Thanks for this MQA update Hans. I think your explanation that no format is truly lossless is right on! I’m old, 64 next month and a lifelong audiophile. In the 80’s when CD’s arrived and were touted as “perfect sound forever”, I wanted to love digital audio, but found CD’s to be harsh, thin and cold sounding, the opposite of warm, lush and engaging. I found myself not listening to a whole CD. Over time CD audio improved some, better players, better A/D converters I suspect, but 16/44 CD quality Digital audio never provided me the engaging experience of analog. Then SACD, and DVD-audio arrived. Big improvement for me. Hi-res discs we much more satisfying than CD’s. I jumped in with both feet. I loved the 5.1 surround capability and purchased as many surround DVD-audio and SACD discs as I could afford. Then, they were pretty much gone. Next up was HDTracks with Hi-res downloads. I was intrigued enough to buy a Meridian Director DAC and purchased a few HDTrack albums. Hmmm… I liked what I heard. Much more analog like than CD for me. However, purchasing HDTracks albums gets expensive quickly. Finally along comes, MQA, Tidal, and Roon. I think the concept of being able to stream thousands of Hi-res quality albums for only a $20 monthly Tidal subscription is a wonderful thing. Now I own a Mytek Brooklyn (MQA capable) DAC. My Hi-res audio library has gone from hundreds to thousands. There are now nearly 10,000 MQA titles available with many more coming. So yes, I am a fan of MQA. I think it is a wonderful technology. I can provide no charts or graphs to prove anything. Only my ears tell me I very much like/prefer listening to MQA encoded digital music.
Read the article in Stereophile I mentioned, the link is in the show notes. It will tell you that the "MQA module' also has beneficiary influence on non-MQA tracks. I second that observation.
Here's the problem. Lossless already has a definition when it comes to digital audio and that is: Can we get the same waveform data out that we put in? This video feels like it deflects from the issue by calling analog lossy. Well, we already knew that so it's irrelevant. So, we already have all kinds of lossy and lossless digital formats that can handle high resolution and moving the goalposts just for MQA's sake isn't an argument.
Hello, It might be that you enjoy the warmness of the Mytek Brooklyn has, and not the MQA files themselves, I am new to the hobby so I would like to know your opinion
A good point made about the argument that high-frequency, inaudible frequencies from instruments affect the audible sounds, is that this will have already have happened by the time the sound hits the microphone. As for MQA, the reason people are "hateful" towards the company, is that they have repeatedly lied about their product and how it works. Even skipping the fact that they advertised it as lossless when they first announced it, NO MQA music has high-res content beyond 96k, making so-called higher-res MQA to be fake. As well, now it has been revealed that Universal lost a significant number of master recordings in a fire 10 years ago, any MQA from them very likely doesn't come from the "original master". Regardless, any benefits of their ADC/DAC synchronised filtering can be realised without their lossy format.
I might be more interested in mqa if it were an open system with open source codecs. Dsd and high resolution pcm are already better than human ears can discern, and flac does a great job at lossless compression. Id be happier if the industry were focusing on multichannel audio, (which humans can discern) rather than on more proprietary formats.
While I can agree with the technical benefits of MQA, in practical use (using Tidal) I have found that most popular music that's been remastered recently has been made so loud and compressed (dynamically) that the sound quality is more compromised by the mastering than the benefits of MQA give to us. On many album titles, I have found that an OLDER master of CD quality sounds better and more dynamic than a new remaster encoded & decoded with MQA. I've heard some audiophile and classical titles that sound stunning using MQA, but that is not the music that I listen to.
