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In Reply to: RE: MQA Out of Business? posted by Doug Schneider on April 06, 2023 at 14:28:58
I think that MQA's intentions were good; it's just that the implementation was kludgy.
Look at the confidently-voiced expectations that SACD would be THE World-Bestriding Colossus. and while it is still technically a viable format, it's popularity is, to reference one of my favorite Rodrigues cartoons, below that of the Latin Mass.
amb,
john
Follow Ups:
" lossy high resolution". That's oxymoronic at best!
Please remember that MQA's goal was for "all" digital music to be MQA encoded.
Edits: 04/08/23
I'm glad to see you speaking up! MQA was not and has never been good for digitized music. It was and still is an unnecessary licensing scheme, IMO.
Doug
BTW, I want to sum up several reasons why MQA's intentions weren't good.
One was that they were attempting to implement a lossy format when we already had umpteen lossless formats -- and mislead everyone by telling them it's lossless.
Another was the BS about authentication. Pure BS when someone understands even a little bit about recording companies and how recordings get made.
And yet another was their filter tech, which was nothing special. Shifts the ringing to mostly after the impulse, which had been done over and over before.
I could go on, but there was, essentially, NOTHING THERE. So you can't have good intentions with that.
Doug
SoundStage!
It was just another con to get you to buy more gear and replace your catalog once again. No telling how much money changed hands to get reviewers to hustle this.
It was just another con to get you to buy more gear and replace your catalog once again. No telling how much money changed hands to get reviewers to hustle this.
People who write about audio technology are usually technology geeks, and therefore they are vulnerable to letting their tech enthusiasms blind them to the fact that for about 80% of the listeners, music is simply a SECONDARY accompaniment to other activities such as socializing, reading, or knitting.
Remember SACDs? Where are they today?
Remember DTS Surround Sound on Music-Only DVDs?
Where are those today?
In other contexts, such as History, one of my catchphrases for more than 40 years has been:
NEVER ASCRIBE TO CONSPIRACY THAT WHICH
COMPLETELY CAN BE EXPLAINED BY STUPIDITY.
I am not saying that the audio journalists who felt that they had heard the future, and it was MQA, were stupid. No.
But they were not as tuned into marketplace realities as they were into fascinating new technology.
BTW, I know at least one famous classical-music record producer who is a true believer in MQA. That guy recorded three of the CDs in the monster suitcase-sized boxed set, "The 200 Most Important Piano Recordings of the 20th Century."
I am sure that nobody paid him off.
jm
"But they were not as tuned into marketplace realities as they were into fascinating new technology."
I don't agree with this. It wasn't fascinating if you peeked behind the curtain -- even a little bit.
Doug
I know more about MQA than I choose to discuss publicly.
You will just have to take that on faith.
I had my caveats as to how the process was rolled out and presented. Specifically, the "bundling" aspect of the mastering technology being bundled with the data-compression technology.
As far as I know, single-ended MQA "De-Blurring" of pre-existing digital files is a very-well-regarded, very much relied-upon digital tool in remastering and cleaning up old files.
Which is a totally separate matter from streaming services and Master Quality Authentication, and so forth.
And as for that specific technology: I, for one, with 55 years experience in recording technology ("Songs My Mother Taught Me" just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its recording sessions); I found that technology fascinating.
jm
Everybody knows that Stereophile and TAS have been evangelizing and promoting MQA. We have the data, it's on the site, it's in the articles and the reviews, there's no question about it. But we don't know why.
I'd guess why? is one of the things you know more about, but choose not to discuss publicly.
Best regards,
Daniel
Nt
"I know more about MQA than I choose to discuss publicly."
Do you not see that your statement adds nothing to this discussion and only adds to questions about you?
If anyone really knows that much about MQA, then they'd know it's a farce. The first thing I did was read their patents to figure out what they're doing. You don't have to go much beyond that...
Doug
Nt
> > > > You will just have to take that on faith.Give me a break -- that's the weakest of weak arguments. It translates to: no argument.
> > > > > As far as I know, single-ended MQA "De-Blurring" of pre-existing digital files is a very-well-regarded, very much relied-upon digital tool in remastering and cleaning up old files.
"As far as I know" is telling. Please, where is this happening? It was pointed out rather quickly that most recordings are made with MULTIPLE analog-to-digital converters, so the question was, how could all these "blurred" steps be accounted for. Nobody could answer it... Furthermore, the efficacy of the de-blurring could've been proven with a simple before-and-after test, but that never happened.
> > > > > I, for one, with 55 years experience in recording technology ("Songs My Mother Taught Me" just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its recording sessions); I found that technology fascinating.
So "55 years experience" amounts to....??? Have you read the patents? Did you understand the digital encoding? Can you actually tell us what in there was special?
Trumpeting "55 years" and taking what you say on "faith" are poor arguments as well. It's also what some will call an "appeal to authority." Sorry, try again, rather than "I know something no one else does."
If anyone knows something, it's the best digital designers in the world -- and when MQA came out, and for years after, I talked to all I could. There wasn't a single designer who thought that the technology amounted to anything.
Doug
Edits: 04/07/23 04/07/23 04/08/23
No they weren't.
What set me off right from the start was the "lossless" claim, which was false. Then they changed the story to "perceptually lossless" -- and the same argument could be made for MP3.
Then there was the point that they wouldn't tell reviewers or manufacturers much detail about their supposed technology. It was all a secret -- even to the manufacturers implementing it. But the manufacturers who were on the up and up and weren't buying into it knew better.
Still, the shills kept their stories going and people were mislead.
I was there from near the beginning of this -- and was part of the bogus demos. The intentions WEREN'T good. From what I could tell, it was an attempt to put a licensed and paid-for music format in the market when we didn't actually need it. FLAC was always better.
Doug
Getting the manufacturers on board as "partners" seems to have been MQA's one success story. Not all did, Linn, Total, Weiss, Benchmark and Schitt come to mind, but the list of the ones that did is long, dCS, TEAC, Esoteric, bel canto, Pioneer, Boulder, Audioquest, Lux, d'agostino, Berkley, EMM Labs, Lumin, Chord ...Benchmark published a blog in May 2016 Is MQA DOA? that seems prophetic.
In the meantime Stereophile had rediscovered the con, while before there were no cons mentioned in the conclusion of a dac review, now there was one, if a dac did not support mqa, and was not therefore "future proof".
Daniel
Edits: 04/07/23 04/07/23 04/07/23 04/07/23 04/07/23
The ones that did sign up generally are high end, the ones that didn't aren't. Coincidence? You could also say the ones that did sign up are less desperate.
Edits: 04/09/23 04/09/23
The point about manufacturers coming on is more complex than thinking that the manufacturers that did actually supported it.
The big thing was that the reviewers acting as shills made it seem like it *had* to be there. So it became a checkmark on the spec sheet -- and certain manufacturers thought they had to have that checkmark. But what it easier for them was when it got built into certain DAC chips.
I think the whole thing was a real sad state of affairs for most the "legacy" press. Old-timers trumpeting up the next big thing that really wasn't. It built a lot of distrust.
Doug
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