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In Reply to: RE: The real scoop on MQA, Warner, and the other major labels posted by Jim Austin on October 29, 2016 at 08:47:42
Thanks but the most important question is never answered, when will we get MQA material. When will streaming happen. The consumer will determine the sucess of MQA, not Meridian or the reviewers.
Alan
Follow Ups:
They can't answer, which is why there is scepticism!
Some caution is appropriate, but it's entirely reasonable to be optimistic: What's the motivation for the major labels to convert their music to MQA if they don't intend to use it? Converting several million albums, even digging into the archive to digitize (at 192/24) material they'd never digitized before--cannot be cheap.
Let me give you a clue...those unarchived tapes were going to be archived REGARDLESS of MQA. This was in the works for years. To try to correlate this activity with the arrival of MQA is a misrepresentation.
Do you have inside information that the rest of us re not privy to?
Sure, they were planning to digitize them eventually, over time. But now they're doing the whole catalog by Spring, and MQA--the company--is helping them.
With all due respect, this is comical. They are batch processing thousands of albums. There is virtuall almost zero additional work involved. Imagine converting thousands of WAV files to FLAC or ALAC. No more labor intensive.
Hi,
I think there are many reasons to go at it in a big way.
1) Analog tape certainly doesn't last forever. So archival.
2) You'll get economies of scale by doing so (i.e., processing many instead of few).
3) Chances are they will use it and it will simply be a right-click away on a hard drive.
These companies know that streaming via digital files is the future, so I'd assume simple preparedness.
Doug Schneider
SoundStage!
Just one clarification: MQA wasn't designed as an archival format but as a transmission/dissemination format. If they're aiming to archive, there's not much wrong with the 192/24 they already had (for much of their catalog). If we're talking historic preservation, DSD is better because it's closer to music (i.e., a future alien race could make sense of it more easily). But there's no archival advantage to creating MQA files from 192/24 files. It's also worth pointing out that this MQA project apparently got them to finally digitize the rest of their analog archives. They could have done that at any time. Considering that MQA is not an archival format, why now?
Hi Jim,
I might've misunderstood your comment. What I understood you saying was that there must be something to them digitizing all that old content -- as in digitizing it in general.
Doug
... no one knows their plans, but because MQA is a transmission format I think they're aiming toward transmission.
Yes, transmission. However that does not necessarily mean a transmission to consumers.
As a business case remastering a major's entire catalogue in MQA over a period of a few months makes little sense. Most of those several million tracks are certainly not scheduled, or are even dreamed of, being commericially re-released. If they are to be re-released then this would have to be done gradually ( you don't release 10 million tracks in one hit). In this scenario conversion to MQA would be best tied to the release schedule. This makes more sense and would not tie up resources for converting tracks that will inevitably have limited appeal and limited ability to earn any financial return i.e. they will stay on the shelf.
Streaming services differ in the sense that they do want access to entire catalogues. However there is not any high rez ( in an MQA sense) service yet in existence. The take up of CD resolution services is so far limited and they have yet to prove themselves as economically viable. I believe that any business considering converting its entire inventory in one go to service such unproven ventures would be irrational.
However international majors like Warner have a huge need to distribute repertoire internally to its operational units across the world for all sorts of reasons not all of which will result in a release or supply to e.g. a streaming service. Perhaps Warner plans are for internal purposes rather than for anything that will necessarily be available to the public?
From my record industry days I remember leaving a meeting and walking back to my office with a senior industry lawyer. This was at the time of CDs's introduction. Having gone hook line and sinker for the "perfect sound for ever" pitch, the lawyer questioned why the industry would want the public (effectively) to have access to its masters. I reckon the same thinking still exists with many record company executives and would be applied by them to MQA.
" However there is not any high rez ( in an MQA sense) service yet in existence"
Classicsonlinehd has many files streaming at 24/96 to 24/192
Of course they are dropping all labels except those owned by Naxos. Too bad
Alan
In Reply to: RE: So in other words ... posted by PAR on October 29, 2016 at 16:06:39:
" " However there is not any high rez ( in an MQA sense) service yet in existence"
Classicsonlinehd has many files streaming at 24/96 to 24/192
Of course they are dropping all labels except those owned by Naxos. Too bad
Alan"
I think that I could have phrased it better if I had just said " using MQA". Still I think that the point about unproven economic viability is still pertinent and the scaling down of Classics Online supports this. As a simile, apparently 83% of Spotify's revenue is dissipated in royalties and other outgoing costs. As Classics Online is owned by Naxos and if they now only have repertoire from the Naxos family of labels, then the cost of some of the royalties (those to publishers are artists remain) is removed. It also must reduce the cost of storage and administration.
It's too bad that Naxos found it necessary to do this but, as I have pointed out elsewehere on AA, some download suppliers have also found it necessary to take roughly similar action although in their case it was reputedly mainly caused by storage and bandwidth costs.
I was listening Qobuz yesterday with a close friend who works at one of the majors " enjoy it while you can" was his view.
Regards
Pete
Of all the labels I have looked at with a hires FFT, Naxos is the worst for having TV Monitor breakthrough on their files. This is at around 15kHz where a very sizeable spikes above the noise floor can create digititis sounding music.
I think we're just talking past each other a little--no big deal. As has been pointed out, those analog master tapes would surely have been digitized at some point anyway. True enough. You suggested, I think, that archiving is one reason they would do that--again, true enough. But they've apparently accelerated the rate at which that work is being done, and MQA is the end point (via, I'm sure, 192/24). So, they're doing the archival digitizing now, fast, and then transcoding to MQA. There's no reason to do that last step if archiving is the goal.
