headfry
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2012
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Just what I thought, thanks for the honest reply.How long to you have to think about it ? LOL
Just what I thought, thanks for the honest reply.How long to you have to think about it ? LOL
Really ,.put a list together of these industry giants and so called professionals then post it over on the pro MQA thread ,.Perhaps you haven’t noticed this thread isn’t debating MQA ..
Imagine if these brands did not support MQA. They would lose half of their customers. PS Audio themselves stated that they only implemented MQA into their equipment because they didn't want to lose clients.i will post it here since i am not debating i am stating a fact- DCS, aurender, moon , nad, esoteric, lumin,
mark levinson, meridian, yba, alo ,ifi, astell and kern just to name a few of the big names that support mqa
Add Mytek, Bluesound, Oppo (dead but still kicking). It's good to have choices. None of these manufacturers stopped supporting PCM or flac.i will post it here since i am not debating i am stating a fact- DCS, aurender, moon , nad, esoteric, lumin,
mark levinson, meridian, yba, alo ,ifi, astell and kern just to name a few of the big names that support mqa
So apparently people do want it?Imagine if these brands did not support MQA. They would lose half of their customers. PS Audio themselves stated that they only implemented MQA into their equipment because they didn't want to lose clients.
It seems people do, for reasons mostly unrelated to technical performance or the difference in sound quality compared to FLAC I'd wagerAdd Mytek, Bluesound, Oppo (dead but still kicking). It's good to have choices. None of these manufacturers stopped supporting PCM or flac.
Guys, just because MQA is not lossless does not mean it doesn't sound good. There are other lossy codec that sound great like ATRAC (later versions). Probably the most unusual thing about MQA is that it is lossy but also high res. I don't think there is another example of such a codec.
So apparently people do want it?
Again, if you don't like it nobody is holding a gun to your head.
LOL!. I guess you skimmed through GoldenOne video with clenched teeth and pounding your fist though if you did actually listen you simply can’t take truth in the evidence , facts sometimes hurt people’s feelings in this day and age and you seem to fit in that category and finally you also failed to grasp the marketing decision of these companies to add MQA to their product line, express your support on the pro MQA thread .i will post it here since i am not debating i am stating a fact- DCS, aurender, moon , nad, esoteric, lumin,
mark levinson, meridian, yba, alo ,ifi, astell and kern just to name a few of the big names that support mqa
If you can refute any part of GoldenOne video I’ll wholeheartedly agree with you on MQA ,.please no word salads You show me hard evidence any part of Goldenones forensic analysis on MQA are false....Just what I thought, thanks for the honest reply.
I thought I would start a thread for those who appreciate the SQ of MQA - both files and Tidal Masters -.(as opposed to those
debating the merits from a scientific standpoint).
i am expressing my support on the pro MQA thread, express your support on the pro MQA thread .
If you can refute any part of GoldenOne video I’ll wholeheartedly agree with you on MQA ,.please no word salads You show me hard evidence any part of Goldenones forensic analysis on MQA are false....
Outstanding! Best post in recent memory.GoldenOne's test is massively flawed in its very premise and lacks basic understanding of MQA's working. He managed to trick the encoder into creating its worst possible output, by telling it to encode real music while feeding it synthetic square waves and spike signals outside its encoding envelope -- and ignoring the encoder's warnings about it. The predictably poor results were then "analyzed" and posted as representative of MQA's performance.
In a better context, the analysis wasn't that bad, and even raised a few interesting questions. But it was poorly premised and misleadingly framed: There was no desire to truly "explore how MQA works". And GoldenOne has shown zero interest in performing similar analysis on "best effort" MQA encodes from real music, say using the free 2L tracks which provide multiple DXD recordings and MQA encodes for comparison. His analysis would be far more credible if it were based on the best MQA can do rather than the worst it can be tricked into doing.
(As a note, even a comparison between 2L's DXD files and their MQA encodes would show differences, as the MQA encoder re-aligns samples to compensate for ADC peculiarities. Yes, it is a lossy codec, aimed at analog-to-analog fidelity. )
I have posted about this in other threads on head-hi, and far more knowledgeable people have posted about it on ASR (including Amir himself). That hasn't dented the excitement of anti-MQA crusaders, who are salivating at the thought finally killing Tidal -- and through that MQA.
I thought of posting about this here when GoldenOne first advertised the coming of his video (since its outcome was fully predictable) but I chose not because it does not belong in this thread as has been repeatedly pointed out.
I am not even that enthusiastic about MQA myself: I do wish they were more transparent and open, and I have often posted that I would prefer if MQA didn't exist and studios happily shared their crown jewels in HiRes FLAC without watermarks. But that is not this world. I also have issues with Tidal's recent changes: I dislike that they no longer have parallel CD and MQA versions of albums, but instead stream truncated (and downsampled in the case of 48KHz base rate tracks) versions of MQA albums to those who choose the Hi-Fi quality setting. My concerns about the Warner 16/44 MQAs are well documented in these forums, although my stance has softened after recent tests I performed.
