I published music on Tidal to test MQA - MQA Review

In this video I've put together all the evidence I could to

test

many of mqa's marketing claims and see if it's something audiophiles should want or avoid. I even posted my own

music

on the mqa title just to show you how problematic. It really is and I discovered a few things along the way that indicate mqa has more problems than we originally thought. I contacted mqa while making this video to present the evidence I had collected and give them a chance. To respond before the video was posted, the first response I received was to remove all my

music

from Tidal.

The next day I received an email from mqa and I will discuss his response at the end of the video. mqa marketing has been vague. at best and has changed over the years, there is a lack of definitive evidence on this, furthermore, because only partially related information is

published

, such as the white glove service that corrects the imperfections of the equipment of recording, which has nothing to do with the normal mqa posts that many people have. They formed their own different ideas about what MQA is, what it does, what it improves, and how it works. I'll stick to mqa's own claims, the things they say it does, and discuss obvious issues found in my

test

ing that would relate to real-world usage. although if you have any specific questions afterwards, feel free to join my discord or my private patreon chat if you're feeling supportive and I'll do my best to answer any questions if you're short on time and want a quick recap of this.

The video will demonstrate the following points: mqa is lossless. mqa adds unwanted noise and distortion even in quiet parts of tracks. mqa is generally not coming from a high resolution master mqa and its mqa studio blue light doesn't actually authenticate anything and then I will be discussing the other issues discovered throughout my testing, if you would like to skip to a particular section there are marks of screen time, but if you want the full story, grab a cup of tea, sit back and enjoy, so before we start, I want to make a few things clear: all the evidence I gathered and all the problems I found were sent to mqa before this video was posted so they could address the concerns raised after I sent my email.

They made sure I received my email quickly. removed tracks from

tidal

and also spoke to the editor. I used to ask to be blocked and all my content deleted. I acted in good faith to ensure this video was as fair as possible and gave mqa a fair opportunity to respond to the thread. for me and suggest alternative tests or explain why some of these problems are present. I didn't want this to be one-sided. I wanted to know your point of view, but unfortunately for a company that has nothing to hide, they are very interested in keeping information like What I am about to show you is that I still have the original and mqa files, so I don't It prevents me or others from testing, but I think it says a lot about NQA as a company.

This video is not an attack on any manufacturer. has incorporated mqa into its products for reasons that will be discussed at the end of the video. This video aims to inform the viewer about the issues and false claims surrounding mqa. Nothing more, there are a lot of fantastic products that have mqa. support, this is about mqa specifically, not the products that support it, obviously this is going to be a controversial topic and even if after watching this video you still think that mqa is beneficial or preferable to native

review

s then that depends entirely on your subjective preference. subjective and I'm not going to stop you from liking what you like.

Some people prefer DACs, headphones and speakers that are likely to distort more and that's okay. Objective performance doesn't always align with subjective preferences, but don't let it just insult me ​​or others. Because your opinion differs, I am providing evidence that mqa's claims are not true and if you do not agree with the evidence provided, I strongly recommend that you collect your own, the more information available the better and so far mqa has provided almost none. Being able to discuss these things in a sensible and constructive way, not resorting to internet discussions, so what is mqa and what does it aim to do?

MQA is a music encoding format that promises to unlock every detail of the original master who recorded it. It will provide the best listing experience possible, as long as you have a subscription to the title and pay for a DAC that has MQA support. This, they claim, allows you to display additional information hidden within the mqa files. It allows the listener to place the instruments and performers to build. a 3D sound image and preserves 100 of the original recording. The claim is that it takes original high-resolution studio recordings and folds the information into a 44.1 kilohertz file encoding what was the high-frequency information beneath the background noise of the audible band.

In theory, this can be played natively on a standard DAC with only the 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz information available or can be displayed again at high resolution. The first deployment can be done in software, taking the file from 44.1 kilohertz to 88.2, some devices called renderers. they can do the second and third display once they have received information that has already been displayed once per

tidal

, for example, and some devices called full decoders can do all three displays internally and mqa claims that this then reveals the original resolution of the study original. the problem is that it is almost impossible to test if any of this is true mqa is proprietary and closed source unlike other formats like mp3 dsd or even flac we cannot encode music in mqa ourselves we cannot use test files to find out what is really going on and as they do everything they can to ensure this is not possible, it is exceptionally difficult to prove anything.

