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It looks like a few writers at the Absolute Sound are gaga over MQA and are making the same postiively definitive statements based on show demos.
Robert Harley:
"Then, seconds into the MQA version, my jaw dropped-literally. MQA's dramatic superiority made the original high-resolution file sound like a pale imitation of the performance, a view shared by Peter. Before the music even began the hall sounded larger, with the acoustic better defined. A glare was stripped away from instrumental textures, leaving behind a gorgeously liquid rendering of timbre. The positions of instruments on the stage, and of the musicians within the acoustic, were precisely defined. Even the applause at the end (it was a live recording) was vastly more realistic."
Wow! SECONDS into the music he determined MQA's "dramatic superiority"!!!!!!
And it gets better...BEFORE the music even began, the hall sounded "larger"!!!! Wow again!! What a gift!!! And his jaw dropped!!
As a remedy to his jaw that "dropped-literally", I hope his medical insurance will remedy that..or..wasn't the founder of his magazine famous for having a man servant? Maybe he can come over and lift Harley's jaw off the ground for him.
Follow Ups:
In this day and age, in the USA the role of consumer magazines is to diseminate the newest product and assist in building up the hype, we have seen it before- CDs, super audio, DVD Audio....
Computer audio/digital file playback still is in a very early development phase. We see many different paths with just hardware of grossly varying quality. And with the introduction of software, (way outside the traditional scope of the audio developer), we see players coming onto the market that are simply not ready.
With so many areas in need of "improvement," - introducing yet another file type into the equation is just going to confuse things even more.
In essence, so many high audio manufacturers just don't know what they're doing.
"Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'"
While digital playback is not at its apex it is IMO hardly at its infancy. I can tell you first hand that things can improve to a far greater degree at the beginning of the recording stage. No microphone or recording device can capture the mythical "original event" that audiophiles like to prattle on about.Manufacturers are using a "throw it against the wall and see what sticks" approach because they don't know what else to do. How many ran out and bought "DSD Ready" DACs and now have 15-20 DSD albums in their collection? They are betting the same will happen with MQA.
Although the fact that they are saying that lossless streaming (Tidal etc)
is going to be a major distribution point for MQA may make it a bit different.
Edits: 01/25/16
Many SACDs are made from PCM recordings.
I use Audiogate to Convert any File to DSD 128, sounds better than in PCM.
Many here do not believe that, which makes me doubt their opinions, or their hearing acuity.
Converting on-the fly works too, with HQ Player.
Original DSD Files would be great, but aren't necessary to enjoy there benefits of DSD Playback.
I've never heard a CD that sounded as good as DSD Playback.
/
About 20 seconds into the clip. . .
Oh dear. You drank the Kool Aid. I guess you are have your fake DSD, so that DSD LED can light up on your DAC. They did a heck of a job.
I have heard many CD's that sound better than DSD. Did you ever think that your DSD playback chain is simply better then your PCM chain?
Alan
"I have heard many CD's that sound better than DSD"
That could have as much to do with the recording/mastering as with the digital format.
That said, if one were to posit DSD as the easier digital format to convert to analog, then it MIGHT make sense to convert PCM to DSD before said conversion.
The fact that both you and I feel the need to reach all the way back to the late 90's for a DAC chip technology we find suitable for the conversion for PCM to analog might be a good argument for that point.
""I can tell you first hand that things can improve to a far greater degree at the beginning of the recording stage""We're not talking about that. The discussion is about the playback stage.
There are only about 8 or so companies who have moved beyond commercial computers. And, very few of those designers are building products that have full functionality, offer great sound, or only offer slight improvements over multi-purpose computers. In fact, some are commercial computers that have been disabled.
There are always "issues" at the recording, - no one here, and none of the products here, are capable of addressing those issues; the scope of anything on any of these forums is in improving home playback. Discussions here sometimes really stray off base in the speaker forums where arguments start about using Pro studio monitors in the home: products that are fundamentally not designed for home use.
"Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'"
Edits: 01/25/16
I don't fully agree. I don't think you can separate what happens at the recording stage and what happens during home playback completely. To me they are like Siamese twins, joined at the hip.The fact is, it is on topic as MQA purports to "correct" what "went wrong" at the A-D/recording stage. That is the very core of their mission statement.
Many, (sometimes unnecessary), aspects of pro audio have made their way into home playback...XLR connections, networking, active speakers etc...too many more to mention. Many of the best pro audio suppliers also make home hifi products..Manley, Meitner,Bryston, ATC, PMC, etc.
