@@MrBouncingDeath how do we tag Mike and Thomas. This needs to turn into a movement. They are implicitly forcing companies like Topping to pay licensing because once they got PS and Schitt to sign on everyone else got FOMO.
As a mastering engineer, the essential thing to me is that FLAC can represent the data absolutely exactly as I have set it for the master, in a format that is about 65% the file size compared to the uncompressed PCM, and is taggable, streamable, multi-channel ready and capable of being fully hi-res - AND open source and license free. And I have been able to prove to myself numerous times via conversion round trips and null tests that it is truly lossless in its encoding/decoding. With MQA - it's opaque in its process, it is not lossless, and it's encumbered by a license that should in no way be considered acceptable for a "standard".
When i have mastered for a client, i receive a digital file, that comes from the studio DAW. I do my work and send a digital file back. I have 0 analog equipment in my chain. It is NEVER converted to analog in my end. There is nothing to unfold... The only thing would be the input converter in the studio, after that the signal easily goes thru 24 effects, can be AD/DAd in the studio to run one single channel thru some device, re-amping.. and then mastering engineer does his stuff. There is absolutely nothing that one could unfold after all the processing that happens.
@@squidcaps4308 - yeah, I probably do analog processing for about 90% of the orders I receive, and deliver back hi-res masters for about 50% of the orders - but plenty of releases sent out at 16bit 44.1kHz still as well.
One guy thought AIFF sounded better than alac. and the problem according to him is When the computer unpack file during playback. if He unpacked the file before playing it, it sounded as good as AIFF
Unfortunately, I do not agree with you. in my ears, the sound from flac is more boring than an original CD. the musicality is lower in the higher frequencies I perceive the sound as withdrawn and the trumpet never wants to jump out of the speaker as on the original CD. it can of course also depend on whether the person who has ripped a CD used volume normal normalization
That's the psychological trick. It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be different to convince most people that it's better. You can hear the difference after all.
@@RonJohn63 Sweeping much? You just listened to an audiphile pointing out how some audiophile gear *_measurably_* improves audio and how some audiophile gear is just (as you suggest) snake oil crapola. Not *_all_* gear; that's objective fact, you can check with signal analysers the improvements *_some_* gear gives. Whether you feel the improvement is worth the cost is another matter.
@@RonJohn63 Dude no. Just stop. If your hearing is that bad just stop listening to anything. Sure, once you get so high end you're splitting hairs at $2,000 just stop. But you can't in good conscience say there isn't a very clear and noticeable difference in everyday pocket buds and something like Sennheiser HD600 is just laughable.
Wow you weren’t kidding, and the entry is pretty damning. “ the authors demonstrated how the MQA process alters the sound and how the claims made by MQA do not hold true” Very awesome indeed.
and apparently wiki also says MQA is a lossy format, that's surprising :o () is an audio codec using lossy compression and a form of file fingerprinting, intended for high fidelity digital audio internet streaming and file download. Launched in 2014 by Meridian Audio, it is now owned and licensed by MQA Ltd, which was founded by Bob Stuart, co-founder of Meridian Audio.
HI, yes I saw this too, but the bad news is that today, May, 07, the link on that wikipedia page is deleted, I guess due to attempts by MQA to suppress inconvenient truths. Probably part of damage control, as I saw some MQA people trolling serious MQA discussions on some audio forums, even John Atkinson doing his part too... Hopefully truth and good will prevail in the end.
*Bottom line:* audiophile standards must be *_independently_* verifiable with no restrictions! MQA is a step backward, for true audiophiles. This was a fantastic review & teardown of MQA's false marketing claims ("lossless", "authenticated content", "no audible artifacts", etc.). This review showed me that MQA seems to be primarily a marketing company, and its audio files seem to have flaws. Their behavior of unilaterally removing your content then banning you appears to be bullying, and prevented transparency and verification of their likely false claims.
Any company that takes measures to shut down their critics out of fear over being criticized doesn't deserve my money. I was already skeptical of MQA before seeing this video, and now that I have watched it, I know for sure that I'll never use MQA, ever.
@@wvincus5522 Facebook didn't shut down Trump because he was criticizing Facebook. They shut him down because he was inciting violence and insurrection and was a clear and present danger to the democratic process. Not, in any way, shape or form the same thing.
@@jimfarrell4635 Dont wanna dwell too much into politics; but US democracy has been undermined for a long time, maybe since forever. You can go back as far as Reagan and find him comitting high treason with the contras. I doubt it was much better before either. Right now you got authoritarian shit like Bush's "patriot act" still living on in spirit, both continued by Obama and Trump. All that talk about how freedom of speech is so important, yet theres a history of constant attacks on the press. The only difference with Trump is that he also undermined some of the established politics as well. That was obviously unacceptable; and it helped turn a lot of established media into propaganda platforms akin to Fox news.
@@mikeclark7429 Same here, I want to feel like I own my copy of the album. I have collections of FLACs that I store on my SSD, USB drives and other places. Streaming also works only when you have internet.