No device with digital output can have full mqa display capability. It's only in dax with an analog output, which means it's impossible to test whether displayed mqa is actually the same as native high resolution because we can't get a true digital display and compare it to the original. There are many factors that mqa has implemented to make it very difficult to test the claims and find out what is going on. So to be able to see in depth what mqa is doing in various situations, I needed a track where both the actual original master and the mqa versions were available and therefore what better way to do it and be 100 sure than to publish something myself.

Not only did I want to release music, but I wanted to encode some test files, like a one kilohertz tone or an impulse response test. When I first tried to do this, the editor told me that the mqa encoder couldn't encode the file. Conveniently, it looks like mqa has controls to prevent anyone from getting scrambled test signals, so I put together a quick acoustic track and casually put in a 32-tone square wave white noise impulse response test and the entire analyzer test sequence rightmark audio inside. Just in case, I not only posted a 44.1 kilohertz version, I also prepared and posted a high-resolution 88.2 kilohertz version with some extra tricks hidden inside, including some test tones at 35 kilohertz and 40 kilohertz and full range scans ranging from 20 hertz to 44 kilohertz to test whether mqa actually retains all the high resolution information of the original master once deployed or if it is removed in the compression process, let's first check if the 44.1 kilohertz file encoded in mqa is the same as a native 44.1 kilohertz flack I checked my master with the file on Deezer and it was absolutely perfect at 100 bits.

It was the same file in the title, although my version of mqa was not the same. The mqa coding process messed it up immediately. The waveform is seen. Different transients are being exceeded. giving the impression that it is louder at some points and there is more high frequency noise compared to the original, even in what should have been quiet parts of the track, when looking at the impulse response within the file this showed a Minimum phase ringing pattern that also did not decay linearly Minimum phase filters have the advantage of having no pre-ringing, meaning that transients can sound snappier or faster;

However, it has the disadvantage that different frequencies move through the filter at different speeds and this can alter musical elements that rely on multiple frequencies at the same time, such as timbre, once developed this problem only got worse, the only way i could correct it was by running the track through the hq players polysynchronous mqa filter which is designed to remove some of the anomalies and noise caused by mqa and it did a pretty good job here, the pulses pretty white and transients are behaving like this, I don't know, for my 88.2 kilohertz tracks labeled deluxe, the Deezer version was simply sampled at 44.1 kilohertz and otherwise looked fine, any hi-fi content frequency was just I cut the impulse response preserving phase and there was no added noise fantastic, however the tidal mqa version looked very messy, there was a lot of high frequency noise again, even in parts of the track that were supposed to They were completely silent, also in the content that was previously. in the previous 22 kilohertz range had been aliased or mirrored back into the audible band and we'll talk about this later, so non-mqa files are lossless regardless of the original sample rate and if not mqa dac or deployment is used, they will present problems compared to transmitting the flag losslessly I had a feeling that the amount of noise in this 25 kilohertz band that was added was proportional to the amount of ultrasonic content that mqa had to reconstruct my file It has quite a bit of noise in this 25 kilohertz band, but then my file also has full range white noise in the original 88.2 kilohertz master.

To test this, I prepared another 88.2 kilohertz master without white noise and with the ultrasonic content drastically reduced. I sent this to the editor, but unfortunately before it was

published

. mqa had censored and removed all my tidal content so I couldn't confirm this. The reason I suspected this was because I found a track where there was a native 88.2 kilohertz version available and an mqa version that was sourced from an 88.2 kilohertz master sam smith too good for goodbyes in the mqa version From the 44.1 kilohertz file that was made from an 88.2 kilohertz master we do not see the same high frequency noise band that we saw in my file, however, when looking at the original native 88.2 version kilohertz there was never content above 22 kilohertz, so this suggests that the amount of noise that mqa adds is proportional to the amount of ultrasonic content that mqa has to additionally reconstruct, one interesting thing was that when these two files were compared using the delta wave.