The point is, they are converging. Prism and Merging Tech are now introducing "audiophile" DACs. Many of your favorite recordings were archived to digital with their ADCs.
Edits: 01/25/16 01/25/16
But again, - the playback of digital files is still in it's infancy.No one has built a SOTA digital file player yet, (with the possible exception of Sonore). There is nothing in digital file playback that compares to the VRDS-NEO for digital discs.
We are still waiting for something that's going to be universally recognized as the SOTA standard that we had for Ed Meitner's products in the early 2000s.
There is so much work left to be done improving what is out there now, - I think that it's a bad idea to distract developers away from fixing and improving already questionable products, to pursuing a different format, - starting all over again with new hardware, - that (as history shows) will be improved over time, - once it is better understood what best brings out the files.
"Asylums with doors open wide,
Where people had paid to see inside,
For entertainment they watch his body twist
Behind his eyes he says, 'I still exist.'"
Edits: 01/25/16
Of course digital file playback is not "perfect" in the sense it is not an exact replication of the original event, but then it never will be because there is not a single microphone on the planet that is totally transparent, and there is no recording medium currently that is.
The bottom line is there is no perfect media playback device and that goes for analog and digital.
But I am with you, that many other avenues should be pursued before DSP/software fixes..which to me are band aids.
When I see folks in the studio use a myriad of "plug ins" as opposed to doing the hard work and getting things to sound right organically it breaks my heart.
Checked my insurance policy. MQA is not covered.
Alan
LOL. That is funny!
> Wow! SECONDS into the music he determined MQA's "dramatic superiority"!!!!!!
> And it gets better...BEFORE the music even began, the hall sounded "larger"!!!!
Robert Harley can defend himself, but for what it's worth I had a similar
reaction. One of the files played was the first movement from a Mahler 5
performed by the New World Symphony. I know this hi-rez recording very
well, Peter McGrath having given me a copy a while back. At CES, the
original file sounded pretty much as I remember from my own system; by
contrast, the sound of the hall before the first note was played with the
MQA version was indeed more coherent, more enveloping. And when the
solo trumpet started playing, there was less ambiguity about the position
of its image within the hall acoustic.
As I said in another posting, Bob Stuart has prepared MQA versions of
some of my own hi-rez recordings and I will be comparing those with
the originals under familiar circumstances. To find out what I thought
of the difference, you will have to purchase a copy of the magazine, of
course :-)
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
I'm not sure what sort of information you have been party to with NDA's and such, but from a quick look at Archimago's article, it appears to me that the MQA process is using an AI-based algorithm to "interpolate" HF data above the Nyquist in order to improve the impulse responses that are smeared by the band-limiting. Knowing the chain as well as the source material could help the algorithm more accurately select the HF content by windowing and then extrapolating the time series that would necessarily follow the signal. Superposition does seem useful. In this age of very powerful computing, estimating a time-series for a time-varying signal doesn't seem so ridiculous when you can "teach" an algorithm to use pattern recognition on those signals based on a large libray of other music. Give afew Tb's of music, a good machine-learning algorithm can probably choose pretty well most of the time. Encoding that information in some of the extra bits som that it appears as dither except to a decoder is really not a much different appraoch than HDCD. I amy be proven wrong, but that's what it looks like to me...
What does "air" or empty space sound like? Perhaps I have noticed this on some subliminal level but have never bothered to think about it much?
Or are you referring to how other types of ambient sounds present themselves within an MQA re-recording? The shuffling of feet? Coughs being suppressed? The rustling of papers or fabrics?
Thanks in advance.
which can establish apparent boundaries for its size.
One of the challenges of our hobby/interest/pastime of listening to recorded music is that natural language does not offer the capability to describe accurately and unambiguously that which we perceive with our auditory senses.
We try, but it is way inadequate. Try it yourself. Try to describe unambiguously, and in detail adequate for others to know exactly what you heard, the audible characteristics of the best sounding concert you ever attended.
No matter how hard you try, your descriptions will be a pale and lifeless caricature of the original.
I hear you (no pun intended). I would try my best to describe hall "ambience" basically and realistically but my best efforts may not be good enough.
I would suggest that "ambience" has something to do with reactivity: The low-level noises produced by the movements of physical objects within a specific habitat. I would probably never claim that a room has a *sound* of it's own, but that's just me.
