Interesting video about MQA
 

All credit to GoldenSound, the content creator of this youtube clip

https://youtu.be/pRjsu9-Vznc

High quality video indeed.

Some people do love MQA.
Maybe the distortion added has some kind of a euphonic effect?
Just like R2R also sounds good to ears that grew up with that medium.

Just to be fair, here's Bob Stuart's response to the video.

I'm still no fan of MQA.

I read that yesterday.
I find the video has more convincing arguments than Bob Stuart.

Interesting film about MQA
 

I’ve always felt MQA was a necessary evil.

MQA was needed for a few reasons. At that time, not everyone had access to fast internet. I could perhaps handle one MQA stream at my place. Two would have decimated my Internet. Now I can say bring on lossless 24/192 FLAC all day every day.

Two, it allowed studios to dip their toes to release high res quality recordings to the streaming community - I’m sure MQA must have touted their DRM like capabilities to them. It reassured them and then showed them the sky didn’t fall when they did release their “masters”. Without MQA, we would not have Amazon UHD music or Apple Music lossless coming today.

So I was happy to get TIDAL MQA 5 years ago. That led me to the choices I have today.

Unfortunately,
MQA != lossless
MQA != HiRes

MQA = MQA

When it was first introduced I actually read the patent applications (not granted, just published applications at the time). Unlike the unintelligible mumbo-jumbo in the marketing speak, the applications were based on reasonable ideas re: human sound perception (the USPTO takes a dim view of mumbo-jumbo). These ideas had nothing to do with hi-res or even lossless but proposed that high frequency content provides important auditory information. To get this into a 44.1/16 bit container, they took away some of the dynamic range to use those bits for high frequency content. This is the unfolding - reassign those bits to the high frequencies - the YouTube video referenced earlier in this thread confirms that in fact is happening. Unfortunately, the MQA folks seem determined not to allow their claims to be verified.

Interesting film about MQA
 

MQA is a perceptual coder.

The authors of the “Worse than FLAC” article do not understand how perceptual coders work and therefore wasted 37 minutes of valuable YouTube time posting something that, if it were printed, the brits would call “tendentious bumf”.

The author of the video is ignorant. The good news is that ignorance can be cured, but stupid is forever, so at least he is not stupid.

It would certainly help if Stuart et all were to make some real world end-to-end testing available, but he/they have chosen not to do so and will get pilloried because of it.

MQA is all the things I don’t like in entertainment media: proprietary, officious, and bombastic.

I know this post is very pointed. I guess I’m just tired of the back and forth on MQA.

:thumbsup:

Interesting film about MQA
 

For the sake of completeness

https://youtu.be/NHkqWZ9jzA0

As far as the content creator “GoldenSound” is concerned this video bookends his exploration of MQA

Thank you for the link! It's clear from watching both videos and reading Bob Stuart's response that significant questions remain about the nature of MQA, including the rather simple question as to whether it is lossless, or not. This is all part of why I've been skeptical of MQA from the start - it just isn't clear what it does. While Stuart can rip "GoldenSound" for his analysis, I haven't seen any response from him to Neil Young, who has his own issues with MQA and has pulled his music from the service.

"GoldenSound" says he'll post another MQA update if Stuart cooperates with him in further testing. That doesn't seem likely to happen, and it wouldn't surprise me if Stuart also ignores GoldenSound's follow-up video, even though it seems fair and thorough to me.