you recall, every statement you ever made is about technical claims and your counterclaims about their correctness, never once talking about the signal chain that you tried it on, for how long you tried it, and so on. So that COULD lead one to assume your focus on MQA is coming from technical claims and not any effort to try your hardest to get a great MQA signal chain and a long period of evaluation of it. Thus, I jokingly tried to make yourself obvious to yourself, when it comes to yourself's apparent biases. I did not actually assume anything, which is why I phrased it more as a question to see if you would then go off on a longer discussion of sound quality comparisons, or by not doing so, reveal the truth indirectly to us and nail it down for us to see the bias exposed.


Are you seriously suggesting that how MQA claimed to work, that MQA claimed to be lossless, and that MQA doesn't include DRM are now being called out due to my reading of "incorrect technical claims"?
No, I am entertaining the possibility that you're thinking square and are a parrot of other false claims made against MQA, without being sure of it, because everything you say has the same general melody of unbacked claims as they make. So let's dice it down
1. that MQA claimed to be lossless -
Yep, this is mass-marketing and in the strictest verbatim interpretation, false. However, truthful marketing of its degree of lossy- and gainy- ness would fly WAY over the heads of consumers and you almost can't fault them for simplifying it to say "lossless". Instead of "lossless in everything but frequencies inaudible to your ear which are then used as data zones to compress a higher-than-CD resolution to get you MORE information than a CD in the AUDIBLE RESOLUTIONS in order to deliver to you MORE information than a normal FLAC in just as much space, but with the loss of a bit or so of resolution that the recording didn't even use but in some extremely rare cases would result in lossyness but 99% of the time not, such that for 99% of music we are not only NOT lossy but are actually GAINY and that FLAC is actually lossy compared to MQA!"
Try selling that mouthful to your marketing team and watch them say "Look, let's just call it lossless." Turns out to have been a big mistake when they let them go that road. They should have forced the marketing team to come out with a new word like "More than LOSSLESS, it's GAINFUL!" or something like that. But we're arguing about marketing here and not the tech. The whole point was that arguing about marketing instead of the tech, is a bad mistake, and by you doing so here, you are only proving that point.
2. and that MQA doesn't include DRM
Depends what you mean by DRM. If you mean that it protects itself from someone else making a FALSE claim that you're hearing a master, then by definition it has to be DRM. It NEEDS to authenticate the claim of being a master or else anyone can compress and degrade audio and just rubber stamp it as "master". If you mean that record companies would never allow us to hear the ACTUAL master (rather than the release), without some kind of protection and assurances, then sure. If you mean that marketing claimed it's not DRM so that dummies wouldn't then propagandize it with false lying conspiracies that "they're trying to take over our music and gain more power for record companies" when they were in fact doing the opposite so much so that record companies were making shills pepper your mind with lies, then sure. At the end of the day I was happy as hell it did NOT allow people to hack and fake a false master, and happy that the fact I couldn't decode it myself, meant that I was now allowed to save my whole collection on my phone, whereas if it didn't have this protection, it wouldn't be allowed. How this becomes any kind of damnation of MQA when it's actually the golden strength of what makes it great, I fail to see. The argument is not made well and seems to be saturated in the conspiracy lies people were feeding to everyone.
3. are now being called out due to my reading of "incorrect technical claims"?
To be fair, some of the exaggerations and half-truths of the marketing deserved to be called out. What was not deserved is an absolute falsification of what any of that means and turning it into a total myth where your average person who reads this drivel walks away thinking MQA was created by the devil to take over and monopolize the record industry and to do so with a format that will replace their nice CD-quality music with lossy trash, forever damaging and lowering the standards of fidelity in a monopolistic grab motivated only by GREED! I mean OMG, that is so further from the truth it makes your head spin, since it's almost the exact opposite. MQA was draining the swamp. Threatening the jobs and income of compressionistas who were feeding you degraded pig slop. Threatening the media distribution that was paying the artist fractions of a penny and hoarding the money for themselves, by making a more direct connection straight to the artist to get MORE money when the consumer RIGHTFULLY CHOOSES to hear the MASTER the artist WANTED them to hear but the content distributors were PREVENTING you from hearing. You "true believers" of the misinformation campaign are singing the song that turns this model of white knight of goodness, into the biggest mythic lie of some kind of greedy demons trying to damage hi-fi forever with a lossy format, while taking over the industry with greed and lies. It's absolutely criminal and it's why I'm talking about mob mentality so much, cautioning us all against it. This incident with MQA is a human tragedy of propagandized violence against the people who brought us the Renaissance of Uncompressed HiRes Streaming. Is this the best gratitude we can give them for their sacrifice? C'mon people!