And who knows what I might say some day in the future? Life is unpredictable and the fourth dimension may actually be lurking out there in the somewhere.
Another question might be is what does any of that have to do with musical enjoyment?
And what bearing does it have on rock and pop recordings with artificially created ambiance....
Isn't "high(er) rez" always superior to low(er) rez?
Supposedly, better/finer detail retrieval supports a more lifelike record listening experience. After perusing through audiophile forums like this one, the impression I get is that the very last iota of resolution matters quite a bit...
Some recordings and some music are so bad that low res is better than high res. And with some of these, no-res is even better. One can take one's system, $1000, $10,000, $100,000 or more and switch it off and one well have a more enjoyable experience.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Peter McGrath, who works for Wilson, and apparently a classical recording engineer, and is being quoted by at least half a dozen audio writers to back up their MQA hoopla had the following to say back Feb. of 2015:TAS: Are you partial to analog or digital?
PM: I was always a big analog fanatic and at the end of the day most of what you're hearing is still analog. What we're really debating is what is the storage medium of choice. It starts perhaps in digital but as soon as you convert that digital data to the highest-quality analog, it's analog all the way through. I'm not a big fan of digital processing per se. I feel you're better off getting things out of the digital domain as fast as possible into the analog, and then deriving the benefits from there.
TAS: You have thoughts on formats like double-DSD and DXD?
PM: Indeed I have, and you can hear differences in all of them, but if the engineer used good microphones and minimum processing even standard CDs can sound very much like music. What sounds horrible are bad microphones, bad processing, too much compression, too much manipulation of the data.
Note:"I'm not a big fan of digital processing per se. I feel you're better off getting things out of the digital domain as fast as possible into the analog, and then deriving the benefits from there."
"if the engineer used good microphones and minimum processing even standard CDs can sound very much like music.What sounds horrible are bad microphones, bad processing, too much compression, too much manipulation of the data."
Wow, it seems he found MQA religion and DSP/processing is no longer bad.
Edits: 01/24/16 01/24/16
"Supposedly, better/finer detail retrieval supports a more lifelike record listening experience. After perusing through audiophile forums like this one, the impression I get is that the very last iota of resolution matters quite a bit..."
Do you not therefore conclude that the illusion of realism is directly related to being able to clearly hear what we would hear in the real world. In simple terms, we have an inbuilt auditory model of the world & how auditory objects behave in this world - the closer reproduced/replayed audio comes to this, the more realistic it appears to be.
But bear in mind, in this discussion, this is ultimately limited by the ceiling that stereo playback imposes - it is very much an illusion that we buy into (just as TV/cinema is an illusion) - it can never be the same as a full blown concert
Initial care in recording and mastering have a far, far greater impact.
Do you think 192 Khz/24 bit has 4.x times more "resolution" and "detail" than a 44.1 Khz/16 bit?
Each time you add a bit, you double the resolution! ;-)
It sure doesn't sound that way. How are you measuring resolution?
Alan
Which, with the right equipment, can be resolved with that 24th bit, or with just ONE bit at 2.8224 MHz sampling rate.
Broke my heart when she passed away. :-(
There's a school of thought that asserts that going from 16 bits to 24 bits makes WAY more audible difference than increasing the sampling rate from, say, 48K to 96K. I've heard some incredibly great recordings at 24/48, and I'm not sure I would disagree with that assertion.
Cannot answer that question at this point in time because I've got some more listening to do.
MAYBE, "Only the jaw knows for sure"?
Haha. I like that one. Let us know how your jaw endures....
I'm sure John can answer this but this really is so basic that the asking of such questions makes one wonder.
I was sure everyone knew of acoustic spaces, hall acoustics, venue ambience, etc. but it would seem I was wrong?
Maybe I'm alone on this one but I am not so sure that I know what JA means when he mentions the *sound* of the hall itself. I am not sure what JA means, so I asked the question.
Is he possibly referring to some measurable level of ambient noise that is not easily heard via the naked ear?
Hmmmm, I really don't know.
If you listen especially to classical music before the orchestra starts playing but the sound starts you get the feeling that you are inside of a concert hall. They are saying that this feeling is more realistic. If it is a studio recording the ambience which is artificially created is again more realistically there. this is usually a result of better low level resolution. If you read the discussion below of the Stereophile report on MQA do we really need this discussion? No!!!
alan
I believe that when very low level sounds (which exist in all rooms apart from very specialised anechoic chambers) are reproduced accurately on a recording, the illusion of realism is enhanced because we now can hear the venue ambience as a separate, distinguishable auditory entity from the foreground sounds - just as we do in real auditory spaces when listening to any sound.