Firstly, we can see that there is still some high frequency noise that mqa has added, it's not lossless, but there is also this strange band of distortion or difference throughout the track, within the audible band. It is not present in my file. I don't know what is causing this, but I felt it was important to mention it. For 44.1 kilohertz masters or high resolution masters where the ultrasonic content was cut off anyway, there won't be much noise, but there will still be some. for a track like this, where there is content that goes up to 44 kilohertz, there is a huge band of noise throughout the track, not just where the ultrasonic content was, this is still a big problem, or any method aimed at high fidelity It shouldn't add noise, the fact that this noise is present and especially the fact that it is present throughout the file is worrying and it seems that mqa gets noisier the more high frequency content mqa tries to reconstruct, other issues were present in both.

The low level signals of the 88.2 and 44.1 kHz versions were handled very poorly and the dynamic range is reduced. My original included a minus sign 60 db and one kilohertz, which is the standard test signal for dynamic range. The original had no noise at all and was restricted only by the fft. gain in the mqa file there was high frequency noise approximately 45 db below the signal level and full spectrum noise approximately 65 db below in the mqa file produced from our high resolution master, this high frequency noise It was actually 20 db above the signal level. Let's see exactly what happens when the rollout fixes the problems and actually reveals the original master, as mqa claims to preserve 100 of the original recording.

The first thing I found was curious thateven my 44.1 kilohertz track was authenticated as mqa studio and the dac split it to 352.8 kilohertz sample rate there was never a hi-res master no additional information is being retrieved here it is just upsampling There are also no indicators in the title that my tracks come from different sample rates, how are the clients? We're supposed to know which versions of mqa are actually high resolution and which are just being downsampled, and if it's a 44.1 kilohertz original, why would you want the mqa version when all it does is add noise and other unwanted effects compared to lossless playback? still, tidal didn't actually deliver the lossless file when I selected the hifi quality setting, it just streamed the mqa file without deploying it, I personally paid for the titles to be able to stream lossless and if tidal doesn't offer that anymore, at least For tracks tagged as master, I am going to cancel my subscription and would encourage others to do the same, even if mqa is a benefit, in some cases it should be an option, it should not be mandatory, talk to your wallet and demand without loss a additional note on this.

The original 44.1 kilohertz master was 30 megabytes and the mqa version is 33. It is larger and does not offer a size advantage. Artist Neil Young removed all of his music at one point from the title in protest after they provided hi-res mqa releases despite the fact that they had never given them permission to do so and had never provided them with anything other than a master of 44.1 kilohertz; In his own words, the tidal master is a degradation of the original to make it fit into a royalty-collecting box, the money for which is ultimately paid by listeners. I'm not behind this, I'm out of there, my masters are the originals now, so let's talk about authentication, that little blue light doesn't mean anything and mqa provenance and authentication is not secure.

User frederick v in the audio file style was able to get rid of over 30 of the file they truncated 30 of the bits and that blue light still appeared and here with my tracks although I only provided them with a 44.1 kilohertz master and the version of the title is not the same as my original master, this light is still When appearing, this track has been altered, so I, the artist, tell you that this is not the version that would have been created or heard in the studio nor It's really high resolution. This blue light is mqa marketing nothing more so let's then look at the display once the track that was originally a 44.1 kilohertz master is split via tidal or roon an 88.2 file is produced kilohertz looking at the spectrum we can see that there is an upward reflection of the music when we look at the 44.1 kilohertz original this was never there on the original master, it is an unwanted artifact, this is because the upsampling filter that usa mqa leaks, an issue that has actually been discussed by ashimago in an article linked in the description and in a 2018 armath talk by chris konica there.

By the way, nqa staff were present for this, but they offered no explanation? Instead, they chose to interrupt Chris quite regularly to argue that he should ask the DAC manufacturer why they support mqa and that the information provided cannot be trusted as he did not want to share the name of the archmage who had provided the graph for address that second point. Chris rightly said that it didn't matter who Ashumanga was. Anyone can easily show this picture problem at home and if you want to replicate it. this problem yourself, I made a post that pretty easily shows how to do just that using the white noise part of my track.