In the real world, we have hard evidence that none of those claims by MQA were true.
"We"? What claims? The only thing I've found is violently ruthless misinformation campaigns designed to KILL the people who saved hi-fidelity from DECADES in the wasteland of degraded sound quality. No proof anywhere. People who can't even design a DAC saying that people who literally were involved in the invention of D/A technology, are incompetent and know nothing.


Great, tell us the best possible attempt you made at a best MQA signal chain, and your objective testing of the subjective listening pleasure it gave you vs. the non-MQA played on the same system. Because I keep seeing CLAIMS it can't be done as if you KNOW this without even TRYING. This really seems to go against everyone I have ever
encountered in REAL LIFE where I just casually played A/B volume matched and didn't even ask which is better or tell them what it is, and just asked "what do you think" and they're always "Yeah, that one is better, sounds more real like you're in the room." NOTE that I am not claiming MQA unfolded to 24/192 is better than a 24/192 on a highly resolving DAC. Because in apples-to-apples, MQA is about getting a 24/192 in situations where you'd otherwise only have a 16/44 available due to bandwidth, data limits, speed limits, usage limits, storage limits, and so on. A 24/192 MQA clearly spanks the 16/44 FLAC and everyone is running around yelling and hating about every irrelevant thing in the world while not mentioning the one thing that matters most, the fact that when delivering 24/192 MQA in situations you'd normally only get 16/44, MQA sounds better. No other claim matters or should matter.


I have no issue with anyone who simply "enjoys MQA". The issue is with the continuing false technical and performance claims of the type MQA originally perpetuated and that you now post to as you attempt to technically justify the unjustifiable.
That's great. Because if true, you'd love MQA and be saddened by some of the exaggerated half-true marketing and be pained by the hate campaign leading to the downfall of consumer choice for the best quality compressed HiRes currently invented. My post is not about justifying anything, honey bunny. It's about standing up against mob rule and "internet truths" that created out of misinformation and turn into a life of their own that then proceeds like a tsunami to damage innovative heroes in our culture who deserve praise for their achievements. We've literally won the loudness wars and have HiRes streaming all over the place, because of what Tidal and MQA started. Show some gratitude for heaven's sake.

Or more simply, just presenting an alternate view of MQA supported by evidence so that readers of this thread can make an informed decision based on what MQA actually does and not MQA's marketing claims.
This thread is for lovers of Tidal and MQA to discuss that and it's people like you who make this thread totally uninhabitable to the citizens to whom it is targeted. You have not picked apart a SINGLE fact about MQA, you literally just have a mushy parrot conception of things others have said but give NO TECHNICAL DISCUSSION on it AT ALL. This is literally how mob-hate-mentality functions and you got fooled by the bad guys who wanted to STOP the low-bandwidth HiRes revolution.

That said, I'm out as continuing this conversation is clearly not going to be productive for either side of the debate.
OK, and nothing personal. I have sometimes been swayed by "mob truth" myself until I went down the checklist of "what do I really know" and "who benefits from this version of truth and why would they want us all to believe it?" It is out of love that I try to defeat the misinformation campaigns that try to spit on the grave of the people who helped end the Loudness War and the delivery of pigslop compressed non-master material to the masses. THEY DESERVE OUR GRATITUDE. MQA is dead, long live FLAC, but let's keep our eye out from what we just learned. The enemy wants to COMPRESS you again and has actually won this battle. Be watchful!

I think we found Bob Stuart's Head-Fi account...

When someone thinks that we owe a technically fraudulent product the "Gratitude They Deserve", there is no possibility of having a rational discussion. MQA defeated the loudness wars? That's quite a spin.

Generally, I don't thank people for attempting to monetize false claims. Perhaps that's just me.

 

[moshe tes]

I think we found Bob Stuart's Head-Fi account...

When someone thinks that we owe a technically fraudulent product the "Gratitude They Deserve", there is no possibility of having a rational discussion. MQA defeated the loudness wars? That's quite a spin.

Generally, I don't thank people for attempting to monetize false claims. Perhaps that's just me.

Tell me about it! Not to mention the partisan language which is too obnoxious to tolerate.

 

[Lexxie]

You didn't even wonder or meditate on it a bit?