In the natural world, every sound has a background ambient environment - that's why people report that sitting in an anechoic chamber is an unnatural & weird experience
That's my take on it - maybe John's is different?
> I believe that when very low level sounds (which exist in all rooms apart
> from very specialised anechoic chambers) are reproduced accurately on a
> recording, the illusion of realism is enhanced because we now can hear
> the venue ambience as a separate, distinguishable auditory entity from
> the foreground sounds - just as we do in real auditory spaces when
> listening to any sound.
Exactly so. Thank you for the clarification.
When I am making my own recordings, there's always that magic moment
when you bring up the faders on the microphones and you sense the space
in which the performance will take place. I always record a couple of
minutes of room tone, with everyone as silent as possible, so I can splice
in a few seconds worth between tracks on the CD rather than fading to
black when I master the record.
John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile
Absolutely correct. For me the first opening of the mikes wasn always a magical moment. I wish more people could experience this and the initial console feed of sound from the studio. It is as John has indicated a wonderful experience
Alan
I have said many times, that anyone who has not actually made recordings is not really an audiophile. They have not experienced this magical moment and then have, IMO, absolutely no basis for making any comments about playback of recordings that other people have made, other than their personal enjoyment or fantasies.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Questions are more important than answers in certain cases.BTW, I had thought that sitting in an anechoic chamber sounded weird because it's about the only time one can hear the blood flowing through one's own eardrums against a backdrop of pure silence. But who knows? Maybe, anechoic chambers do indeed have a *sound*?
For now I am reminded of what Herman and his Hermits used to say. Is there, in fact, "... a kind of *Hussshhhh* all over the world tonight..."?
Edits: 01/24/16
"Questions are more important than answers in certain cases." Depends on whether the questioner is genuinely interested in learning or not?"Maybe, anechoic chambers do indeed have a *sound*?" I believe, it's the lack of the natural background ambience that is "weird" because we never encounter such conditions in the natural world, only in a man-made structure.
One of the ways auditory processing works is via a comparison of the auditory stream signals to it's stored auditory models built up & stored in the brain from experience. It's like the old fairground hall of mirrors - disorientating & unnatural for vision
Edits: 01/24/16
They do not have a sound . The total lack of sound is what inables you to hear the internal sounds of your own body. We had a chamber at IIT and you could not stand it for very long
Alan
the PROBLEM is..95% of rock and pop recordings are done with close mike, in isolation booths, with baffles, in neutral rooms. So there goes that theory. At final mixdown, treatments are applied.
If one focuses exclusively on classical music or a small number of purist jazz recordings, yeh, sure.
IMO it is a complete waste of time to even talk about the reproduction of 99 percent of rock and pop recordings. They are garbage, made for one purpose only, extracting as much money from the plebes (while giving as little as possible to the "artists"). In many cases, the "talent" includes "singers" who are selected for their sex appeal without regard to their ability to sing, and who would never have gotten anywhere without disgusting electronic tricks such as "autotune".
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Sure, most recordings are done with fabricated soundstage & so you are therefore writing off that MQA can have any affect on these recordings. On what basis? Because you have decided to isolate & focus on one aspect that Harley & Atkinson reported as being the only improvement that MQA brought to the recording?This seems a very simplistic & biased approach, if you ask me
I believe you could benefit more by getting over your obvious ire & examine what MQA might be doing that could be responsible for the increased realism of the hall ambience experienced by Harley & Atkinson.
From my reading of Harley's piece, I believe two technical focusses were being followed in MQA - improved noise stability & decreased temporal blur. Both of these factors are of great interest to me & I could well see them being responsible for the perceptual improvements reported, so far in hearing MQA
Edits: 01/24/16
How many times do I have to ask this. How can we report on how well M works when we can't listen to it. At least with 4k and 8k tv we can buy the hardware even though there is no software. With MQA even if you can get a meridian explorer II there is also no software. By the way the Meridian device needs a firmware update to do MQA. Guess what. The update is not ready yet.
Alan
Yea, but I'm sure there were early reports from reviewers of just how realistic 4K & 8K TV was before it became generally available - it's the nature of how products come to market - I'm not sure what the problem is?
And I ignored those reports also
Alan
You are not on the same page. Everyone knows what room/hall ambiance is..even if you know nothing about a music. Two people can have a conversation in several different rooms and they will naturally feel the differences.
