Goldensound’s view on MQA

Regardless of what you think about MQA, the guy that posted that video almost certainly went out of his way to find something provocative to post about in order to start his YT channel. So he wasn’t exactly neutral in trying to assess MQA. Bob Stuart has published a response on his Bob Talks blog. There are a lot of folks with very high end systems who are mightily impressed by MQA. If folks who have spent £40k+ on their systems think it has merit I am disinclined to write off MQA simply because of this video or the snarky comments on various facebook and other forums. Nothing beats listening for yourself ultimately and making your own mind up.

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At least not for as long as you need to wear special glasses… but reasons for MQA resistance/disinterest are quite a different from 3D video, or even surround sound hifi.

I meant that they are both proprietary, commercial initiatives pushed by a part of the industry, without a real demand from consumers. Solutions looking for a problem so to speak. Very difficult to maintain in the long term…

I would say there are two parts to this.

The first is the scientific assessments based on measurements, and then there’s the subjective listening experience, which your last sentence addresses.

The video seems to be only concerned with the measurements but not the experience. In that regard, he seems to make a good attempt at assessing MQA via the usual standard methods and seems to make sensible conclusions from them.

As far as being provocative is concerned, if his conclusions refute any claim made for MQA, this will naturally seem/be provocative. But to say he “clearly” is being provocative, I did not read that from the video.

Or no ADC at all - with digital instruments (keyboards of various, effects of all sorts, beat-boxes).

Well, he published the file for us all to listen to. Unfortunately the MQA-people went in to panic-mode and reacted …

I still remember MLP where Bob S. and his people basically re-invented FLAC and wanted thousands for the encoder.

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I think one of the original intentions for MQA was really interesting, to capture the sound signatures of studio environments so that they could be applied to or subtracted from recordings. This is a very interesting way of making recordings transparent, by having the option to remove the studio environment from a master, or by adding it to simulate the original recording environment at home.

Since a few years, similar techniques are also used to great effect for amp-modelling and speaker-simulation in the music industry:

The problem with MQA is that they chose to “misuse” it somewhat for another purpose, to simulate high resolution audio from a lower quality signal. While this is technically a form of simulation that can be done with these technologies, it’s not what they were intended for. It’s also a lossy process, so there is always an approximation taking place.

It just seems unnecessary, since storage and bandwith are not limiting factors anymore in 2021, so there is no real good reason to not stream the original losless high resolution audio instead.

I wish they would have stuck with the original purpose and improved on that…

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A response from GoldenSound:

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Q: Is MQA lossless?
A: It’s better than Lossless!

Nearly spat my dinner out over my family reading that one…

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Oh dear, the MQA response is silly. I more or less canned my Tidal subscription over this, which might be just as silly, but closed systems, together with highly dubious claims, mean I’d rather put my hard earned cash to another streaming service who do not associate themselves with such things

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That pretty much destroys all credibility to any claims they make that aren’t material, testable and supported by the provision of irrefutable evidence.

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When reading the whole answer, it’s not so ridiculous. Lossless only means that the original file was compressed with a lossless algorithm. It does not mean that no improvements to the format are possible. What they are saying is along the lines of “it’s not just lossless, but has additional advantages”

Whether they additional claims they make have merit is a separate discussion of course

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I think the premise of the youtube guy is that it’s misleading to an average consumer, he’s looking for something tangible that can demonstrate how it makes something different/better.
consumer electronics companies are having to continously reinvent themselves to stay current and ahead of the curve.
You see similar in content for movies/streaming, Dolby Vision vs HDR10+ as an example.
I think he’s being fair and just asking questions out of curiousity mostly.

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I wasn’t criticizing the Youtube guy. I haven’t watched the video even, but certainly it is legitimate to test the claims and one would hope that the company making the claims deals with criticism in an honest manner.

I was just commenting on commenting on an incomplete quote from the MQA page as if it is all they had written

I don’t think it’s technically lossless, because you can’t decode an MQA like a Zip and get the original, unaltered source back. The unfolding is a lossy process that approximates the original.

Yes, I know. My point was that they didn’t really say “it’s better than lossless” as if they meant losslesser than lossless. They gave a long list of why they think it’s better than just being lossless, and it has nothing to do with this.

Each of those claims is, of course, open to debate.

But that is misleading…

It’s like going to a restaurant and ordering chicken curry, but getting beef curry served instead. And when asking the waiter getting the response “Yes i know it’s not chicken, but it’s better than chicken!”.

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It’s marketing, they are hardly they only culprits. And to use your analogy, it’s like the waiter not just saying “but it’s better than chicken!”, but then continuing with a long list of reasons for why he thinks it is.

I don’t know what’s so controversial with the idea to read to the end and criticize the content, not just stop at the heading. That headline is hardly the most outrageous claim in the hifi world

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I said BUTTER Chicken, not BETTER Chicken!

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The MQA compression algorithm is NOT lossless, it’s a lossy compression, and, once information is lost it can’t be regained (entropy).

The result of a lossy system can’t be better than a lossless system at the same resolution and sampling rate, this is a mathematical fact (the Nyquist limit and Shannon limit reflect the mathematical entropic limits of information).

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