Why on earth would any music company upsample red book asynchronously to 24 192 to archive? There are actually much better technical reasons to archive in DSD or DXD.
Upsampling leaves its own sonic signature depending on the software used. The question of whether touch up software will be used is another question. The marketing phrase 'master quality' that I first encountered in Linn downloads has no real meaning as it depends on the native recording rates and bit depths.
Archiving valuable analog recordings is a subject in itself and should not in any way be linked to MQA.
AS a matter of fact, when one compares the resampled 2L files to the DXD masters, they all sound different. The 2L MQA files played backed on HQ dacs are nothing to shout about either.
> > Why on earth would any music company upsample red book asynchronously to 24 192 to archive? There are actually much better technical reasons to archive in DSD or DXD. < <
Agreed--who's doing that? Did I mis-write? All I intended to say was that Warner is reportedly digitizing its analog tapes to 192/24. One could have hoped for DXD or DSD, but 192/24 is fine.
This does raise an interesting question, though, one I didn't ask. Stuart and I talked a lot about "white-gloving" those early digital files in those obsolete, proprietary 16-bit formats; "white-gloving" is his phrase for the careful, custom work much of that music requires. But we talked about this in the context of conversion to MQA; we didn't discuss how one might archive those recordings and what format should be used.
> > The marketing phrase 'master quality' that I first encountered in Linn downloads has no real meaning as it depends on the native recording rates and bit depths. < <
It's true it has no technical, quantitative meaning--is that what you mean? As I've written more than once, those numbers have little directly to do with sound quality; it's easy to make a bad high-res recording. Within a certain technology--PCM say--bit depth and sampling frequency may put an upper limit on resolution (one aspect of good recorded sound), but how often is that upper limit ever approached? This appears to be a frequent point of confusion: people confuse file resolution with musical resolution.
As to the meaning of "master quality", it just depends how cynical you are. I think people cling to numbers because they're reliable, quantitative, more comfortable than relying on people and their work--like how well a recording is engineered, or whether the head of a company has good intentions. "Master quality" only means something--as I said to Bob Stuart in that interview (in a slightly different way)--if the people who sign off on it are serious and committed. (He agreed.)
"Master quality" is either an aspiration, or a marketing slogan, or both. How cynical are you?
> > Archiving valuable analog recordings is a subject in itself and should not in any way be linked to MQA. < <
The point here I think is just that the MQA process appears to be accelerating the pace of digitizing analog tapes. I don't think anyone is talking about MQA as an appropriate archival format. The MQA folks have said all along--since that earliest JAES paper--that the MQA idea is based on a clear separation of archival/storage and transmission formats. MQA is the latter.
Nonsense. Sony started to archive in DSD long long ago. Deterioration of the master magnetic tapes is the reason and if other companies don't do it, then this will be their loss.
MQA is just another marketing excuse.
"The point here I think is just that the MQA process appears to be accelerating the pace of digitizing analog tapes."
Can you provide any evidence that MQA has anything to do with pace of digitizing the catalog?
Until quite recently, Warner apparently still had thousands of analog tapes that had not yet been digitized. That's something they could have done at any time over the last, say, 20 years In May, they signed an agreement with MQA to transcode their whole catalog, and now it's happening and is scheduled to be completed by spring.
Is that proof? No. That's why I wrote "appears to be." But if there's no correlation it's a hell of a coincidence.
As someone who has written articles on MQA, you are positioning your self as an authority.
Your casual comment is a clearly intended to sound factual. If you don't understand this, that is rather perplexing.
The record companies have their own methods of work flow that depends on staff, changing technology, and priorities.
If Bob Stuart's comment is your only source, you need to do better than that.
What you're saying I understand.
For a variety of reasons today, I could see people going on "digitizing missions" today, not only for archiving, but also streaming. I have trouble believing MQA itself is speeding that up. What I believe they want is to have it to transcode to any file format -- MP3,even -- just to be able deliver quickly when necessary.
Doug
SoundStage!
Again a bit of a misrepresentations. MQA has been reported widely as not compatible with DSD. MQA WAS at one point being floated as a procedure that could be used during the recording process.
I thought DSD was supposed to take care of archiving analog material. That went well
Alan
Depends what is meant by "archive." The advantage of DSD as an archival format is that it closely resembles actual music, which means that when they clean up the mess after global nuclear war and start to explore our lost civilization, DSD files will be easier to make sense of than PCM (and certainly than MQA).
In general, for archival purposes, there's not much advantage these days to compression. DSD is a good archival format in the sense above; DXD is great if you think you'll someday need to turn it into something else.
MQA is for transmission, whether for streaming or downloads. So they only reason to transcode to MQA is if they intend to distribute it in that form.
jca
Well, then there's that... ;-)
Let's just say that I don't think there is ever going to be a once-and-for-all archiving of everything. Look how many times certain movies have been restored.
Doug
SoundStage!
I am optimistic myself about better quality streaming, it is going to take some time. Perhaps the discussions should have remained private. Reason is control over distribution and playback, what blu-ray was going to be before Streaming took off.
I have Tidal and Deezer Elite and Amazon music and Google Music and Pandora subscriptions. That's a lot of money considering all I do is stream Burzum over and over again.
> > I have Tidal and Deezer Elite and Amazon music and Google Music and Pandora subscriptions. That's a lot of money considering all I do is stream Burzum over and over again. < <
That's funny!
> > Thanks but the most important question is never answered, when will we get MQA material. When will streaming happen. < <
Agreed--but it's at least intriguing to know that very likely in a few months the whole catalog will be in MQA format. The labels are spending money on those projects; surely they'll do something with all that music. Seems like a reasonable expectation.
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