I was able to observe the ultrasonic attenuation performance and filter design of the mqa pull-down filter. The white line here shows the mqa filter and the blue line shows the sync l filter of the hq player as an ideal reference. This is a 2 million tap filter similar in design to the m chord scaler. If you are familiar with that mqa filter it has really poor attenuation as well as strange patterns in the ultrasonic range this is why ultrasonic content is added in the 44.1 kilohertz deployed version not only is ultrasonic content added not desired audible band content has not been corrected or there is still persistent high frequency noise the square wave has excessive non-linear hum and a strange notch in the transitions, there is absolutely nothing I can see here that is in any way beneficial to the listener or the integrity of the song and much that would be considered problematic if we do a full decode, these problems are effectively repeated with more upstream images.

This created part, for example, is a sweep from 20 hertz to 20 kilohertz and this musical content stopped at 22 kilohertz. There should be absolutely nothing above that, but the leaky sampling filter design is introducing artifacts that a strange notch in the square wave now extends lower. The 44.1 kilohertz master has gained nothing from this development process and all kinds of problems have been added to it, so what about the versions that come from a high resolution version, the ones that were 88.2 kilohertz in the original file for the 88.2 kilohertz version? I added a 35 kilohertz and 40 kilohertz Test Tone - these are frequencies that are too high to be stored in a 44.1 gigahertz file, so it was designed to test whether mqa would recover this information once it was deployed.

The writemak audio analyzer test also has sweeps and imd tests. reaching up to 44 kilohertz in the 44.1 kilohertz mqa encoded file, these signals are aliased in the audible band of 9.1 and 4.1 kilohertz, they are not below the noise level, they are very audible and barely have been toned down at all. The same thing happened with the signal sweeps in the right brand audio analyzer test, once the frequency reaches 22 kilohertz it starts moving downwards and aliases back into the audible band once the first scan was done. deployment; However, these 35 and 40 kilohertz signals were returned to their correct position. place and the writemak audio analyzer sweeps had been reversed, indicating that mqa's claim of restoring high-frequency content is at least partially true;

However, it is far from perfect; We still have a massive band of noise centered around 25 kilohertz and the deployment has left more artifacts. at lower frequencies, resulting in a noise floor of approximately -60 db. On mqa's bob talks blog they state that the content folds back to the region below -120 db and should therefore be inaudible. We can see from my file that this statement is simply not true. This has barely been attenuated at all and higher level signals would be absolutely audible. I checked this by simply listening to myself and I could quite clearly hear these tones played, which means we have a very poor dynamic range in both the audible level and the ultrasonic bands when mqa is displaying ultrasonic content once it was performed again a full decode, these problems did not go away and we simply see the contents of the file reflected up several times in the ultrasonic range, so to answer question number two, yes, technically mqa puts back the high frequency content once displayed, However, it does so with very little precision and dynamic range, introduces worrying levels of noise that do not disappear once unfolded, and leaves a fairly high level of noise and artifacts in the audible band when pre-folded content is removed, which does. does.

In no way do I retain 100 of the original recording and this statement is false. In my own opinion, it's not exactly a great achievement either, given that the 44.1 kilohertz file was barely usable. All of this content is simply aliased and reflected back into the audible frequency range at high levels it is not reduced at inaudible levels as mqa claims and depending on how much high frequency content was originally present it could be very audible and very problematic, so, once the tests are finished, let's do something quickly. points we now know that mqa is lossless in either stock or deployed format, regardless of the sample rate of the original file, most versions of mqa are simply being upsampled and are not coming from hi-res masters, aka mqa, high frequency content up to the audible range.

With minimal attenuation, mqa returns high-frequency content and removes most of the previous aliasing content when dropped, but leaves significant noise and distortion behind tidal no longer offers true lossless transmission for any track marked as master that I could find that you have compressed or lossy mqa the lossless indicator is not available and you must use an alternative service like cobuzz authentication or deezer mqa and the blue light offers absolutely no guarantee of source or missing sample rate file integrity of alteration and does not guarantee that the sound will be the same as it was in the studio.

If you are a runes user, you can see what the original sample rate of an mqa release was. The last part of the track description where the mqa sample rate is stated is the original mass at the sample rate, so whatever. labeled as 44.1 kilohertz here it is only upsampling mqa as for similar it does not offer any advantage in file size and is actually larger than 44.1 kilohertz although it is smaller than high resolution now with evidence and tests the way i want to give my own opinions on the mqa situation in general and why i took this test, the following is my own

review

, not necessarily fact.

