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In Reply to: RE: On the blurriness of MQA posted by BubbaMike on November 02, 2016 at 13:08:13
Seemingly endless objections to MQA on AA and elsewhere. What is the point?
1. Most objectors have never heard MQA.
2. It has not yet reached the consumer market except in a very limited way.
3. Its primary purpose at this juncture seems to relate to streaming media where , whatever its limitations, it promises better sound than exists is this medium now.
4. Do people think that perhaps their arguments (often technically incorrect) may influence Bob Stuart to change it?
Why waste time now on this subject when in there is a real and present problem with digitally distributed recordings - the use of watermarking. Yet the comparative amount of forum postings on this subject is fractional.
Follow Ups:
If this was just some standalone product I wouldn't care. MQA deserves extra scrutiny since it aims to replace current delivery formats, and its end goal is to control the whole digital audio chain from recording to playback. It has the potential, if widely adopted, to affect every consumer of digital audio. That's why so many people are talking about it. Beyond that, the marketing of MQA has been confusing, sometimes contradictory, dare I say a bit shifty. So that's leading to some skepticism.
I have not actually seen any vigorous examination of the postulations behind the model. Instead, I have seen the assertions behind it.
We should recognise that human responses to acoustical factors are not uniform, and that the only way to validate such models is to expose statistically significant numbers of respondents to them. Even then, the results may well be dependent on ethnic origins and their exposes to what may be regarded as 'musical'.
The point is simply that MQA is being promoted thru media push and not through rational discussion of pros and cons at a technical and prospective consumer demonstration level.
MQA is a psychoacoustic software and hardware system. It is closed and web retailers are trying to sell MQA music at £16 a go, without the ability for users to compare file 'before and after'. So the sales model seems to be: let journalists write about the merits and let consumers be tempted towards its widespread adoption.
The 2L stuff is a red herring as, if you audition the same files at different resolution levels, they sound different in themselves anyway. And I have not seen comparisons of the original DXD files with the MQA ones using the same dac.
Take a recording like Kinds of Blue being written about wrt the merits of MQA. If you reverse the phase of the music being played, you can end up with 'an opening of the soundstage' and the other superlatives that have been bestowed on the format.
What is needed is a much more clear headed and valid approach to MQA v hires comparisons.
Hear, hear! (meant in more ways than one...)
Doug Schneider
SoundStage!
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