For den som måtte være interessert er MQA sitt svar til GoldenSound dette:
Han svarer til MQA her:
A video version of this post is available here: Introduction MQA is a proprietary music compression solution that uses the FLAC container. It requires a license fee for manufacturers to implement it, and due to the lack of transparency from MQA, there has been relatively little conclusive...
www.head-fi.org
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MQA's Response
Immediately after MQA removed my content from Tidal, I posted here and in a few other places to encourage people to go and find the tracks on Tidal or Roon. They could not be streamed, but could be seen. This was so MQA wouldn't later be able to claim they never existed, and there would be "witnesses" so to speak.
AFTER that happened, I received a response from MQA. Their full response can be read here:
https://pastebin.com/2YfT6vfZ
I won't address every point as much of it is marketing speak. But there are a few i'd like to address:
- The first part discusses how MQA is more advanced than conventional approaches and intends to account for the conversion process at each end of the chain.
To which i'd respond with two things:
1) In that case why is Warner, who offers MQA for seemingly most of their releases, not using MQA for archival storage? Or anyone else for that matter?
2) Why was I never even asked during the publishing/MQA encoding process about what recording methods or hardware i'd used? I also used a fully MQA certified full decoder for output so that cannot be the issue. And digital recordings were made from Tidal or Roon's MQA core decoder.
More to the point, even if you DID have info about the source and DAC hardware components, how would you account for tracks where multiple ADCs, synths, recording methods and in-production editing methods were used? Hardly any music nowadays is produced in analog and then digitised, or digitally recorded using only one ADC model.
- "We don't understand your frustration about evaluating MQA."
My frustration is that no end to end analysis tools are available like they are for nearly EVERY other format. Yes we can listen to any MQA song, but we have no information about how its been altered, is it the same master, no way to check for placebo, or any way to objectively test with test files other than jumping through hoops like I had to do for this video/post.
Additionally, when someone like Chris Connaker, Mans Rullard or Archimago provides evidence, the question is dodged, and when I reach out to you, you attempt to censor me by removing all of my content.
THAT is my frustration. It isn't transparent in the slightest and MQA responds in a hostile manner whenever criticised.
If you truly stand by your claims, myself, and just about anyone else would be more than happy to work with you to conduct testing that both sides agree on to demonstrate your claims. But when all the evidence suggests your claims are false, and you do not allow proper testing or provide your own, there is absolutely no reason to believe you.
- "This [the MQA encoder] is not configured to deal with content where, for example, the statistics change mid‐song, or where the audio does not resemble natural sound."
Does that then imply that electronic music won't work with MQA? Or that tracks with a combination of 'natural' recording and synthesised parts won't work?
Right now none of the tracks in Tidal's top 10 are true analog recordings, and 8/10 are in MQA.
Maybe the 'studio tools' that are referenced in your response do help to overcome these issues, but again, there is no transparency. We have no idea what these tools are, who has access to them, which releases were made using them, and have no way to evaluate them.
Would you ever consider making a limited version of these available? Perhaps releasing a version that only allows for a max 10 second audio length. This would allow people to test properly.
A little transparency would go a LONG way. And saying that MQA is lossless, but only within certain vague and unspecified criteria, and lossless only using non-conventional evaluation methods, isn't exactly reassuring.
- In regards to my mention of the blue MQA authentication indicator they said: "The onus is on the submitter to check the content when it arrives in Tidal and confirm the sound."
This was NEVER mentioned during the publishing process. And doesn't address the fact that you can take an MQA file, throw away a third of it, and still have that light show up.
Plus, even the 44.1khz file I submitted both sounds different and is objectively different to the master I published.
And again this is the same for any other track where a high sample rate version and MQA version are available, they are not the same.
- The next part of their response goes on to explain how MQA adaptively identifies and responds to content in a track.
This again, implies that it cannot be lossless. If it is behaving differently to different types of recording and music then the result will not be consistent.
It might sound more 'natural' to some people, but sounding natural and being lossless to the original master are not the same thing.
If you wish to market an 'AI upsampling' or responsive/adaptive process then that's totally fine. But sounding subjectively better to some people does NOT make it lossless and is no excuse to make false marketing claims.
- They also discuss the files I had published.
I should firstly mention that the information and status messages they're providing here, I only ever received one of these, the one saying that the encoder was unable to encode the file. And that was only for the files where it was literally just a test file, an impulse response or square wave without any other content, which would likely not pass MQA's checks for this sort of content.
All the other error messages, I never received, I do not know if these are genuine, and given as MQA had the publisher remove all of my content I cannot go back and check.
Given as I cannot verify any of these, and even if they are true it doesn't address the fact that the encoder was unable to handle my files, I won't discuss this point further.
- In response to my concerns about added noise, MQA claims that this was my fault, as I didn't dither the files. Claiming this was a "Naive mistake".
No MQA, it wasn't. In fact this was something I had explicitly tested. The first track I submitted, called "Try again", DID have dither, and showed all of the issues mentioned in this video, in fact some to a worse extent. To give MQA the benefit of the doubt and check that the dithering wasn't adversely affecting anything, I published the next two tracks without dither.
So this is not my fault at all, and the only Naive mistake made was not looking at all three files I had published.
- In response to others and my description of the MQA upsampling filters as leaky, they claim this term is derogatory and inappropriate. And that the only alternative would be brickwall bandlimiting.
Firstly, I don't think that the filter itself has feelings, but if I have hurt them then I apologise. Secondly, perhaps the biggest advantage of genuine native hires audio is just this. It allows much more flexibility with filter design. Going from 44.1khz to 96khz source sample rate gives you over 13x more distance between the audible band and nyquist frequency.
So if the argument is that brickwall filters are bad, which to be clear, in many aspects I agree with, the solution isn't MQA, its to use native hires!
- In regards to aliasing they claim that this is simply because the levels of the signal were too high and it wouldn't occur in real music.
For this point, I'm quite happy to accept this might be the case. (Though I would say it still is concerning that the encoder wasn't able to handle even simple sines, and still invalidates the "Lossless" claim.)
In fact as I mentioned earlier in the post, i'd prepared another track with ultrasonic content at much lower levels to test what level this was aliased down at. Unfortunately you had my tracks removed and this never made it to Tidal.
If this claim is true, then send me the MQA encoded version of that file and i'd be happy to post here with updates.
Again, lack of transparency makes it difficult to address concerns.....
- They also say that every MQA file will tell you the sample-rate of the original audio.
And this is true, but my complaint wasn't that it didn't tell you at all, it was that it isn't clear in the slightest. Tidal shows no indication at all of original sample rate.
You have to use a program like roon to show this information. This means it is misleading consumers into believing that any MQA release is better than RedBook FLAC."