I am an audiophile. I love the team. I love music and I love when a technological advance improves our listening experience, but whatever. In this hobby they will happily tell you that there is a lot of snake oil out there that there are many products that promise a better experience and claim to be the best way to do whatever they are doing, but there are two key categories: those that have evidence or can be tested by a third party and those who can't, there are people like rob watts from cord who is quite vocal about the fact that he believes his wta filter design is the optimal method for reproducing 44.1 kilohertz audio and not It is only evidence provided for this, you can try it yourself.

I don't necessarily agree but I or anyone with a dac chord or scalar m chord can play and record any music we want through them, sample any signal we want and steal watts also very responsive on places like Headphy writing detailed posts on how and why your design works. It won't hand out the filter coefficients, but it will answer enough questions and provide evidence for you to make an informed decision about whether you agree and would do it. I would like to buy this product. It's a similar story with DSD. It's open. Anyone can encode and play files using it.

It is fully capable of being poked, tested, explored and the pros and cons discussed, even in the market segment most commonly considered snake oil cables. It can be tested by comparing the jitter performance between a decent generic BNC cable and the AudioQuest Carbon BNC cable. I was able to get considerably less jitter with the audioquest cable. Now whether it's worth the cost or audible to you is a different question, but the point. I can test your marketing claims and I can prove or disprove them, but there are companies like mqa that not only have not provided their own evidence, but are preventing you from collecting your own?

They cannot encode files in mqa or log the final result. of a complete decoder just works with confidence, it is best to address their marketing claims are vague and change when refuted, they have published information and done some things that are really fascinating. The mqa white glove treatment for fixing problems in recording equipment is really fantastic and I would highly recommend reading the fairy tale article, it is highly recommended, but the way it is presented makes people believe that this is how it works the core mqa product, which is not to say that all versions of mqa are better than flac when most of it is just 44.1 enhanced.

Bob stewart's blog provides an explanation of how mqa folds high frequency information that could never work with a 16 bit file as it wouldn't have enough dynamic range when given problems, they dodge the question. and I try to divert the conversation and meanwhile more and more music content is being replaced by mqa, more and more hardware supports mqa and it continues to spread with the supposed benefits completely unproven and its problems constantly being exposed as people find ways toavoid it. testing hurdles like the ones I've done today, even if we were to assume that mqa is absolutely perfect, lossless and does everything as described in the marketing material, it shouldn't be the only option, it should still have an option.

You should still be able to choose between high resolution native sample rate audio and mqa as well as any other options you choose to appear now as I have shown in this video most mqa releases are simply downsampling from 44 .1 kilohertz. it doesn't come from a high resolution master, but there are some versions where it actually comes from a high sample rate master and there is no native high sample rate version. This is a problem; You, as a consumer, should not feel comfortable with a company developing a monopoly. In the high-resolution audio market, 24-bit, 192 kilohertz audio uses less than 5 megabits per second, the vast majority of Internet connections in the developed world can absolutely accommodate that, if you can watch YouTube or Netflix, You can stream losslessly on 24,192 without any worries. mqa is nothing more than an expensive lossy compression mechanism forced on you and provided as the only option if you want to access some of this high resolution content and even then, due to the flaw shown in this video, It is not the same as the native one. high-resolution content, that ideal option of true native audio has been taken away.

The reason hardware manufacturers support mqa is not because they actually think it works and is better than native high resolution, but because you, the customer, demand it. Several companies like lin and even ps audio, whose dax support mqa, have again spoken out against mqa links. In the description, Paul from ps audio talks in a video about this. He says that mqa was added because a lot of people were demanding it, but they still don't like it, it's a business decision, it's being made because if they don't implement it they will lose customers and regardless of the technical performance of mqa, no one can argue that it is an absolutely example fantastic power of marketing.

I like progress. I like the advancements that allow us to enjoy music even more, but mqa has several demonstrable problems, none of which exist if you simply stream lossless reviews even in 44.1. I can't recommend anyone use mqa in any situation and you should vote with your wallet. Don't buy products that have cost you mqa licensing fees Don't subscribe to platforms like tidal that remove content losslessly and force you to use mqa for many tracks and require companies to be honest and transparent about the products sellers demand allowing third-party testing to confirm their marketing claims if a company can't provide its own evidence and goes to great lengths to prevent anyone else from testing it, which should probably raise quite a few red flags.