You argue that it doesn't matter whether or not MQA is lossless because no file format, analogue or digital, is lossless. This is 'bold' as it is at odds with most people's understanding of what lossless means - in the digital domain, at least. Part of the definition of a lossless digital file format is that you can translate the original file into the new file format and back again and the result will be bit perfect with the original file. Can we confirm this with MQA? Your stance seems to be that this doesn't matter because you and people whose ears you trust are confident the MQA version in most cases "sounds better" than the original file and people can always listen themselves and make up their own minds. Fair enough, but the empiricists in the community will not have your level of faith in their (or your) ears or the marketing spin and they will, with good cause, argue that MQA is a black box that is mysteriously post-mastering/EQing the original file without informed consent from the original artist.
Of course it’s bold. I want people to think about the true function of distributing music in stead of counting bits. Adding 45 kHz to a recording looks wrong but for tape recorders it is the only way to get a good sound quality. Making low frequencies mono doesn’t sound right, still that is done to make it doable to cut vinyl records. Get my point. We must serve the music, not the bit counters.
Oh wow. I just heard you say you like your mqa over your dsd. That blows me away. I thought I have found sonic gold with my dsd and my new dac. Amazing to know there is competing formats. Thanks for the explanation. Love your channel.
So, basically MQA is an added distortion to the original PCM file, intending to make the decoded sound "better" for some people on some music tracks played thru some DACs. Thus technically it is just an audio effect.
No it isn't. It is a clever way of filtering and storing music, based on technology used in the processing of radio telescopes. That way a better sound can be achieved using more affordable replay equipment.
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel " technology used in the processing of radio telescopes" enhancing the input signal. MQA is "enhancing the original sound" which is just an audio effect.
In my opinion, the problem of MQA is not about quality (even if there are things not clear) but about the additionnal cost for customer that is useless when listening to HI-Res. It's like using a fridge with a door code and have to pay the fridge and the code to open the door. I prefer using a fridge without that useless stuff. It's make the job.
Thank you this is a great video, even though there will always be people that will have closed ears no matter what. I pulled the trigger and got Tidal a couple of days ago, taking advantage of the Bluos module my NAD C388 has and so far i like what i hear. I tried some MQA albums too and they indeed sound amazing. I was blown away last night by "Vallon Sonore" aria from Les Troyens, so they must be doing something right. Keep up the good work, most viewers appreciate what you do, haters will hate. That been said, i hear that they charge an arm and a leg for the right to use their technology and that is what makes many manufacturers not support it for now, but i am not an expert on what is really happening in the industry behind closed doors.
The first step in the MQA decoding is universal for all DAC;s, the second stage corrects for the time behaviour of the DAC and therefore is. unique to that DAC. Therefore Tidal can't do that, nor can any network player. Watch th-cam.com/video/r_wxRGiBoJg/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/T5o6XHVK2HA/w-d-xo.html
Thank you Hans, for the best information on Digital Audio on TH-cam. I have decided to try MQA and have purchased (not arrived yet!) the Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 and have subscribed to Tidal's HiFi service. I'm hoping for good listening experiences. I trust your reviews more than anyone else, thanks a lot.
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel Thanks for the effort put into the vid! I'm no audiophile but compression artifacts really gets me. My minimum is CD quality and now your video got me thinking about MQA... :-) Now how not to ovespend on it given my myriads of hobbies... :-)
This is puzzling me quite a bit. I have seen the MASTER audio files that come off Tidal. They are a flac. One comparison I made with the hi-fi version of the same song was about 10kbps higher. Both registered as 44khz and both sound the same when playing on PC via hdmi to 2015 Onkyo Atmos AV amp and £1k speakers. Is this sounding right? Does extra equipment change something with the 10kbps of extra data? Normally I'm a sucker for a gadget, but on this I'm loathed to by extra stuff for no difference.
The lossless compression rate of FLAC can be varied. High compression needs more computational power to be played back but you get smaller files. Today all playback devices have no problem at all decompressing highly compressed files but not every one set the compression to the highest. Provided the playback system is capable of proper and fast decompressing - which all modern playback systems can - there will be no audible difference between high compression and low compression. FLAC compression is always lossless.