Did you reject CD when they called it lossless, and you later found out Nyquist can only losslessly resolve a single sine wave? And that when adding harmonics and overtones and other real musical content at the same time, that D-to-A is lossy? Did you go into every forum for CD lovers and invade it with partisan claims against it, in their own thread dedicated to be a home for those people who liked CDs?

How is what you're doing with Tidal/MQA any different from that?

 

[moshe tes]

You didn't even wonder or meditate on it a bit?

Did you reject CD when they called it lossless, and you later found out Nyquist can only losslessly resolve a single sine wave? And that when adding harmonics and overtones and other real musical content at the same time, that D-to-A is lossy? Did you go into every forum for CD lovers and invade it with partisan claims against it, in their own thread dedicated to be a home for those people who liked CDs?

How is what you're doing with Tidal/MQA any different from that?

Well, it turns out, with a CD, you get a piece of plastic you can keep forever. With MQA, you pay for an intangible idea that lies about its capabilities.

 

[Powermankw]

Well, it turns out, with a CD, you get a piece of plastic you can keep forever. With MQA, you pay for an intangible idea that lies about its capabilities.

And... I don't necessarily absolve Tidal is all this either. It doesn't sit well with me their apparent comfy position in bed with MQA. They seem rather complicit in the whole thing. I like the fact too that they pass on more money to the artists... But at the end of the day we just have to take their word that's true. I would not be shocked at all if a suit was ever filed claiming artists did not get their proper cut.

Right now it is simply a matter of listening to content that Qobuz does not have and listening to Qobuz for the same reason. If Tidal doesn't get this sorted out fast... AND show that they actually have hi res and not just CD quality... Then I will be canceling the subscription.

 

[KaiFi]

All hail the mighty MQA, savior of music.

See, that's the problem. You're upset with "MQA haters", but you literally want people to worship MQA. As always, there's no nuance or middle ground, in your world it's either blind hatred or blind praise. None of the "lay people" I know have any clue what MQA is and the few non-audiophiles I know who subscribe to Tidal never went for the highest tier because it was too expensive. Some people I know do appreciate lossless music even if they're not "audiophiles". But MQA wasn't swaying anybody in that direction.

This thread became the general Tidal thread--if there's another thread for Tidal discussion that isn't about praising MQA, then I will go to that thread. But I've found Tidal-related discussion here and that's why I post here. Tidal users have various feelings about MQA, not all positive.

 

[moshe tes]

You didn't even wonder or meditate on it a bit?

Did you reject CD when they called it lossless, and you later found out Nyquist can only losslessly resolve a single sine wave? And that when adding harmonics and overtones and other real musical content at the same time, that D-to-A is lossy? Did you go into every forum for CD lovers and invade it with partisan claims against it, in their own thread dedicated to be a home for those people who liked CDs?

How is what you're doing with Tidal/MQA any different from that?

Having a bit of time on my hands after work and reading your comments, you parrot the pre-GoldenSound claims of MQA in a way that makes me wonder if you even watched that video. That marvelous piece of journalistic excellence singlehandedly exposed the heads at MQA for the scandalous charlatans that they truly are.

That's great. Because if true, you'd love MQA and be saddened by some of the exaggerated half-true marketing and be pained by the hate campaign leading to the downfall of consumer choice for the best quality compressed HiRes currently invented.

Consumer choice? Honey bunny, if you know anything about MQA, you are in the top less than 1% of the population. Consumers have spoken through Spotify and they ain't complaining. Even if we were to confine that consumer choice to the hi-fi community, they ain't embracing it either. Why? Not because of misinformation as you claim. It is because MQA can't corroborate its claims and effectively counter so-called misinformation. Consumers have nothing other than the fickle ears of fellow hifi-ers such as yourself to go on. Other than that, it's an ugly picture for MQA.

 

[gregorio]

Dumb people tend to conflate things.

Immediately after making this statement you “conflated things”, whoops! It was funny though, lol.

People get paid for their jobs. Artists for performing. Producers for producing. Recording engineers for doing their stuff. Distributors for distributing. And quality authenticators for authenticating. So people getting all self-righteous over someone being paid for a quality service doesn't move the needle.

What quality authenticators? You’re conflating the name (master Quality Authenticated) with MQA having teams of people actually authenticating masters. Whoops! There were no quality authenticators, there was no authentication, it was just a marketing name. I’ve produced masters that have been encoded into MQA by Tidal, no one authenticated it with me and I’m the only person who could authenticate it! There was no “service”, so duh, of course I’ll get “all self-righteous over someone being paid for a quality service” they’re NOT providing!

