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A blog for audiophiles about more objective topics. Measurements of audio gear. Reasonable, realistic, no snakeoil assessment of sound, and equipment.
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To end... Let's talk about MQA once again. Feel free to ignore this section if you're sick of MQA talk.
By now, in 2021, I trust there's no longer a need to say much more about the technical abilities (or just as relevantly, criticisms and inabilities) of MQA. Although P.T. Barnum supposedly offered the proverb "There's no such thing as bad publicity", in reality there are certainly instances where this is not true. Much of the publicity around MQA surely has not been good, especially recently with GoldenOne's YouTube videos on the CODEC. I suspect this has been the kind of "bad publicity" that MQA does not want, especially when viewed among audiophile circles.
This gets us to the recent Jim Austin editorial in Stereophile - "MQA again" which is targeted at the videos. It's fascinating that within this "perfectionist-audio pond", the audiophile press continues to step up to bat for a CODEC that is clearly not "perfectionist" in any way, shape, or form.
Austin continues to repeat the claims of "deblurring"; yet MQA has not explained how this is possible in all these years. There's even the obvious but still amazing admission by Austin that "In the interest of making the sound better, it alters the sound the mastering engineer and musicians signed off on." Isn't this seriously problematic? How do we know it's "better" when it alters the "signed off" sound? So what in the world does "Master Quality Authenticated" even mean if the DSP is allowed to modify the sound without the artist/production team's authentic input? MQA: aren't you a little concerned about what Austin just said there!?
Let's not get into the "seaweed" with the specific numbers and test signals GoldenOne sent in for encoding to Tidal as he has expressed his findings well already. Let's think for a moment why we use test signals. We do so because they help us determine the limits of something - whether it's some hardware or in this case the effect a CODEC/DSP has on the known signals sent into it. Since this is a "lossy" compression system, the MQA encoder has to decide what to keep and what to throw away; what is deemed "music" and what is not. Wouldn't it be good for audiophiles to understand exactly what these limits are?
Inherently as audiophiles who hang out in the (again, as Austin puts it) "perfectionist-audio pond", we'd like to achieve audio playback with no compromises. We want systems capable of "perfectly" reproducing potentially audible signals whether from real acoustic recordings or commonly synthetic sounds which have never existed before. Heck, some of us might even want to ensure that the system reproduces likely inaudible signals >20kHz which hi-res allows with super-tweeters and such! As hobbyists seeking this level of high performance, possibly spending lots of $$$ in the pursuit (just look at the price of some of the stuff Stereophile reviews), of course there will be many of us curious enough to explore the limits of this CODEC and how it would influence the sound quality.
Did MQA honestly think that by strategically employing magazines like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound in its PR campaign, audiophiles would simply fall in line and be satisfied with what these people reported? I think MQA has grossly underestimated the independence of audiophile hobbyists and magazines have lost touch of their actual ability to influence audiophiles over these years.
This article to me seems like a desperate attempt by Austin/Stereophile to act as some kind of "influencer" to change the MQA dialogue which has gone grossly awry against the company. I think all this article has done is perpetuated the "bad publicity" against MQA and in the process continues to demonstrate the bias that the magazine has against the interests of the community versus the desires of MQA Ltd. to achieve some level of success (by taxing music lovers for their needless "service").
As I said in one of the comments below the Jim Austin article, I believe that MQA barely was of benefit back in 2014-2015 when it was first introduced. In 2021, its proprietary scheme - one shrouded in nebulous claims by a company that actively enforces their opaque practices - simply has no value for the perfectionist-audio hobbyist nor music lovers in general IMO.
I'm certainly listening if anyone can provide even a single benefit MQA provides that cannot be done just as well if not better than existing, free, solutions of plain MQA-less FLAC/ALAC which have been embraced already by the other lossless music streaming services (the exception being Tidal of course, and we're still waiting on Spotify HiFi's exact technical plans).
While Austin ended off the editorial characterizing GoldenOne's tests as a "lost opportunity", I think the real opportunity that has been lost over the years has been to show that the magazine is able to perform a little bit of independent investigative journalism. To find courage to go beyond what they have been fed by the MQA company. For example, John Atkinson was able to get some of his music encoded years ago. Why not insist on trying some test signals then to understand the limits or claimed benefits of the encoding/decoding processes? I'm sure audiophiles would have been fascinated by what "deblurring" meant and how it could be demonstrated. Stereophile would truly have been the magazine for both subjective and objective evaluation of audio technologies if it had the balls to dive deeper and call out the BS (pun intended) if there's nothing to find before hobbyists had to take it upon themselves to investigate.
It should be obvious to everyone that if Stereophile is supposed to function as a reliable journalistic enterprise, then it must be truly impartial. Despite Jim Austin's words that "If I'm partial to anything, it's fairness", I'm not sure this is what we're seeing here. I'm struck by the echoing of MQA-inspired language used ("post-Shannon developments in sampling theory", eh?) and text devoid of independent thoughts or suggestions of "leg work" done by Austin to examine the veracity or significance of the disparate viewpoints other than basically agreeing with MQA against points made by GoldenOne. This article sounds more like the work of a tentative "lobbyist" and the magazine simply as a friendly advertising platform for the Industry. There's nothing wrong with this so long as the magazine is honest about it and the biases inherent in these roles openly disclosed.
I think it would have been better for Jim Austin to simply have remained silent rather than offering an article like this. Surely MQA Ltd. can handle themselves, and have offered their rebuttal. With any luck, let's hope this is the last Stereophile editorial we might see about MQA in awhile... Ideally forever...