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel, thanks for your reply. I may have asked it badly. I'm trying to understand if the Tidal MQA files from Tidal will have a .flac extension and not something else. As the files I se from there are barely bigger than the regular HiFi flac files and sound identical on my better than average equipment, albeit not with anything stating MQA ability. I'm wondering if the tiny extra bit of data is enough to transform the slightly larger files, despite them all registering as 44khz in any analysis software. I have a Intel 8700 and rtx 2070 that uses hdmi 2.0b. So you can get 7.1 from the PC to the amp and I think the pc goes to 192khz. I'm not stuck for processing power, or hard drive space. Perhaps if there is extra hardware required to benefit from MQA on these files, I could convert the to files to wav and avoid the hardware? Thanks again
Thank you Hans, your review is as always is smart and balanced. I will wait and see how all this works out and will be just listening to music with my old Burson dac and going out and seeing live music in Montreal, jazz fest week. Just left France before the heat wave by a few days. 🌞
The whole video is great. The first part taught me a lot I didn't know about analog audio. I've always had a hard time explaining the difference between analog and digital audio to my none audiophile friends (specially explaining analog). Also it’s great having more information on MQA. I'm looking into a new audio set up and knowing more about MQA has helped narrow down what I want my set up to be. Thanks for the video.
I heard something that struck me as odd. You said that you preferred a MQA file to a good (or indeed, *perfectly* mastered 24/96 file. In an ideal situation they should sound alike (or at least similar, given the heavy reliance on psychoacoustics in MQA) How can a well crafted 24/96 file sound WORSE than an MQA? I'm not being a purist. I will risk saying that they may sound alike (to people not trained to notice the difference, since there are a few tell tale artifacts - that do not hurt the listening experience in a significant way) But to sound BETTER? WHY better? Perhaps artificially so, if the 24/96 file is an honest one. You rely heavily on science and are one of the small handful of truly knowledgeable people in the medium. Could you please explain your assertion in technical terms?
If you watch my two part video on MQA (th-cam.com/video/r_wxRGiBoJg/w-d-xo.html), you will see that MQA is designed to reduce time smearing even when it originates from the master recording.
there are forums where even if you mention MQA you will be destroyed. this is done by folks that have never heard it in any way. my cost of entry was tiny: explorer 2 hooked up to my old mac mini playing tidal. i love it. love your channel, Hans.
ok. i was setting up my digital front for the first time. the mac i already had lying around. i needed to get a dac. explorer 2 is cheap enough. obviously if you have already invested thousands into your gear and switching to mqa was going to cost thousands more then it would be dumb. so yeah, my cost of entry was tiny.
@@colinutus My cost of using MQA was zero. Nothing. PS Audio provided an MQA update to my DAC free of charge and Tidal provides MQA for no extra charge over standard CD quality streaming.
I am enthusiastic about Mqa. But do Tidal really use Master recordings to make Mqa tracks? I think they do - but most likely only in a small percentage of the tracks they have mqa versions of.
Thanks for the great video. How keen should audiophiles be to change their DACs to MQA enabled DACs while listening to Tidal Masters? Not everyone affords a Mytek Brooklyn DAC and you do get pretty decent non-MQA DACs at 10% of what the Brooklyn costs (say the SMSL SU-8 - a balanced DAC for $200). Should people then pay much more to enjoy the extra benefits of 2nd MQA unfolding by buying a MQA rendering DAC and how much benefits in Sound Quality should they expect if they were to do so. Thanks
You list a great many things impacting "audio quality" without any effort to highlight the impact of each relative to the others. Clearly, some influences have dramatically (multiple orders of magnitude) more impact than others. They can't all be lumped together except to make the most general statement that there is entropy in the universe, so all signal processing is inherently flawed.
That was not the intend. This was my thought about the intifada against MQA and how 'not lossless' was used as 'the proof' MQA is inferior. My ears -and those of my respected colleagues - tell a different story and that is what I wanted to express.