@@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935 not sure i get what you mean. 20kHz is within the human audible range. Obviously not everyone will have the hearing for it depending on their age (among other things) but I dont see why it wouldn't be mentioned
Of course they removed you from Tidal and tried to get your publisher to block you as well, even though you had the decency to send them everything ahead of time and acted in good faith, lol. That ALONE proves they are scumbags, regardless of the results (which are also pretty damning as well.)
@Dylan except for that time they were inflating artists streams like saying people listened to Kanye's album 200 million times in the first week... Tidal is heavily invested by artists themselves so inventing fake streams helps them.
Yeah, if what they say in the response is true, the right way to do things is to discuss and perhaps guide this youtuber to improve and achieve what they are claiming, despite the manner of this youtuber shows that this is for seeking truth not trouble.
I've released a new audio format called "BBF". It takes a flac file, encrypts it, then doubles the encrypted file 20 times. This creates a "Big-Bloated-File". The "BBF" format can only be played on licensed products that will cost thousands more than standard players, but it's well worth it because as everyone knows bigger files means better quality.
you are my hero…I have been reaching out to Tidal asking them why they’re removing the flac choice’s and they have not responded. I’m so glad to have some proof or explanation of what i am hearing. I also warned Tidal that audiophiles are who is paying the higher price for loss less content and many of us want that choice - that replacing flac with MQA would eventually lead to their demise.
What about original format from the studio? Is that PCM? Can u stream that anywhere? :) It would be cool to stream the original not compressed to FLAC :)
@@johanlindhe7378 FLAC is a lossless, open-source, and taggable compression of the PCM format. It wouldn't make sense to stream uncompressed PCM when FLAC exist.
Hi. I am a concert pianist and I want to thank you for saying the truth and contributing people to understand how they’re constantly fooled by marketing. Unfortunately music is suffering a lot because of marketing, arts and business are rarely compatible.
Unfortunately, it is way easier to fool people than to be convince someone they've been fooled. Disproving extravagant/misleading claims requires a lot of effort and expertise and usually a lengthy explanation - while marketing just needs one sentence to find its way into the brain. But I still think it is of vital importance and that it needs to be done by good communicators in every field.
Your research confirms the 6moons mqa industry feature from May 2017: MQA does not want anyone to be able to do a QC. The fact that your encodes were removed from Tidal, the fact that the encoder checks for test signals and does not allow those signals to be encoded, ... The HighResAudio Press Release also mentioned that no analysis tools are available to verify the encoded MQA content. Therefore no quality control is possible, and now already three sources have confirmed this in public. This is one of the best video's on the subject and thanks for mentioning our truncation experiments.
I had no idea what MQA was but I bought an MQA capable DAC and after some Googling I wanted to try it out and bought the HIFI+ subscription on Tidal. It's sad to see now that I was fooled by the MQA marketing into thinking that this is better than standard HIFi. And it was quite shocking to me too realize that MQA is not lossless. Anyway, thank You for this informative video.
@@Dan_Mellinger DLSS has noticeably (positive) difference in games that have solid support. Unlike mqa, it has been proven many times. Comparing that to mqa is a bit odd
You sir are a hero. Thx for taking the considerable time and effort to simply provide facts. Lies are too easy to fabricate, hard work like this to expose them is very welcome.
@@FlamencoOz I didn't know that, I've used Quboz, selection is small and Ui is awful, at least for mobile. If Spotify gets at least CD quality I'm ending my sub to tidal.
thank you for this amazingly detailed video on what all you encountered. it definitely helps to see what all goes on behind the scenes and how legit some of the services are that we pay for
I came here from Techmoan's summary of the Japanese "MQA-CD" format. When he described how this "folding" works onto standard 44.1KHz audio CDs my bullshit-ometer was off the scale. This video just confirms that for me. Thanks!
I was a Tidal fan thinking that I was getting hi-res files at standard res size. Then I received Mark Waldrep (AIX Records) emails regarding MQA and it's shortcomings. Now your video has out the nail in the MQA coffin for me. I was a Tidal subscriber twice in the past and went back and forth with Qobuz. Tidal's interface is better but Qobuz gives you the real thing. Thanks for all the great info. I am now a subscriber to your channel.
@@bobromano7548I'm on the same boat as you but Tidal is €10 per month as a student. Qobuz has no student discount. The €5 a month is essentially a free kebab every 30 days. Also Qobuz has a more limited library, especially for songs in my language.
Years ago, when the annual audio expo was held in the metropolitan city I live in, someone from Meridian had a room demonstrating MQA shortly after its launch. The guy was doing very controlled auditioning demos where he would play some generally well known music tracks encoded with MQA and then went on to ask the audience if they agreed on how wonderful MQA sounded. Most people noded in agreement with some verbally expressing their positive impressions. But I, being the unfaithful and scientific minded bastard that I am, despite my name, had to be the only fly in the proverbial ointment. So I asked the showman to play an MQA track followed by its red book CD counterpart. He responded that he couldn't do it because he didn't have the original file on his server and that they didn't perform their demos in that fashion and asked me if I didn't agree that it sounded great. I replied, sure it seemed to sound good but unless we could compare it to the original CD track, we the audience had no point of reference to compare to, specially since the playback was performed under a setup, i.e. speakers, audio gear and a listening room that we were unfamiliar with. So I told him that his demo was not valid and didn't convince me of MQA's claims; you could tell from his facial expression that he didn't like that. It just goes to show you how unscientific and deceptive their whole approach to selling MQA technology is.