One last thing. I would like to talk about the first implementation of mqa which is different than the second and third, so some devices can only do the same second and third and require the player software to do the first if you have no choice but to use a mqa file. My recommendation would be to do the first deployment in software and then sample or upsample normally with your internal dac filter. Do not do it. any additional mqa rendering will remove most of the audible band aliasing but will also remove unwanted high frequency images and some of the noise during this video.

I use the ifi idsd diablo to test it. It's a complete mqa decoder and I have to say it's a fantastic product, I love it, but I discovered something interesting about the ifi gto filter while I was doing this, this is the answer for the ifi gto filter, it looks familiar, it's probably because Since this is the response of the mqa renderer filter, they are basically identical, a quick test showed that the ifi gto filter exhibited the same leak characteristics and generated images in the same way that the mqa renders and also has a phase minimal, meaning that phase-dependent sound features such as timbre can be degraded when used, however, when swapped back. to firmware 7.0 and using the original filter was absolutely fine.

I would highly recommend if you have an ifi dac to use the original filter, not the gto. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when I read the i5 article about the gto. I filtered and saw that it was designed with the help of mqa, the diablo is still a really fantastic product and again, just because something supports mqa doesn't mean the product is bad, but tell the manufacturers that you don't want to pay more for it . who wants your non-mqa products added in mqa responded to me before this video was posted. I won't address all the points because a lot of it is just marketing speak, but the full answer is now on the screen for you to read. and references are linked in the description, the first part mainly talks about how mqa is more advanced than conventional approaches and is intended to account for the conversion process at each end of the chain.

This doesn't make sense since I have my files encoded in mqa. and they didn't even ask me for any information about the production hardware I used, this was all done using mqa's recommended method for independent artists, by the way, and all the issues in this video were captured using fully certified mqa hardware and software, more Straight to the point. Even if you had information about the source and dac hardware components, how would you explain the behavior with tracks where multiple adcs synth recording methods and production editing methods were used? Today, almost no music is produced analogically and then digitized or recorded digitally.

Using only an ADC model, we don't understand your frustration when evaluating MQA. My frustration is that there are no end-to-end analysis tools available like there are for almost all other formats. Yes, we can listen to any mqa song, but we have no information. about how it's been altered, we can't check for placebo, we don't know if it's the same teacher, and we have no way to objectively test with test tones or cues other than jumping through a lot of hoops like I had to do for this. video also when someone like chris conica provides evidence the question is dodged and you try to change the subject when i contact you you try to censor me by deleting all my content thats my frustration its not transparent in the slightest and mqa responds in a hostile manner every time they criticize it regarding the tracks I used to test in this video mqa says that this encoder is not configured to handle content where, for example, the statistics change mid-song or where the audio does not It looks like natural sound.

Does that imply then that electronic music won't work with mqa or that tracks with a combination of natural recording and synthesized parts won't work at this time? None of the tracks in the top 10 titles are true analog recordings and yet 8 out of 10 of them are on mqa, perhaps the studio tools referenced in your answer and on your website will help overcome these problems, but again there is no transparency, we have no idea what these tools are, who has access to them, what releases were made with them and we. I have no way of evaluating them. Would you ever consider making a limited version of these available?

Maybe release a version that only allows a maximum audio length of 10 seconds. This would allow people to test correctly without having any commercial impact and is similar to what the signalman does. with your hq player software, where you can use professional hq player software but limit the output to 60 seconds of audio, a little transparency would go a long way and saying mqa is lossless but only within vague criteria no specified and lossless only using no- Conventional evaluation methods are not exactly reassuring regarding my mention of the blue mqa authentication indicator. They said the onus is on the sender to verify the content when it arrives on Tidal and confirm the sound again.

This was never mentioned during the publishing process. it's not mentioned in their marketing material and it also doesn't address the fact that you can make an mqa file throw away a third and still get that light on, plus even the 44.1 kilohertz file I sent sounds different and is objectively different than the master that I posted and again this is the same for any other track where a high sample rate version and an mqa version are available. They are not equal. The next part of your answer goes on to explain how mqa identifies and responds to the content of a track, again implying that it can't be lossless.