Question HANS. I have a LG G8 phone. I play mqa files on my phone using tidal. Does the LG G8 phone have a dac that plays MQA files. I read that it does. So is MQA the new audio sound. Hope to here from you soon.
If it's G8 and not G8s, yes. LG has built in ESS made Quad DAC, which can unfold MQA. If you have Tidal subscription you can choose and play Masters on Tidal app or if you've MQA files from 2L or other sources, you can play them directly on LG's built in player or on USB Audio Player Pro (it also functions with Tidal, but only online) and get full MQA experience
Hi Hans. I own an AURALiC G2.1 and I understand you own an Auralic G2. Auralic is clearly against MQA. They accepted to "support" it by means of their own software but not by using MQA's own system, and in their website there is a very long post explaining why they are against MQA. So, if the server streamer you (and I) are using, and you have stated that this is the best you have heard and used up to now, rejects MQA, why do you support MQA? Don't get me wrong. I am not doing this in bad faith. I just want for you to clarify this.
The Aries G2(.1) is extremely good in being a bit perfect network player and network bridge. If you don't use DPS or volume control, it's the best digital source for an MQA DAC I know. The fact that Mr. Wang doesn't like MQA has nothing to do with that, technically. The advantage of MQA in very high quality DAC's is marginal at best but it can bring clear sound improvement in more modestly priced gear.
So why does Steve Guttenburg say that MQA changes the sound of the music? My problem is just that often these hi res downloads still use the same mastering from the CD or low res download which is often loud and overly compressed, so we wind up just getting garbage in and garbage out no matter the resolution. Call me crazy but if anything is going to be issued in a hi res format, it should but a very different mastering.
You should ask him I can only tell you that almost all MQA versions I heard were more transparent, has faster percussion, a lovely piano right hand and so on. My experience is that MQA sticks to it's promise not to upsample and only issue higher sampling rates when the digital master was recorded at higher sampling rates or if the original master was analogue. They also promised to use only the original master if that still exists. Don't let the meanies get into your head and enjoy the music.
It's just that the inventors of MQA try to avoid just that. If the recording was made at 44.1 kHz, it will be released as MQA 44.1 kHz as you can see if you check all MQA releases.
Thank you for the excellent explanation on MQA. Now I feel I can argue against any MQA-hater. The most important point is that MQA is not lossless in the digital domain, but it is more lossless than any other format in the analog domain. The most lossy step in a digital format is the PCM encoding itself. MQA works around this in a genious way to get the listener closer to the original sound. And therefore has the potential to sound better than any lossless format. And the fact that you actually prefer many MQA-tracks over their 24/192 versions is more than enough proof for me on the technical superiority of MQA.
Thanks for this MQA update Hans. I think your explanation that no format is truly lossless is right on!
I’m old, 64 next month and a lifelong audiophile. In the 80’s when CD’s arrived and were touted as “perfect sound forever”, I wanted to love digital audio, but found CD’s to be harsh, thin and cold sounding, the opposite of warm, lush and engaging. I found myself not listening to a whole CD.
Over time CD audio improved some, better players, better A/D converters I suspect, but 16/44 CD quality Digital audio never provided me the engaging experience of analog.
Then SACD, and DVD-audio arrived. Big improvement for me. Hi-res discs we much more satisfying than CD’s. I jumped in with both feet. I loved the 5.1 surround capability and purchased as many surround DVD-audio and SACD discs as I could afford. Then, they were pretty much gone.
Next up was HDTracks with Hi-res downloads. I was intrigued enough to buy a Meridian Director DAC and purchased a few HDTrack albums. Hmmm… I liked what I heard. Much more analog like than CD for me. However, purchasing HDTracks albums gets expensive quickly.
Finally along comes, MQA, Tidal, and Roon. I think the concept of being able to stream thousands of Hi-res quality albums for only a $20 monthly Tidal subscription is a wonderful thing. Now I own a Mytek Brooklyn (MQA capable) DAC. My Hi-res audio library has gone from hundreds to thousands. There are now nearly 10,000 MQA titles available with many more coming.
