The highlight for me was when he mentions that Tidal sends the same MQA formatted data, even when you aren’t listening at Master quality. It simply doesn’t decode the MQA data from it.
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We recently discussed this video in this thread:
You may wish to review the discussion there (or the moderator @TylersEclectic may wish to merge the threads).
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I watched that. Pretty slick and seamless response to the MQA fu… folks.
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Yes, MQA’s reliance on lawyer language to thread the needle (e.g., recall “It depends on what the definition of is is…”) strongly suggests their technology is just smoke-and-mirrors. While creating an algorithm that uses psychoacoustic principles to improve perceived quality is admirable, this is not and cannot be lossless. I guess it’s hard to sell high range filtering as something special, and perhaps their engineers made technical or logical errors in MQA’s early days. They may now be stuck in defending the indefensible.
Wait about 6 months for a class-action lawsuit alleging fraud from those who bought MQA hardware, and from vendors who paid licensing fees.
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I believe they’ve always done that.
“Delivered Losslessly” etc.
“Assured to be what was signed off on”
For whatever reason I’ve always assumed MQA was lossy, the description of the algorithm implies it has to be for anything higher than redbook, and if they are using more than the bottom 8 bits to encode the HF content then it’s not even lossless to redbook quality.
Information theory is pretty clear on this point, you can’t encode all bit patterns into less bits, so any algorithm with an output bandwidth less than the input bandwidth will always lose information from at least some inputs. This is intuitively obvious, I can 4 values into 2 bits, if I have encode the 4 values into less bits, you would not be able to differentiate some of the inputs. This doesn’t change for 10 bits or a million.
I guess it’s why I find all this sudden outrage to be surprising, I didn’t think they’d ever claimed it was lossless. If they did they ought to go find out how courts interpret walking that line, they usually favor what a reasonable person would understand from the claim.
I don’t like it, because it’s an excuse to not provide lossless data for services like Tidal, and there is really no excuse given what audio streaming bandwidth amounts to at this point. That coupled with the licensing model means anyone who buys an MQA DAC pays for it whether they use it or not.
Per the MQA website as of May 27, 2021:
Based on pioneering research into human neuroscience, the award-winning British technology captures every element of a recording’s resolution and timing. This level of detail recreates a natural sound. It enables the listener to position the instruments and performers to build a 3D sonic picture.
Using a unique ‘origami’ folding technique, the information is packaged efficiently to retain all the detail from the studio recording. While MQA retains 100% of the original recording, an MP3 file keeps just 10% of the data. Digital Trends has named MQA’s hi-res audio format a “game-changer”.
Devices or apps with MQA decoding capability can fully ‘unfold’ the MQA file and reveal the original master resolution. They will also authenticate the file to guarantee that it is the definitive master recording from the studio. According to What Hi-Fi? “Wherever there is sound, MQA delivers the best version of it.”
Their narrative strangely jumps from neuroscience (i.e., use of perceptual and psychoacoustic standards) to complete information and data retention (i.e., simple storage but not psychoacoustics at all). Is MQA playing a shell game?
MQA claims it retains 100% of the original recording – this is unambiguous in my book. I interpret their description as equal to a FLAC CD but in less space. Furthermore, saying that MP3 keeps 10% of the original information ignores that MP3 has different quality settings. [Again, marketing sleight of hand.] Keeping 10% is close to the 128 Kbps rate (11:1 compression). That quality standard is 20 years out of date, as MP3 users quickly moved to 192 or 256 Kbps and now commonly use 320 Kbps.
See above. I recall an awful lot of skepticism about MQA when it was coming on the market several years ago. People didn’t want something new, and didn’t want a proprietary black box. At the time I took it to mean getting CD quality from MP3 file sizes, or distributing better-than-CD-audio in smaller files. However, I never investigated further.
See above. I read their current website as claiming it is lossless.
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I guess I read that as marketing wank, and don’t think it’s claiming lossless.
If anything the original logo with the word lossless plastered on it is the worse offender.
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This discussion puts me in mind of a Borges’ short story (I don’t recall the title) in which copies and copies of copies began to improve, and became better than the original. And the sophistry of the MQA people resembles another Borges work, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. I provide links for the curious.
English PDF:
Original Spanish:
http://tlon.unal.edu.co/files/tlon_texto.pdf
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Let’s try to rationalize why MQA should be used. Ask yourself the question “Is MQA better than FLAC?”, the current standard for lossless compression.
- Mqa is lossy. FLAC is not.
- It’s been shown mqa files are no smaller than FLAC files, or MQA files are not sufficiently smaller to matter.
- A 24-bit FLAC file can contain all of the ultrasonic information that mqa can.
- FLAC can do this without reproducing errors.
- Mqa is expensive, Flac is free.
There simply is no practical reason mqa should be used, adopted, streamed, or it’s costs forced upon the consumer.
Discussion over in my mind.
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It should have been over years ago. The current ASR thread is hilarious.
