NorthSky
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- Feb 28, 2016
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Is this for the underground audiophiles? What are our children going to do with it, if ever they can access it?
End User Marketing:
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My Bad Idea for the day:
How about distributing some gussied up (excuse me: Master Quality Authenticated) 96/24 files we can actually play, and maybe get a taste of what they're up to?
Finally made time to read through the original article. Quite the dissertation. Very interesting approach and IMO very hard to explain without delving rather deeply into technical details that most audiophiles (and reviewers) will fail to follow. What I did not have time to do was to try to find the references explaining the need for much greater time resolution than in current schemes, and that seems to be the primary basis for MQA. It's an interesting argument but one I am not competent to debate. A few years ago I was able to calculate the difference in time we (humans) can distinguish and it was much, much lower than I would have guessed but IIRC still well above the aperture time of a 16-bit converter. And there is always the debate about how much it matters in the real world, with real musical signals and such. The fact that a cymbal crash contains signal content above 20 kHz does not mean that I can hear it, which is acknowledged in the paper, but how the lack of time resolution degrades the sound is unclear to me. I do not know how important the temporal smearing described in the paper is in the real world, i.e. how well I can hear it. Be interesting to test with and without MQA to see, but perhaps my ears aren't up to the task. The claim is most anybody can hear the differences so I wonder (do not know) how much of the debate is based upon "blind" rejection without actually listening tests.
As for MQA being DOA, I suppose it depends upon how well they can market it. I am a little surprised at the apparent level of resistance, but suspect a lot of that is from a combination of misunderstanding of the technology and inbred rejection of anything that appears to make assumptions about what we can and cannot hear. The latter I base upon the high level of concern related to the use of bits below the noise floor. Nobody wants to be told something is below their noise floor and people continue to reject studies showing e.g. two cables can sound the same; "not in my system!" That said, I do not claim to have the hearing many reviewers and others claim to have achieved, it is quite clear others hear what I cannot, and it is impossible to resolve a debate that takes on the nature of a religious war wherein beliefs and science collide.
IMO - Don
4 out of 7 correct with the usual excuse making afterwards. Ha!
Is there a requirement for the number of tests to be an odd value?
Do you think after the eighth try he said "Well, seven was enough. I'll go with seven." ?
I think for many including myself it's more about the DRM like closed loop aspects.I am a little surprised at the apparent level of resistance, but suspect a lot of that is from a combination of misunderstanding of the technology and inbred rejection of anything that appears to make assumptions about what we can and cannot hear.
Very good find Bob. Had not seen that before. Shame you have to send files to Bob Stuart to get anything encoded in MQA.
I don't recall what JA used but Meridian Explorer2 is just $300: https://www.amazon.com/Meridian-Explorer2-Digital-Analog-Converter/dp/B00Q6VQGS2How much is that little MQA gadget?
I hope that power cable is up to the job - looks a little flimsy.Yes, that's it; that was what I was looking for
I'm not sure what you mean by "HF signal amplitude". Are you talking about bandwidth, or something else?Note it is not the HF signal amplitude that's important, but rather the greater time resolution, i.e. the ability to resolve smaller time "steps" and thus provide more realistic time cues in the music and less "temporal smearing". At least as I understand the article.
To me it is a ploy to get control back in the hands of a few hardware and music providers. If it really was about sound quality then the MQA encapsulation strategy could easily be set up to operate with existing components: making it a recording and mastering standard, making the decoder open-source or provide low-cost licenses.
22 pages of MQA promotion from The Absolute Sound
https://mqa-production.s3.amazonaws.com/default/0001/01/6a10f3ba2385770ac3658df2cadc537ffcd09cd3.pdf