So yes, I am a fan of MQA. I think it is a wonderful technology. I can provide no charts or graphs to prove anything. Only my ears tell me I very much like/prefer listening to MQA encoded digital music.
Read the article in Stereophile I mentioned, the link is in the show notes. It will tell you that the "MQA module' also has beneficiary influence on non-MQA tracks. I second that observation.
Here's the problem. Lossless already has a definition when it comes to digital audio and that is: Can we get the same waveform data out that we put in? This video feels like it deflects from the issue by calling analog lossy. Well, we already knew that so it's irrelevant. So, we already have all kinds of lossy and lossless digital formats that can handle high resolution and moving the goalposts just for MQA's sake isn't an argument.
The job at hand is to get the audio from the mastering desk to the home stereo with as little loss as possible. So you must consider the whole chain.
John Eaton apparently drawn we are twin sons of different mothers! I found the same. Very well with them!
Hello, It might be that you enjoy the warmness of the Mytek Brooklyn has, and not the MQA files themselves, I am new to the hobby so I would like to know your opinion
A good point made about the argument that high-frequency, inaudible frequencies from instruments affect the audible sounds, is that this will have already have happened by the time the sound hits the microphone. As for MQA, the reason people are "hateful" towards the company, is that they have repeatedly lied about their product and how it works. Even skipping the fact that they advertised it as lossless when they first announced it, NO MQA music has high-res content beyond 96k, making so-called higher-res MQA to be fake. As well, now it has been revealed that Universal lost a significant number of master recordings in a fire 10 years ago, any MQA from them very likely doesn't come from the "original master". Regardless, any benefits of their ADC/DAC synchronised filtering can be realised without their lossy format.
You might want to watch "Is MQA lossless?": th-cam.com/video/9NHuwOgWYOo/w-d-xo.html
I might be more interested in mqa if it were an open system with open source codecs. Dsd and high resolution pcm are already better than human ears can discern, and flac does a great job at lossless compression. Id be happier if the industry were focusing on multichannel audio, (which humans can discern) rather than on more proprietary formats.
While I can agree with the technical benefits of MQA, in practical use (using Tidal) I have found that most popular music that's been remastered recently has been made so loud and compressed (dynamically) that the sound quality is more compromised by the mastering than the benefits of MQA give to us. On many album titles, I have found that an OLDER master of CD quality sounds better and more dynamic than a new remaster encoded & decoded with MQA. I've heard some audiophile and classical titles that sound stunning using MQA, but that is not the music that I listen to.
I wonder if that is unique to MQA. To me most remasters sound less.
You argue that it doesn't matter whether or not MQA is lossless because no file format, analogue or digital, is lossless. This is 'bold' as it is at odds with most people's understanding of what lossless means - in the digital domain, at least. Part of the definition of a lossless digital file format is that you can translate the original file into the new file format and back again and the result will be bit perfect with the original file. Can we confirm this with MQA? Your stance seems to be that this doesn't matter because you and people whose ears you trust are confident the MQA version in most cases "sounds better" than the original file and people can always listen themselves and make up their own minds. Fair enough, but the empiricists in the community will not have your level of faith in their (or your) ears or the marketing spin and they will, with good cause, argue that MQA is a black box that is mysteriously post-mastering/EQing the original file without informed consent from the original artist.
Of course it’s bold. I want people to think about the true function of distributing music in stead of counting bits. Adding 45 kHz to a recording looks wrong but for tape recorders it is the only way to get a good sound quality. Making low frequencies mono doesn’t sound right, still that is done to make it doable to cut vinyl records. Get my point. We must serve the music, not the bit counters.
Oh wow. I just heard you say you like your mqa over your dsd. That blows me away. I thought I have found sonic gold with my dsd and my new dac. Amazing to know there is competing formats. Thanks for the explanation. Love your channel.