What we are talking about his the comical hyperbole of hearing magical ambiance before a note of music is even played in some misguided attempt to illustrate how superior a new technology is. I always felt that if you have to grossly exaggerate, then you are a shill, or worse.
It might be believable if the original performance was a recording of a live performance. Once can tell a lot about the venue acoustics by listening to "room tone" especially if it is created by individual people. In some live performance recordings one can hear the conductor walk up to the podium, etc...
I'm generally interested more in the musical performance than the recording. Generally speaking, by the time the first three or four notes have been played it is pretty obvious whether the performance and recording are going to be good. (At live concerts at the BSO in the past this might not have been the case, because sometimes the brass players were drunk and if they weren't scored in the first few bars this situation would't be immediately apparent by listening. However, sometimes this condition was apparent visually.)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Of course some of this can be true with "orchestra on the floor" capture it all at once type recordings. 95% of all commercially released recordings are not done this way.
Interestingly, there were a few pop artists who did not like overdubbing, and recorded their vocals with the musicians in the same room. Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presely come to mind.
I have heard Sinatra multi tracks at Capital and on his vocal track you can hear lots of orchestra/band. I think bleed through is part of nature. When musicians play live they don't exist in a sonic vacuum.
"You are not on the same page. Everyone knows what room/hall ambiance is..even if you know nothing about a music. Two people can have a conversation in several different rooms and they will naturally feel the differences." Correct. That's why I wondered what gave rise to your question "Another question might be is what does any of that have to do with musical enjoyment?""What we are talking about his the comical hyperbole of hearing magical ambiance before a note of music is even played in some misguided attempt to illustrate how superior a new technology is. I always felt that if you have to grossly exaggerate, then you are a shill, or worse." So you are not asking about musical enjoyment, then - what you are really complaining about is how someone expresses their enthusiasm for a new auditory experience that they have been exposed to & you haven't?
Maybe you are just ranting as on your other MQA thread - a good rant is good for the constitution - it usually acts a cleansing exercise - has it not had this effect for you?
Edits: 01/24/16
"Maybe you are just ranting as on your other MQA thread - a good rant is good for the constitution - it usually acts a cleansing exercise - has it not had this effect for you?"
the first step on the road to hell is internet posters engaging in amateur psychoanalysis in a smug attempt and avoiding the actual topic at hand.
"So you are not asking about musical enjoyment, then - what you are really complaining about is how someone expresses their enthusiasm for a new auditory experience that they have been exposed to & you haven't?"
No.
I see you make DACs. Are you in chomping at the bit to include MQA in your product?
Maybe it would help you if you followed some of the sensible advice you were given at the start "Relax. Post when you've heard it."
Since MQA is being rolled out with a lavish marketing campaign, with audio writers as de facto PR operative..reporting as if Moses being given the tablet to bring down to the bottom of the mountain for the benefit of the unwashed masses, there is no hearing it.
I will ask again, are you going to include MQA in your products for the benefit of your customers if you believe in so strongly?
Yes, the usual shills are being paid, bribed or wined and dined to roll out the prepared propaganda.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"I will ask again, are you going to include MQA in your products for the benefit of your customers if you believe in so strongly?"
I listen to the reports above about MQA & don't try to denigrate them as a knee-jerk reaction - do you call this "believe in so strongly"? I don't
I also don't see that explaining what hall ambience is "believe in so strongly"
I'm interested in hearing what MQA does & how it does it. I'm also interested in what will be measured & what relationships can be established to auditory perception. I'm interested in the effects of temporal blurring & noise modulation on auditory perception. So, in essence, I'm interested in it from a scientific viewpoint
If you are trying to play some commercial card to win a debate - forget it, it's childish, playgound tactics
You're interested but will make no judgement until you hear it. That is all the rest of us are saying.
Alan
Who cares?
And why on earth would folks who listen to rock and pop (which I frequently do) give a crap about the possibility that MQA is little more than a form of DSP?
Well then..I take it your jaw suffered similar damage as Mr. Harley. :)
I trust debunkers less than zealots!
How do we do that?
alan
n
LOL
The year's funniest joke so far: being offered the bargain subscription rate on this Journal of Adjective Engineering.
----------------------------
"Use adjectives instead of numbers, and you'll never be wrong again." ~ The Wizard of Audio
You and I just listen. Audiophiles "get involved".
LOL!
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