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I don’t have much to add to the objective side of the debate here, but since I have a DAP that happens to fully decode MQA up to 8x/384kHz (FiiO M11 Pro) and a Tidal subscription, I have given it a chance and kept an open mind about it for a good while. So I’ve taken some time to compare a broad variety of MQA releases from Tidal against the equivalents on Qobuz, and some also in DSD (transferred from analog tape to DSD128 mostly). I have friends in the music industry, and that has allowed me the opportunity to experience music in a proper studio environment, and learned quite a bit of theory from conversations with those friends. So I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but at least I have a bit of a frame of reference to base my thoughts on MQA on, as it promises to deliver the sound closer to how it was heard in the recording studio, compared to FLAC.
Do I think MQA subjectively delivers on its promises? The short and simple answer is no, not in my opinion.
Comparing Tidal against Qobuz, the more relevant and direct competitor to compare against, I found MQA releases to deliver inconsistent results. Sometimes there wasn’t much of a difference between the 2 that I could detect, sometimes the difference was rather significant, but usually somewhere in between. And in some cases, the MQA release actually sounded preferable to me. But these cases are few and far between, and the reason for preferring the MQA version in those cases was mostly due to the Qobuz version sounding too bright, sharp or sibilant. MQA seems to have a tendency to soften transients, and creates a slightly artificial sense of depth/distance/air. So while this can sometimes be preferable, it most often takes away more than it adds.
Comparing MQA against DSD isn’t exactly an apples to apples comparison, as the DSD albums I have are all different masters than the MQA equivalents. So instead, I converted some of my DSD records to 192/24 FLAC, to be able to find out if DSD as a container offers an audible advantage over FLAC, which is essentially what MQA tries to accomplish.
Comparing DSD against FLAC, I did find there to be a subtle difference, but consistently in favor of DSD. In general, I would describe DSD as sounding ever so slightly more dynamic and open/transparent, in a way I would consider to be more natural/realistic. This is, imo, much more in line with what MQA is advertised to be, subjectively speaking. DSD has its own downsides, like enormous file sizes and the extremely limited availability of genuine DSD content, but unlike MQA, it’s open-source and truly lossless.
So concluding my overall thoughts;
I find that MQA overpromises and underdelivers. Their marketing is misleading and full of objectively false claims/promises. Also subjectively, it seems to do more harm than good in my opinion. I’ve given it a fair chance to convince me, and it didn’t. I pay for Tidal because of the music in their library that isn’t available on Qobuz, and I will downgrade my subscription to “HiFi without MQA” once the option becomes available.
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That was precisely my analysis and conclusion when I demoed Tidal and Qobuz in 2020. I could have written your words. I didn’t own an MQA decoder at the time, so both were played on my ordinary DAC.
I concluded that MQA processing embeds a proprietary treble filter in the data, or the MQA file format activates a playback treble filter. My non-MQA setup sounded exactly like your description. I’m not convinced that MQA’s “origami folding and unfolding process” has any meaning or relevance.
In fairness to all the happy MQA/Tidal customers, having an embedded treble filter can be indeed desirable. It is a work-around to harsh playback hardware. End users often lack the knowledge, money, ability, or motivation to buy the gear necessary to fix bad treble. If I wasn’t motivated to mess around with new headphones, amps, and DACs, Tidal’s filtered tone would honestly appeal to me. Their artificial filtered sound is way less fatiguing than a bad setup.
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Nice to hear your experience has been similar. Although I haven’t directly compared fully unfolded MQA against folded MQA on the same chain, I did indeed also find MQA releases to have similar characteristics without the full unfolding of it. I can’t really say whether there is a noticeable difference/improvement with full unfolding, but it doesn’t seem to matter anyways.
Yeah, conveniently the exact target audience which Tidal’s marketing has the strongest focus on, with their very generous student deals and family plans, and their focus on promoting mostly modern pop/edm/rap music and such.
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Joshua Valour has an MQA poll now. Yay or Nay:
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Yeah, I’m in the no category…
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MQA is just an unnecessary licensing scheme. Even if for the sake of argument we grant that MQA is in fact lossless - WHY do we need it? We already have FLAC, ALAC, AAC, etc. Why do we need to pay a shadow organization a licensing fee to use their proprietary formula which does some unspecified thing? At least with Dolby what it’s doing is plainly apparent when you listen to it. Does anyone even know what MQA is actually doing? Can you prove it?
Also, bandwidth is more or less unlimited now, there’s literally no need to pay for miraculous compression when it’s perfectly reasonable to stream a lossless file in its original form.
For these reasons, I’ve decided I want nothing to do with MQA.
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Even if I must admit that in pure theory the idea at the base of MQA can be interesting the whole way it’s managed by meridian makes of it the last thing I want for my music.
As you wrote since we have flac files why do we want such a thing for our music?
Why should we want our music go into obscure process when we can have it straight as it comes from the source?
I really don’t get the point for MQA usability.
In addiction if for new recordings I can get they have been done specifically for MQA format how can I believe that MQA is bringing me way at the artist wanted if the artist is for example John Coltrane and he recorded half a century before MQA was a thing?
I just don’t want be fooled and don’t want this thing into my listening.
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