If it behaves differently with different types of recording and music, then the result will not be consistent; It may sound more natural to some people, but it will sound natural and lossless to others. the original master is not the same now they also discussed the files he had posted. I should first mention that the information and status messages you provide here I only received one of these, the one that said the encoder was unable to encode. the file and that was just for files where it was literally just a test file, an impulse response or square wave with no other content that probably wouldn't pass mqa checks for test files.

Other products like the scalar called m have impulse test detection like Well all the other error messages I never got. I don't know if they are genuine and they came about because mqa made the editor remove all my content. I can't go back and verify in response to my claims about added noise. Mqa claims this was my fault as I didn't ramble through the files claiming this was a naive bug not mqa, it wasn't, in fact this was something I had explicitly tested. The first track I sent called try again had hesitation and showed all the problems mentioned in this video, in fact some to a worse extent to give mqa the benefit of the doubt and verify that the dithering was not negatively affecting anything.

I posted the next two tracks without dithering, so this is not my fault at all and the only naive mistake made was that mqa didn't look at the three files I had posted. Dither was something I considered and was something I checked to see if it altered mqa performance in response to others and my description of mqa upsampling filters as filtering affirms this term. is derogatory and inappropriate and that the only alternative would be to limit the band in a brick wall, first of all, I don't think the filter itself has feelings, but if I have hurt you, I apologize, second of all, maybe the biggest advantage of genuine high-resolution native audio is just this. allows much more flexibility with the filter design, going from 44.1 kilohertz to 96 kilohertz, giving you more than 13 times more distance between the audible band and the Nyquist frequency, so if the argument is that the brick wall filters are bad, to be clear in many ways, I agree that the solution is not mqa, it is to use native high resolution with respect to aliasing.

They claim this is simply because the signal levels were too high and would not occur in real music at this point, I am quite happy to accept that this could be the case, in fact as I mentioned earlier in the video I prepared another track with ultrasonic content at a much lower level to test what level the alias was at, unfortunately you deleted my tracks and this never came. To find out if this statement is true, send me the mqa encoded version of that file and I will put at the top of the description of this video that mqa actually doesn't have any aliasing problems.

Lastly, they say that despite what is shown here, mqa does not add distortion and the added noise is inaudible high frequency dithering noise. It may be centered at 25 kilohertz in the deployed version, but in both the 44.1 and deployed versions it extends into the audible band and is -43 dB at 20 kilohertz. it's audible, they also say that every mqa file will tell you the original sample rate of the master and this is true, but my complaint wasn't that it didn't tell you anywhere, but that it wasn't clear in the slightest tide shows. there is no indication of the original sample rate, you must use a program like roon to display this information, this means that mqa marketing is misleading consumers into thinking that mqa releases are not the same or better than 24 bits and 192 kilohertz.

I did a survey that got over 240 responses from those people 46 said they thought mqa was a good thing the people who said mqa was a good thing two thirds of them believed the versions of mqa were equal to or better than 24-bit flack and 192 kilohertz, this is why I think it's a problem, this is why it needs to be more transparent, even if a 24-bit 192 kilohertz recording folded to 44.1 kilohertz was absolutely identical to a native 192 kilohertz recordingkilohertz that records the large number of mqa launches that are 44.1 kilohertz of 44.1 kilohertz. masters are not equal to or better than native hi-res flack and this misconception is worrying.

I hope you found this video informative and enjoyable. I would like to thank daniel mellinger and amos alias kurawong for helping me with the making of this video. amos has compiled a long list of interesting articles and evidence on mqa, many of which were not mentioned in this video and all of which are in the description below. I would also like to thank ashimago john atkinson miska mans roll guard and frederick v for the information. tools and tests that you have made available thanks also to the 250 people who responded to my mqa survey, also a huge thank you to all my sponsors, especially my diamond and my legend here sponsors chris ross kyle gravitas crack daniel mellinger king jong - un and lana bennett, you guys are fantastic.

If you have any questions, feel free to join my discord or my private Telegram chat for backers, if you're feeling supportive, have a great day.