Sorry 😐 😁
You are such a knowledgeable person, learning alot visiting your channel. You earned yourself a new patreon from Australia :)
Thanks Hans
Awesome, thank you!
So, basically MQA is an added distortion to the original PCM file, intending to make the decoded sound "better" for some people on some music tracks played thru some DACs. Thus technically it is just an audio effect.
No it isn't. It is a clever way of filtering and storing music, based on technology used in the processing of radio telescopes. That way a better sound can be achieved using more affordable replay equipment.
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel " technology used in the processing of radio telescopes" enhancing the input signal.
MQA is "enhancing the original sound" which is just an audio effect.
In my opinion, the problem of MQA is not about quality (even if there are things not clear) but about the additionnal cost for customer that is useless when listening to HI-Res. It's like using a fridge with a door code and have to pay the fridge and the code to open the door. I prefer using a fridge without that useless stuff. It's make the job.
I don't think MQA adds to the cost. Tidal cost about the same as Qobuz
Thank you this is a great video, even though there will always be people that will have closed ears no matter what. I pulled the trigger and got Tidal a couple of days ago, taking advantage of the Bluos module my NAD C388 has and so far i like what i hear. I tried some MQA albums too and they indeed sound amazing. I was blown away last night by "Vallon Sonore" aria from Les Troyens, so they must be doing something right. Keep up the good work, most viewers appreciate what you do, haters will hate.
That been said, i hear that they charge an arm and a leg for the right to use their technology and that is what makes many manufacturers not support it for now, but i am not an expert on what is really happening in the industry behind closed doors.
what I don't understand is why Tidal couldn't do the full unfold of MQA, feeding any DAC with full resolved HD signal? Why the need to change DAC?
The first step in the MQA decoding is universal for all DAC;s, the second stage corrects for the time behaviour of the DAC and therefore is. unique to that DAC. Therefore Tidal can't do that, nor can any network player. Watch th-cam.com/video/r_wxRGiBoJg/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/T5o6XHVK2HA/w-d-xo.html
Thank you Hans, for the best information on Digital Audio on TH-cam. I have decided to try MQA and have purchased (not arrived yet!) the Pro-Ject Pre Box S2 and have subscribed to Tidal's HiFi service. I'm hoping for good listening experiences. I trust your reviews more than anyone else, thanks a lot.
Glad it was helpful!
The best MQA explanation I’ve ever heard. “Sapere aude” is a great advice and I thank you for all the informations you share
Glad it was helpful!
I came across your video, and thank you for your detailed and neutral opinion.
Thanks for watching!
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel Thanks for the effort put into the vid! I'm no audiophile but compression artifacts really gets me. My minimum is CD quality and now your video got me thinking about MQA... :-) Now how not to ovespend on it given my myriads of hobbies... :-)
This is puzzling me quite a bit. I have seen the MASTER audio files that come off Tidal. They are a flac. One comparison I made with the hi-fi version of the same song was about 10kbps higher. Both registered as 44khz and both sound the same when playing on PC via hdmi to 2015 Onkyo Atmos AV amp and £1k speakers. Is this sounding right? Does extra equipment change something with the 10kbps of extra data? Normally I'm a sucker for a gadget, but on this I'm loathed to by extra stuff for no difference.
The lossless compression rate of FLAC can be varied. High compression needs more computational power to be played back but you get smaller files. Today all playback devices have no problem at all decompressing highly compressed files but not every one set the compression to the highest. Provided the playback system is capable of proper and fast decompressing - which all modern playback systems can - there will be no audible difference between high compression and low compression. FLAC compression is always lossless.
