MQA: That Sounds Good. To Me.

Rnrmf said:
Since nobody else posted this yet, this video comes down pretty hard on MQA. The author submitted his own tracks to MQA which got published to Tidal and then he analyzed them versus the original files; I found the entire length pretty interesting. One of the more serious accusations is that the majority of MQA on Tidal are 44.1 files, not hi-res, and that MQA just upsamples them so that the end user thinks they are a real hi-res file

I published music on Tidal to test MQA - MQA Review - YouTube

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Here we have visible, objective proof that MQA has been trying to fool everyone. Yet I bet that some folks will still continue to “trust” their ears instead of science. Like someone said earlier, it is ok to like or prefer whatever, but facts are facts.
 
Surprised Youtube hasn't taken down the video, its a scorcher 😊.
MQAs lawyers must be working furiously, Tidal did immediately yank the tracks.
Funny stuff. ;)
 
nicoff said:
Yet I bet that some folks will still continue to “trust” their ears instead of science.
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Thats a default for the technically illiterate, not a choice. However, why shouldn't they listen to what they prefer, in this case a healthy dose of unauthentic aliasing distortion added, if that's what they prefer, regardless of the marketing nonsense they believe?
This is yet another case of it it sounds better to you, enjoy it. But beware of touting "objective" crutches, to avoid looking silly.

cheers,

AJ
 
The video makes a point to vindicate Neil Young for pulling his albums from Tidal a month or two ago; I think some people might have interpreted this as NY being cranky or having an ulterior motive, but it's a valid point if the MQA version of his albums were smoke and mirrors
 
nicoff said:
Here we have visible, objective proof that MQA has been trying to fool everyone. Yet I bet that some folks will still continue to “trust” their ears instead of science. Like someone said earlier, it is ok to like or prefer whatever, but facts are facts.
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Ahem... Yeah, I can name many more obvious items in audio besides MQA.

This hobby has always been part science and artesian art of crafting good sounding, good measuring, scientifically backed designs and part "Having tea with the Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland, type of approach from some others".

I don't believe MQA was intended to fool anyone, it was "perhaps" a good approach as a lossy encoding to prove that it can both save bandwidth and storage while proving that Bob Stuart has "figured out" what the human ear can and cannot appreciate. Then again he was always doing things his own way and certainly the licensing fees didn't hurt!

MQA is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Spotify has over 155 Million subscribers while Tidal has 3 Million, so unless MQA is adapted by other platforms, chances are it will remain a very small, niche, concept that is only relevant to a handful of audiophiles, myself NOT included. I'm very happy with Qobuz and no MQA. :P
 
TheOctopus said:
MQA is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Spotify has over 155 Million subscribers while Tidal has 3 Million, so unless MQA is adapted by other platforms, chances are it will remain a very small, niche, concept that is only relevant to a handful of audiophiles, myself NOT included. I'm very happy with Qobuz and no MQA. :P
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Insignificant in those terms, yes, but one of the points was that it hurts audiophiles overall because of the added cost of licensing MQA decoding in gear that implements it and which, by and large, is added due to vocal customer demand. I think the video or comments or something I read yesterday after watching the video claimed that MQA adds 20% to the cost of a device. That seems steep to me and I don't take that at face value but it's an interesting perspective.

I'm interested in gear that implements it even though I don't subscribe to Tidal; at best I have a handful of MQA compact discs that offer novel and good remastering compared to what else is available. Of course I think all these remastered compact discs that I've bought are mastered to DSD first and the fact they aren't offered on SACD from the start is irritating. I'd pick the SACD over the MQA disc all day if I had the choice.
 
Does seem its fate is tied to Tidal and this certainly wont help adoption on other platforms.
Btw, Neil Young is cranky. Just happens to be right on this one. :happy:

cheers,

AJ
 
I’m just glad that every week we get additional MQA titles to choose from. New music every week. New manufacturers adding capability to their gear. New sources to purchase downloads from.

Must be crappy lives for all these individuals who aren’t happy unless jumping from site to site arguing about MQA, benefits of power cords, whether switches impact sound, etc.
 
Crankiness comes from realizing that hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on gear and music only to realize that which was obvious from day one to others... MQA sounds worse and one does not need a few hundred thousand dollars of gear to figure that out. Only a good pair of ears...
 
All of this is pointless anyway. In the end, as is almost always the case with audiophiles, no one will be convinced. The side of MQA non believers will not go out of their way to warm up to it and the MQA followers will simply call this guy a "quack" just like the guy who built a cable comparator to show that cables do not pass the signal any differently from each other. I forgot who that guy was already but I thought that was an interesting and logical way to prove a point.
 
TheOctopus said:
Crankiness comes from realizing that hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on gear and music only to realize that which was obvious from day one to others... MQA sounds worse and one does not need a few hundred thousand dollars of gear to figure that out. Only a good pair of ears...
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I agree that's how I heard it on my system.
To subjectively prefer how MQA sounds is one thing and it's certainly possible that MQA could sound better on one's system but I can imagine there are some people that won't want to admit that the source they prefer or have championed is technically inferior on multiple levels.
 