In any case do I prioritize quality of recordings over format any day: HiRes FLAC or MQA doesn't matter compared to good recordings. But I have a Tidal subscription (which I just renewed for 3 months) and some of my music there is MQA -- and sounds fantastic on my Gustard A18 DAC and my LG V30 phone. Mostly because that's how it was recorded.
The reason I bother responding now is less in defense of MQA and more in defense of common sense and factual analysis. And most of the fanatical venom spewed against MQA possesses neither. And either way, it still doesn't belong in this thread. Including this post of mine. Thus I do not intend to debate it further in here. And I have no desire to attend the anti-MQA echo chambers.
Have a great weekend, everybody. Listen to some good, well recorded music from your preferred source, whatever it may be
GoldenOne's test is massively flawed in its very premise and lacks basic understanding of MQA's working. He managed to trick the encoder into creating its worst possible output, by telling it to encode real music while feeding it synthetic square waves and spike signals outside its encoding envelope -- and ignoring the encoder's warnings about it. The predictably poor results were then "analyzed" and posted as representative of MQA's performance.
In a better context, the analysis wasn't that bad, and even raised a few interesting questions. But it was poorly premised and misleadingly framed: There was no desire to truly "explore how MQA works". And GoldenOne has shown zero interest in performing similar analysis on "best effort" real music samples, say using the free 2L tracks which provide multiple DXD recordings and MQA encodes for comparison. His analysis would be far more credible if it were based on the best MQA can do rather than the worst it can be tricked into doing.
(As a note, even a comparison between 2L's DXD files and their MQA encodes would show differences, as the MQA encoder re-aligns samples to compensate for ADC peculiarities. Yes, it is a lossy codec, aimed at analog-to-analog fidelity. )
I have posted about this in other threads on head-hi, and far more knowledgeable people have posted about it on ASR (including Amir himself). That hasn't dented the excitement of anti-MQA crusaders, who are salivating at the thought of finally killing Tidal -- and through that MQA.
I thought of posting about this here when GoldenOne first advertised the coming of his video (since its outcome was fully predictable) but I chose not because it does not belong in this thread as has been repeatedly pointed out.
I am not even that enthusiastic about MQA myself: I do wish they were more transparent and open, and I have often posted that I would prefer if MQA didn't exist and studios happily shared their crown jewels in HiRes FLAC without watermarks. But that is not this world. I also have issues with Tidal's recent changes: I dislike that they no longer have parallel CD and MQA versions of albums, but instead stream truncated (and downsampled in the case of 48KHz base rate tracks) versions of MQA albums to those who choose the Hi-Fi quality setting. My concerns about the Warner 16/44 MQAs are well documented in these forums, although my stance has softened after recent tests I performed.
In any case do I prioritize quality of recordings over format any day: HiRes FLAC or MQA doesn't matter compared to good recordings. But I have a Tidal subscription (which I just renewed for 3 months) and some of my music there is MQA -- and sounds fantastic on my Gustard A18 DAC and my LG V30 phone. Mostly because that's how it was recorded.
The reason I bother responding now is less in defense of MQA and more in defense of common sense and factual analysis. And most of the fanatical venom spewed against MQA possesses neither. And either way, it still doesn't belong in this thread. Including this post of mine. Thus I do not intend to debate it further in here. And I have no desire to attend the anti-MQA echo chambers.
Have a great weekend, everybody. Listen to some good, well recorded music from your preferred source, whatever it may be
It would be great if you could provide hard evidence to refute any of GoldenOne’s findings other than opinions, speculation, and theories. Seriously. I’m not being argumentative. I would simply like to know the truth. I think everybody would regardless of the camp they are in.
The main giveaway is in the early minutes of GoldenOne's video: The encoder rejected his synthetic samples until he tricked it by wrapping them in music. MQA's response (shown only as small-print legalese) elaborates on that and how the samples triggered many warnings from the encoder.
MQA was designed to encode music, as perceived by humans; recorded by microphones and sampled by ADCs. It uses FLAC for backwards compatibility, but instead of wasting space to bit-perfectly preserve noise and high frequency amplitudes that never exist in music, it uses that space to store ultrasonics (HiRes samples in a compressed form). This is a deliberate trade-off assuming that these contribute more to musical fidelity. One can disagree, but that was always its premise.
So when GoldenOne tricked the MQA encoder into encoding signals far outside its envelope, it was destined to fail. And it warned about it. Most conclusions in his analysis become invalid because the entire premise is false.
Such tests can be perfectly useful when applied to DACs or a bit-perfect codec. But that is a different premise. And I think he knew that.
Beyond that look for my recent posts here on head-fi, and posts by mieswall, filter_listener and amirm in the thread on ASR:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/
It's a vast thread with much hate, salivation and guesswork, and little understanding of MQA outside of those three members.
And that's all from me. Already more than I intended.