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel, thanks for your reply. I may have asked it badly. I'm trying to understand if the Tidal MQA files from Tidal will have a .flac extension and not something else. As the files I se from there are barely bigger than the regular HiFi flac files and sound identical on my better than average equipment, albeit not with anything stating MQA ability. I'm wondering if the tiny extra bit of data is enough to transform the slightly larger files, despite them all registering as 44khz in any analysis software. I have a Intel 8700 and rtx 2070 that uses hdmi 2.0b. So you can get 7.1 from the PC to the amp and I think the pc goes to 192khz. I'm not stuck for processing power, or hard drive space.
Perhaps if there is extra hardware required to benefit from MQA on these files, I could convert the to files to wav and avoid the hardware?
Thanks again
Thank you Hans, your review is as always is smart and balanced. I will wait and see how all this works out and will be just listening to music with my old Burson dac and going out and seeing live music in Montreal, jazz fest week. Just left France before the heat wave by a few days. 🌞
The whole video is great. The first part taught me a lot I didn't know about analog audio. I've always had a hard time explaining the difference between analog and digital audio to my none audiophile friends (specially explaining analog).
Also it’s great having more information on MQA. I'm looking into a new audio set up and knowing more about MQA has helped narrow down what I want my set up to be.
Thanks for the video.
Thanks Hans - very informative..
I heard something that struck me as odd. You said that you preferred a MQA file to a good (or indeed, *perfectly* mastered 24/96 file. In an ideal situation they should sound alike (or at least similar, given the heavy reliance on psychoacoustics in MQA)
How can a well crafted 24/96 file sound WORSE than an MQA? I'm not being a purist. I will risk saying that they may sound alike (to people not trained to notice the difference, since there are a few tell tale artifacts - that do not hurt the listening experience in a significant way)
But to sound BETTER? WHY better? Perhaps artificially so, if the 24/96 file is an honest one.
You rely heavily on science and are one of the small handful of truly knowledgeable people in the medium. Could you please explain your assertion in technical terms?
If you watch my two part video on MQA (th-cam.com/video/r_wxRGiBoJg/w-d-xo.html), you will see that MQA is designed to reduce time smearing even when it originates from the master recording.
He seems angry, but I can understand why. People have hinted that MQA is giving money to him.
For me, Audirvana 48Khz max and 24Bit upsampling deactivated sound best on Sotm SMS-200 Neo and Conrad Johnson HD3. I greet you from Poland.
there are forums where even if you mention MQA you will be destroyed. this is done by folks that have never heard it in any way. my cost of entry was tiny: explorer 2 hooked up to my old mac mini playing tidal. i love it. love your channel, Hans.
So what was the total cost of your explorer + the mac? All for "entering" a pointless, unnecessary and proprietary new format?
ok. i was setting up my digital front for the first time. the mac i already had lying around. i needed to get a dac. explorer 2 is cheap enough. obviously if you have already invested thousands into your gear and switching to mqa was going to cost thousands more then it would be dumb. so yeah, my cost of entry was tiny.
@@colinutus My cost of using MQA was zero. Nothing. PS Audio provided an MQA update to my DAC free of charge and Tidal provides MQA for no extra charge over standard CD quality streaming.
We need some real data. What come in vs what come out.
Excellent video, well explained.
I am enthusiastic about Mqa. But do Tidal really use Master recordings to make Mqa tracks? I think they do - but most likely only in a small percentage of the tracks they have mqa versions of.
Give it time and then watch it again (and again..) That's the way I learned.
Bravo. Best commentary on the subject that I've found.
You are great the way you explain is perfect but the background buzz in your videos kill me
Luckily it's not in every video....
@@TheHansBeekhuyzenChannel Yeah and it's kinda ok general public will not even hear the buzz if they are using entry level systems or mobile phones .
