LightninBoy, this is an excellent point about MQA's claims of removing the noise and keeping only the music.
This is the more so that there are musical genres where noise is sought for and is even fundamental!
I will be showing with some factual references to albums that in such genres noise is music,
so this is entirely for proving that MQA's claim about separating noise and music does not make sense,
so it is entirely relevant to MQA and to the effect MQA would to the audio tracks it transforms,
so please do not erase this post because it deals also with music
(and trying out music relevant to the topic may calm the moods?)
Below a few examples of genres where noise is not only inherent, but even absolutely essential to the music:
Warning: most people find this ugly sounding.
1. Noise experimental music
Within experimental (avant-garde) music, there is a whole sub-genre based on noise.
The most Seminal is
Lou Reed's
Metal Machine Music from 1975,
it is plenty of noise , incl. HF.... , where the noise is used to create musical patterns
2. Noise industrial electronic music
There are many famous bands in this genre (Cabaret Voltaire, etc.)
Here a seminal album,
Throbbing Gristle's 1977 debut album
The Second Annual Report
Singing and so on is purposefully distorted with noise:
Here another example from a 2012 compilation "United States Bestial Forces " from various artists, more recent,
Constrictions'song
Transparent, the noise is prevalent:
3. Ambient and atmospheric black metal
Not even speaking of the purposefully distorted manner of playing the electrical guitar in metal, within back metal there are whole subgenres where noisy effects are used to create a hazzy atmosphere, this was pioneered by
Burzum in his album
Filosofem, which gave birth to ambient black metal (which itself evolved later to give birth to atmospheric black metal)
Here that seminal album, Filosofem, 1996, if you listen you will hear many passages were the music is very noisy :
Metal is not much mainstream but super active,
here there would be more than 1500 bands of ambient black metal:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=ambient+black&type=band_genre
and about 1900 bands of atmospheric black metal:
https://www.metal-archives.com/search?searchString=atmospheric+black&type=band_genre
= a lot of music to be erased by MQA?
4. Noise ambient music
I am not sure about the seminal works here, but here an example:
Thomas Köner's 1993
Permafrost
It is ambient music, so very calm, soothing, in the background, but still consisting of noise :
I could add more examples, and more genres, like drone ambient music (smoothing engine sounds),
but this would become too long...
and I would not want this post to be erased and all the work I put here to be lost...
Conclusion re. MQA
These examples show that a substantial amount of modern music is based on noise,
and that here the music can absolutely not be separated from the noise which is its very essence.
Therefore MQA's claim to separate music from noise is wrong-headed and the MQA format is based on a
fundamentally flawed principle.
Now what would MQA do to theses examples if tested, what could we expect?
- if it did remove the noise it would remove the music...
- if it didn't remove the noise, then its claim about removing the noise would be false.