MQA streaming detailed analysis --- and it's not good

Eppie

Eppie

Audioholic Ninja
GoldenSound on YouTube has performed a detailed analysis of MQA on Tidal. It is a technical analysis that may be beyond the level of the average audiophile, but for those that understand encoding methods and in particular those with recording engineering experience, it's a very interesting video. The first half of the video contains the technical details and the second half some personal opinion and comments.

Short answer for audiophiles is stay with FLAC. What MQA does to audio streams is not lossless and in some cases downright detrimental. How they market their services and make it extremely difficult for independent analysis is much too similar to what some dubious peripheral manufacturers are doing and is great cause for concern. With Tidal replacing FLAC streams with MQA streams and defaulting to the MQA version, they may be doing themselves harm in the long run and their subscribers a disservice. The MQA files can even be larger than the FLAC files so it's not even about bandwidth and appears to be all about royalties. Fortunately there are good people out there willing to take the time and effort to dig deeper and reveal the facts about some of these technologies. There is also a lot of other material referenced to in the description if you want to dig deeper, and he linked to every section of the video so you can jump to the conclusion and comments if you want to skip the details.

(Edit)
@Irvrobinson linked to the AudioScienceReview discussion in another thread and I added that link for more info:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/mqa-deep-dive-i-published-music-on-tidal-to-test-mqa.22549/

 
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T

Trebdp83

Audioholic Ninja
Unfortunately, just another attempt at getting a few bucks out of participants for use of a process. And who can afford it anyway after dolby has picked everyone’s pockets? I do enjoy sampling atmos albums via Tidal, but will probably not renew my subscription after the three months for three bucks offer comes to an end.
 
Pogre

Pogre

Audioholic Slumlord
I've yet to find a streaming service that equals my cd rips, even Amazon HD falls a little short, imo. I'm just gonna stick with my cd rips.
 
Eppie

Eppie

Audioholic Ninja
Response from Bob Stuart:
I have hard time believing someone that claims their technology provides "higher temporal resolution" and "lower blur" without any measurements to back up that claim or even a proper explanation of what that means. Temporal resolution is a listener's ability to follow rapid changes in sound. (There are studies for example that show that vocalists have higher temporal resolution than non-musicians and slightly higher than even other musicians.) How would that apply to a compression technology? Is it higher than with other technologies and if so how? How do you measure temporal resolution in compression codecs and above what resolution does it no longer matter? How can you have lower blur (horizontal smearing of decompressed wave forms) when flac is lossless with no blur? It's a lot of fancy language with no evidence to back it up.
 
John Parks

John Parks

Audioholic Samurai
I have hard time believing someone that claims their technology provides "higher temporal resolution" and "lower blur" without any measurements to back up that claim or even a proper explanation of what that means. Temporal resolution is a listener's ability to follow rapid changes in sound. (There are studies for example that show that vocalists have higher temporal resolution than non-musicians and slightly higher than even other musicians.) How would that apply to a compression technology? Is it higher than with other technologies and if so how? How do you measure temporal resolution in compression codecs and above what resolution does it no longer matter? How can you have lower blur (horizontal smearing of decompressed wave forms) when flac is lossless with no blur? It's a lot of fancy language with no evidence to back it up.
I really do not have an opinion either way. What is obvious is that both sides have their own agenda and that's fine. I first became aware of the GoldenSound video on another site and what really caught that reviewers attention was where the video shows measurable differences between digital cables...
 
mtrycrafts

mtrycrafts

Seriously, I have no life.
I really do not have an opinion either way. What is obvious is that both sides have their own agenda and that's fine. I first became aware of the GoldenSound video on another site and what really caught that reviewers attention was where the video shows measurable differences between digital cables...
What kind of differences? There is a measurable difference between 5ft cable and 6 ft cable. or a 6'-1" cable if test gear is good enough.
What parameters are different and how much? Does it exceed perceptible differences?
 
John Parks

John Parks

Audioholic Samurai
What kind of differences? There is a measurable difference between 5ft cable and 6 ft cable. or a 6'-1" cable if test gear is good enough.
What parameters are different and how much? Does it exceed perceptible differences?
In the video, jitter was specifically mentioned.
 
J

Jerkface

Audioholic
In real life jitter is what sort of audible issue?
Rather than try to explain, you can listen yourself. Someone kindly posted audio samples of them basically upsampling then downsampling various wave files while subjecting them to various kinds of sampling errors that would be present in jitter caused by a variety of factors.

Pro tip: The 1Khz test tones are probably most revelatory in terms of "what" it does, but the music files are probably more revelatory in terms of "how much it matters".

 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Rather than try to explain, you can listen yourself. Someone kindly posted audio samples of them basically upsampling then downsampling various wave files while subjecting them to various kinds of sampling errors that would be present in jitter caused by a variety of factors.

Pro tip: The 1Khz test tones are probably most revelatory in terms of "what" it does, but the music files are probably more revelatory in terms of "how much it matters".

Oh please explain....
 
J

Jerkface

Audioholic
Oh please explain....
I listened to it on my laptop speakers, not my system. The test tones, you can hear what should be a continuous sound have a waver to it, like a singer's vibrato. The music, again, I listened to it on my laptop, not my big system, so I'm not going to make a prejudgment regarding what it does or doesn't do.
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
I listened to it on my laptop speakers, not my system. The test tones, you can hear what should be a continuous sound have a waver to it, like a singer's vibrato. The music, again, I listened to it on my laptop, not my big system, so I'm not going to make a prejudgment regarding what it does or doesn't do.
That was at the 100x or?
 
J

Jerkface

Audioholic
That was at the 100x or?
Actually, I just went back and listened again - apparently his test tone itself had the warble in it. The 2 microsecond (about the most jitter you'll ever get in real-world applications) created a significant amount of white noise similar to tape hiss. But it definitely wasn't present in with the same amount of jitter in an actual musical source. Once again, this is on craptop built-in speakers, though.
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Actually, I just went back and listened again - apparently his test tone itself had the warble in it. The 2 microsecond (about the most jitter you'll ever get in real-world applications) created a significant amount of white noise similar to tape hiss.
Never been an issue IME
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
I mean, anything that raises the noise floor is a potential issue. But it's hard for a cable to add enough jitter to ruin the rest of your signal chain.
Explain how a cable would add jitter please.
 
J

Jerkface

Audioholic
Explain how a cable would add jitter please.
Jitter is errors in the bitstream that are compensated on the receiving end through quantization, which adds noise. It's not hard to imagine (or measure) how a poorly constructed cable could add errors through poor/non-existent shielding, ill-fitting terminals, etc.

We're on the same side here regarding $10K cables, please don't get me wrong here.
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Jitter is errors in the bitstream that are compensated on the receiving end through quantization, which adds noise. It's not hard to imagine (or measure) how a poorly constructed cable could add errors through poor/non-existent shielding, ill-fitting terminals, etc.

We're on the same side here regarding $10K cables, please don't get me wrong here.
Sorry, hard to determine just what you're on about. Please refer to audibility of "jitter'
 
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