What matters here is that the pillars that supported the loudness wars were weakened by the new MQA paradigm.

You just made that up! MQA was not a new paradigm, it was as just a codec applied to the master after it was completed and it had no influence or effect whatsoever on what we did to the master before encoding. It had zero influence over what compression and limiting we used and therefore zero effect on the loudness wars, which unfortunately you also don’t appear to understand!

Downstream compressions of the original master are ideally completely blocked by the MQA process (when properly followed competently and honestly, at least.)

No, they’re not!

Compression sounds better?

Of course, why do you think compression has been around for 90 years and used almost ubiquitously on all commercial audio products? Maybe you think everyone, including the musicians/artists themselves want those products to sound as bad as possible? Have you ever heard a mix/master without any compression? The loudness wars was not an issue of the use of compression/limiting, it was purely an issue of inappropriate over-application, an issue engineers were complaining about 30 years ago, many years before the audiophile world even knew about it!

So when you hear two songs on radio, or satellite radio, streaming, or wherever else, the louder song sticks out as "better" to you (in a fake way), causing you to divert your money toward it IN SPITE OF THE FACT that the great majority of people would actually enjoy non-compressed music with the volume simply adjusted a little louder.

Again, you just made that up! Pretty much no one would enjoy the vast majority of music without compression, let alone “the great majority of people”!

While MQA didn't single-handedly defeat the loudness wars, you'll notice exactly when it came out, the beginning of the end of the compressionistas.

Oh dear, you’re conflating when MQA came out with when the loudness wars started to be tamed (whoops, conflating again!), a classic example of a correlation fallacy. Just because something happens at the same time doesn’t mean one causes the other. For example, in summer more people consume ice-cream, also in summer the number of people who die from drowning significantly increases, therefore eating ice-cream causes drowning! The “single-handed defeat” was the release of ITU BS. 1770 about 15 years ago but it took many years for it to filter down to music production/mastering, due to music distributors like Apple and others implementing it with “Sound Check”, “ReplayGain” and “Loudness Normalisation”. None of this had anything whatsoever to do with MQA!

Did you reject CD when they called it lossless, and you later found out Nyquist can only losslessly resolve a single sine wave?

CD is lossless and Nyquist/Shannon can resolve ANY number of sine-waves within a band-limited signal. Not only is that exactly what Shannon proved (hence why it’s called the Nyquist/Shannon Theorem) but it’s trivially easy to demonstrate using white noise (which contains all the frequencies). So you clearly don’t know anything about this either!!

I just find it really atrocious that people who don't subscribe to Tidal come and trash all the MQA threads and fling accusations at the people who enjoy MQA. And that the mods completely ignore this while in other threads any kind of bashing or insult results in bans or deleted posts.

What’s atrocious is that so many of the false marketing scams in the audiophile world are effectively not allowed to be “outed” as scams anywhere on Head-Fi (with the exception of the Sound Science subforum). I therefore share your surprise that the mods have allowed the truth/facts to be discussed and MQA to be exposed as the scam it is, as they don’t allow that for other audiophile scams.

That marvelous piece of journalistic excellence singlehandedly exposed the heads at MQA for the scandalous charlatans that they truly are.

To be fair, the Sound Science subforum trashed MQA years ago and the pro-audio community even earlier. Some of their marketing claims were disproven by their own patent application (being lossy for example) and others were just nonsense claims that every professional music/sound engineer would instantly recognise as being impossible (correcting recording equipment “timing blur” being just one example). What GoldenSound did was bring it to the attention of the audiophile community, unlike the pro-audio or scientific communities which tend to deliberately avoid the audiophile community.

G

 

[Currawong]

The idea of AUTHENTICATING that what you hear is the MASTER, allowed the consumer to know if they were getting a GMO (genetically modified offering.)

The authentication was BS. You could alter the file and remove frequencies and it would still authenticate. The authentication was just a flag in the file, as was the "unfolded" frequency. Any number could be put in there. What is quite comical is that there are commercial DACs with MQA that have a stated technical limit of 192 kHz as their maximum internal sample rate, that would state an MQA file was unfolding to 384 kHz!

What is more, multiple artists and engineers, such as Brian Lucey, stated that they never authorised the MQA versions of their music.

The only claim MQA made about their tech that was genuine was the first unfold. Literally everything else was a lie. It got to the point they had to edit their marketing materials as they would have fallen afoul of consumer protection laws in various countries. Note that I never use this word lightly when I do use it, but in all honesty, what MQA were doing was defrauding consumers.