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In Reply to: RE: How is Archimago's equipment not "up to the task"... posted by Tony Lauck on January 31, 2016 at 13:16:08
So only people at CERN or other physics labs at national standards bureaux are capable of measuring things? If so, how on earth do equipment manufactures get any work done? ;-)
I disagree that measurements made with less than SOTA equipment have no value. Perhaps measurements made with SOTA equipment may be more valuable, but even poor equipment can be capable of giving us a "ball park" measurement, and perhaps the ball park estimate is good enough to allow us to make a judgment.
In the case at hand, Archimago has shown that the differences between the formats, if any, are more than -70dB down in the mix. That may not be the precise figure, but it at least tells us the differences, if any, are small.
JE
"A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all." - William James
Follow Ups:
Don't we all know that many of these differences are small? I don't need any measurement to tell me that. Just my ears
Alan
Aren't the folks touting MQA saying it is revolutionary? That it "unlocks the resolution that is inside of digital files that we've never heard before?"
In my mind at least, for something to be revolutionary, heck, to even be meaningful, it's going to have to bring more to the table than differences -70dB down in the mix. I think Archimago's post is helpful in alerting consumers to proceed with caution with this product.
JE
"A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all." - William James
Do you understand what you are talking about with the -77dB difference from Diffmaker? What difference is he measuring in this? This is NOT the difference between an ordinary file played through a DAC & the same file with MQA treatment played through an MQA ENABLES DAC. What archi is attempting to measure is how close the MQA file might sound compared to the standard file when both are played back through a non-MQA enabled DAC - in other words how much does MQA encoding affect the playback on an ordinary non-MQA DAC.You don't seem to understand what Archimago's "measurement" even mean, never mind how useful they are.
It's always interesting how those with a particular axe to grind, latch onto any measurement, no matter how dubious to support their mindset. In this case you wildly misinterpret what Archi's article is about, as evidenced by your repeated quoting of his Diffmaker measurement as some sort of evidence that MQA is not providing any worthwhile sonic value.
I guess you also missed this in Archi's article "Sure, I would be curious to have a listen to an MQA decoding DAC."?
Edits: 02/01/16
Thanks for the reply!
I stand corrected.
I wish you all the best in your business, although as you probably surmise, I'm not likely to be a customer. :-)
JE
"A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all." - William James
If the difference on playback between an MQA enabled DAC and a non-MQA DAC is greater that -70 dB, then one or the other is broken!
When comparing two different reconstruction filters at a hi-res sample rate of 88.2 KHz or higher, the difference should be a lot smaller than that.
"If the difference on playback between an MQA enabled DAC and a non-MQA DAC is greater that -70 dB, then one or the other is broken!"
Who ever said that?
I think what Archi measured should be visited before passing comment, don't you think that would be wise?
In the case of the -77 dB result, there was no measurement, just a diff of the digital files.
If I understand the process correctly, MQA encoding as described in the AES paper should be transparent to at least the 16 bit level. So the differences between the clips Archimago compared are almost 20 dB higher than they should be. I can think of a few possible reasons why:
a. The MQA encoded file is not sourced from the same master as the original offered for comparison, in which case it's not a fair comparison.
b. The MQA encoded file was doctored in some way prior to encoding, in which case it's not a fair comparison.
c. The MQA process is not as transparent/faithful to source as claimed.
Other possibilities:
- Diffmaker's results are not reliable
- for instance, it's known that the first 200mS at the start & end of the files being compared causes unnaturally high difference values - an edge effect
- Diffmaker is particularly sensitive to phase differences
- it's really impossible to use Diffmaker to evaluate the audible difference between two files
I'm leaning against blaming Audio Diffmaker because it looks like he selected an appropriate clip and you can actually see a difference in the spectrum plot.
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