Rnrmf said:
I agree that's how I heard it on my system.
To subjectively prefer how MQA sounds is one thing and it's certainly possible that MQA could sound better on one's system but I can imagine there are some people that won't want to admit that the source they prefer or have championed is technically inferior on multiple levels.
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As I have mentioned multiple times in various threads, we don't have a definitive standard to go by. There is no more of a bullseye to aim for with this hobby than there is admiring and comparing/contrasting the Mona Lisa to The Last Supper and arguing over which is more "perfect"?

The moment in space and time when the instruments first played a note and made a sound is gone and forever replaced by some version of it that is less than perfect. To the musically untrained ears, or even the trained ears, we have very little idea what constitutes accurate representation of that sound, how it actually sounded in that acoustic space by comparison to that what we are hearing the moment our system plays it back.

Logic dictates it can never sound the same. Two very different acoustic spaces, all the various processes involved with recording and mastering, not to mention all the variables involved with hundreds of feet of various cables/components if we are to believe they all make a difference? All that before it is even packaged on a music disc, vinyl or a digital file ready to be consumed and played over various systems in various rooms.

Then we add all the trickery and origami folding and unfolding of MQA on top of that...


So is it the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper that is "technically" a better painting?
 
The good news is that people have a choice. There are people who love them some MQA like Still One, and there are others that hear it and know something is wrong. You get to choose whether you want to listen to MQA or not.
 
TheOctopus said:
So is it the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper that is "technically" a better painting?
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Agreed again, but it's probably more accurate to describe the comparison as between the Mona Lisa and some version (copy?) of the Mona Lisa as opposed to the Mona Lisa vs The Last Supper
 
mep said:
The good news is that people have a choice. There are people who love them some MQA like Still One, and there are others that hear it and know something is wrong. You get to choose whether you want to listen to MQA or not.
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Choices are definitely a good thing. One can chose to eat organic or one can choose to eat McDonalds... There are health benefits and there are simple taste preferences and habits that outweigh concerns over health for some.

We can certainly measure things, we can can certainly say measurements do or do not matter in audio (depending on whether the measurements support or do not support the argument or desired results)

If enjoying music is the desired goal from this hobby, it can be achieved on many different levels, with and certainly without MQA.


Some have young, fresh ears that still hear out to 20Khz, many do not... We still only have 2-4 seconds of audible memory built into us so things will certainly sound a bit different upon swapping things but hey, it is all part of the fun. The accessorizing, upgrading, planning, dreaming, working towards some goals, achieving, only to continue the process tirelessly and seemingly endlessly is perhaps the beauty and the allure of virtually any hobby or passion out there.

If the gear is a big part of the hobby as it is for most audiophiles, so be it, it is what it is. Many own Porsche, Corvette, Ferrari, not many can drive like Walter Röhrl... Many audiophiles enjoy a good sound and great gear, not everyone is a musician with pitch perfect hearing.
 
Rnrmf said:
Agreed again, but it's probably more accurate to describe the comparison as between the Mona Lisa and some version (copy?) of the Mona Lisa as opposed to the Mona Lisa vs The Last Supper
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Both were painted by Leonardo Da Vinci, created some 8 years apart. I'm sure he used different brushes, different paint, different canvas, he was in a different mood, the light was different, at 1.3 Million miles per hour, the Milky Way Galaxy had traveled over 91 Billion miles further into space. It definitely was not the same space and time by then... Of course one can paint a copy, that copy would then be gauged for accuracy to the original. How do we do that with audio?

So which one of Da Vinci's creations is the technically more correct painting? It is all very subjective, NO?

Perhaps that can never be the right question to ask? Surely they are to be admired all within the context of itself, like any other masterpiece painting or sculpture?

Perhaps our own approach to audio should be similar? Enjoy that which you have created on your end, without having to compare it for accuracy to the actual creation and birth of that musical moment in the studio? We certainly like to use the accuracy argument in this hobby :)
 
The very paradox of high end audio, is that it should be impossible to capture the original sound without having affected and therefore changed it.

If the main argument and design philosophy of audio gear is such that "everything changes sound", then we have come to the conclusion, the "perfect recording" and "perfect reproduction" can never be achieved?

Well, in that case my friends, enjoy whatever you like with whatever flavor you have created with your system.

That would be my conclusion and is the very philosophy by which I have gained tremendous satisfaction out of my system without having to worry about such trivial things as whether power cords or switches change my streaming music files sound... or which amplifier or new pair of speakers can get me closer to some elusive and unobtainable perfection. But I get the desire to constantly upgrade, been there myself.
 
TheOctopus said:
Crankiness comes from realizing that hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on gear and music only to realize that which was obvious from day one to others... MQA sounds worse and one does not need a few hundred thousand dollars of gear to figure that out. Only a good pair of ears...
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Keep on telling yourself it sounds worse. That doesn’t make it correct.
 
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