No deception? Here is what Dolby says about TrueHD:
"Most movie and TV soundtracks are recorded at 48k. Unfortunately, the 48k recording process can introduce an unnatural harshness or edginess to the sound during the conversion from analog to digital. Dolby TrueHD corrects this problem by applying higher sample rates and increased playback quality through an advanced apodizing filter. "
You buy the bolded section? How about Apodizing filter bit which is what is used in MQA? They go on to say:
"The 96k upsampling process applies higher sample rates and increased playback quality through an advanced apodizing filter that masks undesirable digital artifacts in 48k material. The upsampling takes place before Dolby TrueHD encoding."
How is this lossless if there is upsampling of the content prior to encoding?
Love you Amir, but this doesn't really make any sense. The TrueHD claim about "harshness" with 48k recording is of course ridiculous, as is the claim that an apodizing filter increases playback quality. But whole-integer upsampling, in this case simply doubling every sample to make a 48k original into a 96k file, while pointless, is still lossless. "Lossless" does not mean "the data is never altered in any way." "Lossless" means, "the original data is not altered in such a way that it cannot be fully recovered or reconstructed." By your logic here, every Delta-Sigma DAC ever made (and every oversampling R2R DAC as well) is "lossy," which is at best meaningless and at worst demonstrably false based on any meaningful sense of the concept of "lossless" in digital audio.
MQA, by contrast, takes any PCM original with a sample rate over 96k and destructively downsamples it, throwing out half (or 3/4 in the case of a 352.8k or 384k original) of the samples
before encoding. And don't even bother responding that "no one needs 192k and 384k sample rates anyway" - of course they don't. But nor do they need a 96k sample rate either. That's not the point.
The point is that MQA is lossy (and not just in the way I've noted above - the encoding itself is lossy) - yet they continue to lie and claim otherwise. You know it's lossy,
@John Atkinson knows it's lossy, and I would say that at this point it's not credible for anyone to try to claim that Bob Stuart doesn't know it too. Yet here is the current MQA web site on this topic:
By any reasonable interpretation, this is a lie. This is fraud.
Statements like "MQA delivers clearer sound" can be put into the bucket of garden-variety misleading, evidence-free audiophile PR BS. Even "Master Quality," by the lenient legal standards established in the U.S., can be considered advertising talk and not fraud. But "Is MQA lossless? - Yes" is different. It's a lie. And "a lossless file is just a digital container... what really matters is the content!" is a willfully misleading statement in furtherance of that lie. The FLAC container can losslessly contain the MQA data they've stuffed in it, but the MQA data itself is not a lossless encoding of the original PCM data. You know, it, Atkinson knows it, and Bob Stuart knows it.
If you had a DAC in for review that used a new DAC chip which claimed to perform unique forms of oversampling and ultrasonic processing, and your testing revealed that DAC actually altered the digital data so that its output did not match the input (beyond the slight amounts of noise, distortion, and jitter one gets with even the best DACs), you would go ballistic and call out the DAC and its maker for either fraud or a broken implementation. That's what MQA is: a fraudulent, broken implementation of lossless high-res. Its adoption rate and partial resemblance to other, past formats and schemes does not change that fact.
I sincerely hope you're correct that the format is going nowhere. But folks appear to have found evidence that MQA-encoded content has already infected the subscription (and perhaps download-for-purchase) music pool, with unflagged and unidentified MQA-encoded material showing up on multiple services. This is cause for concern. More broadly, as many of us have said over and over - and over - again, the lack of MQA's success thus far should not be equated with its aspirations and business model, both of which are predatory and therefore
ipso facto worthy of sustained critique and opposition.