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based on reading the recent book How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt.
It is a fascinating book. Back in the prehistoric days of the early 90s, a CD might take an hour to stream (still does on my DSL), but even worse, it might take up most of the space on a hard drive. The magic goal was 12:1 compression. It took some smart German guys a couple years to achieve acceptable quality with mp3 at 12:1 compression. But corporate politics led to the adoption of a competing Philips technology. The Germans made mp3 available for free and it became the standard for streaming.
So now it appears that MQA is trying to achieve that same sort of trick on a higher plateau. Now that many people have the bandwidth to stream CD size files, MQA is claiming to pack higher resolution quality into those smaller streams.
It seems to me it's going to be a very tough sell. I know from a number of discussions that many people see no benefit to higher resolution files, period.
Of course, the MQA guys claim more than just packing. They also make some quite mysterious claims to correct flaws in original recording equipment. Without a lot more information, I have big questions about what is actually going on. What flaws existed in the original equipment and why were they not addressed when the equipment was designed? And how do you retroactively recognize and fix such flaws? It may sound great- and I heard an MQA demo at an audio show, and the sound was fine, but not the best I heard all weekend, and that kind of demo does not really mean anything.
Then again, there is a rather hyperbolic teaser in the latest Absolute Sound, and unlike many here, I don't completely disregard that. So I will be interested to play with it sooner or later.
Follow Ups:
Meridian: "Hey, - let's send a bunch of junk-ass headphone amps around that process a new, "secret," "magic" file type that we control. High end audio writers will eat this shite up. Break out the Diana Krull baby"
"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.'"
Not only is that hysterical..but I would not doubt that is exactly what conversation took place.
Good post. I agree, especially in relation to the history of commercial wars for closed format revenue.
I believe most of the work on MP3 was done when the German guy was a post-doc at ATT Bell Labs, working with James D. Johnston ("JJ") of Bell Labs.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Edits: 02/09/16
the heavy lifting was done by Karlheinz Brandenburg, while at Fraunhofer Institute. This being month after month of listening tests using wide varieties of program material, narrowing down the various problems until they got something that basically worked, as what we have today (doesn't really work for me, but most people seem happy).
Also of interest, the same people then worked on improvements and came up with AAC. By then, the genie was out of the bottle, their free mp3 encoders and players had been hacked and copied and mp3 took over the world as a standard (and even Apple had to add it to the ipod).
It is a fascinating story and it provides a good overview of the massive changes. I do miss my record stores still.
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