Thanks for the great video. How keen should audiophiles be to change their DACs to MQA enabled DACs while listening to Tidal Masters? Not everyone affords a Mytek Brooklyn DAC and you do get pretty decent non-MQA DACs at 10% of what the Brooklyn costs (say the SMSL SU-8 - a balanced DAC for $200). Should people then pay much more to enjoy the extra benefits of 2nd MQA unfolding by buying a MQA rendering DAC and how much benefits in Sound Quality should they expect if they were to do so. Thanks
Please watch th-cam.com/video/EykkzxUstL4/w-d-xo.html
You list a great many things impacting "audio quality" without any effort to highlight the impact of each relative to the others. Clearly, some influences have dramatically (multiple orders of magnitude) more impact than others. They can't all be lumped together except to make the most general statement that there is entropy in the universe, so all signal processing is inherently flawed.
That was not the intend. This was my thought about the intifada against MQA and how 'not lossless' was used as 'the proof' MQA is inferior. My ears -and those of my respected colleagues - tell a different story and that is what I wanted to express.
Question HANS. I have a LG G8 phone. I play mqa files on my phone using tidal. Does the LG G8 phone have a dac that plays MQA files. I read that it does. So is MQA the new audio sound. Hope to here from you soon.
I don’t have hands on experience with this phone so I can’t say.
Yes the lg g8 is proven to play mqa with no Problems. Of course mqa will only be "the new audio sound" when you are actually listening to mqa .
If it's G8 and not G8s, yes. LG has built in ESS made Quad DAC, which can unfold MQA. If you have Tidal subscription you can choose and play Masters on Tidal app or if you've MQA files from 2L or other sources, you can play them directly on LG's built in player or on USB Audio Player Pro (it also functions with Tidal, but only online) and get full MQA experience
Hi Hans. I own an AURALiC G2.1 and I understand you own an Auralic G2. Auralic is clearly against MQA. They accepted to "support" it by means of their own software but not by using MQA's own system, and in their website there is a very long post explaining why they are against MQA. So, if the server streamer you (and I) are using, and you have stated that this is the best you have heard and used up to now, rejects MQA, why do you support MQA? Don't get me wrong. I am not doing this in bad faith. I just want for you to clarify this.
The Aries G2(.1) is extremely good in being a bit perfect network player and network bridge. If you don't use DPS or volume control, it's the best digital source for an MQA DAC I know. The fact that Mr. Wang doesn't like MQA has nothing to do with that, technically. The advantage of MQA in very high quality DAC's is marginal at best but it can bring clear sound improvement in more modestly priced gear.
Really the best approach to MQA I have found. Subscribed instantly to your channel. Great job!
Welcome aboard!
You are a genius! Thank you for these videos.
So why does Steve Guttenburg say that MQA changes the sound of the music? My problem is just that often these hi res downloads still use the same mastering from the CD or low res download which is often loud and overly compressed, so we wind up just getting garbage in and garbage out no matter the resolution. Call me crazy but if anything is going to be issued in a hi res format, it should but a very different mastering.
You should ask him I can only tell you that almost all MQA versions I heard were more transparent, has faster percussion, a lovely piano right hand and so on. My experience is that MQA sticks to it's promise not to upsample and only issue higher sampling rates when the digital master was recorded at higher sampling rates or if the original master was analogue. They also promised to use only the original master if that still exists. Don't let the meanies get into your head and enjoy the music.
It's just that the inventors of MQA try to avoid just that. If the recording was made at 44.1 kHz, it will be released as MQA 44.1 kHz as you can see if you check all MQA releases.
Thank you for bringing sanity to this world of snake oil salesmen. Tidal sounds amazing on my modest system. Evev better than the cds I have
Glad you like it!
Let your ears decide! Yes I agree~
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Thank you for the excellent explanation on MQA. Now I feel I can argue against any MQA-hater. The most important point is that MQA is not lossless in the digital domain, but it is more lossless than any other format in the analog domain. The most lossy step in a digital format is the PCM encoding itself. MQA works around this in a genious way to get the listener closer to the original sound. And therefore has the potential to sound better than any lossless format. And the fact that you actually prefer many MQA-tracks over their 24/192 versions is more than enough proof for me on the technical superiority of MQA.