I listened to a Bose demo, where halfway through, the salesman walked from the back of the room, right up to the wall mounted speakers, and removed a large speaker cabinet that was covering the small speakers which were playing. Most of the room gasped and they were impressed that the small speakers were making the sound. But I thought, "Well that's why they sounded tinny and washed out". I had the opposite happen when I worked in a hi-fi shop. After a demo, because they were sold, I was asked to help disconnect the speakers, and I started on the wrong ones, because the soundstage was so wide, I thought we were listening to the large Dynaudio floor standers, but actually the Dynaudio bookshelf speakers next to them were playing.
Yep, FLAC is actually lossless. MQA is lossy. Has been since its introduction 6 years ago. People who know what they're talking about said this 6 years ago. Said it for years. But that doesn't stop audiophiles from falling for marketing, hype, biases and then "hearing" the improvements (that are actually degradations in sound quality). Seems like it's a mandatory component of the hobby.
The sucess of MQA proves an underlying problem in the audiophile community. Past a certain point, humans cannot percieve improvement, only change. Past this point (around lossless) any change at all is so celebrated that it insantly becomes recognised as an improvement. No matter how good your ears are, you cannot rely on them for solid analysis, no matter how "expert" or "trained" you might be. This hobby isn't about finding the objectively best sounding thing on the planet, It's about enjoying the music you love how you want to listen to it. People relying on their ears to prove that MQA is better are the essence of everything wrong with this community for many more reasons than just being wrong.
@@NVRSE500 You make some good points but I have some comments. We cannot reliably hear small changes, regardless if they are improvements or degradations. We're fooling ourselves and prone to cognitive biases, that make us hear differences even when there are none. That's why controlled listening tests are the only thing where there is a hope of producing reliable results. Secondly, audiophilia is not about music in my book. It's about the equipment. It should be about striving for highest fidelity in audio reproduction, but it often is not. Why? Because the audiophile industry abuses people fooling themselves, hearing what they are told/want to hear, etc. to sell them two lies: 1) different = better 2) and that their product makes an audible difference. Contrast that with musicophilia, when people actually love to experience the music, not drool over scammy, expensive audio equipment.
@@xnoreq fair enough, I agree with what you say, although I'm pretty sure musicophilia is an extension of audiophilia, rather than a separate entity. I think every audiophile can relate to the feeling of high fidelity listening suited to their tastes, whether their tastes be incredible detail or anything else. People can enjoy the sound of MQA if they want, what they can't do is call it lossless or "better than lossless", because that is objectively false. And you're correct, almost no objective arguments can be made through just a listening test, and the combination of objective performance and subjective enjoyment in audio is what audiophilia is at its essence. MQA only blurs the line between subjective and objective, which degrades the integrity of the hobby as a whole. Luckily, lossless is still accessible and common, and can still provide a benchmark for objectively perfect sound :)
@@NVRSE500 I didn't say no objective arguments can be made through listening tests. Quite the contrary. Properly controlled listening tests are the only hope to arrive at any objective conclusion regarding audibility of small differences. But audiophiles have been sold the idea that different = better and therefore nothing can be objective and anything objective is the enemy ... by the industry, by magazines and this has spread to communities where now brainwashed people brainwash each other while calling it a hobby.
Professional audio engineer here. Great video! When mastering a try to tell my clients to avoid MQA like the plauge! I try to tell them that my ears hear things that theirs don't and it's not anything like the dream that they are selling!
"Just trust your ears and stop asking questions" has been the audiophile motto since the beginning and so many audio manufacturers have cashed in on the vast subjectivity. Well those days are OVER, more and more people are testing, tinkering and publishing all the BS these companies may have a rude awakening in the next few years. We get better fidelity when we call the companies out and vote with our wallets.
Yeah, my many thanks also go out to subjectivist audiophiles in all the forums, who keep this murky culture going of "anything can be true depending on whom you ask" and who keep shilling these BS technologies like MQA and NOS DACs with leaky filters.
MQA always sounded worse to me. Deezer hifi and Amazon HD sounded immediately better and I dropped Tidal. This excellent video confirms what many people heard.
This video popped up for me when it came out and I barely understood much of it. One year later I’ve become interested in better gear and suddenly everything makes sense. Thanks for the fantastic explanations here.
@@Some-guy-on-the-internet yeah! There must be alternatives you can switch to, right? A possibility very valuable suggestion if you're truly (considering) switching between audio streaming services is that if you take a look around the internet and possibly Google a little bit you may get lucky and come across a tool to facilitate the switcheroo and help you with the whole shebang 😎 It would undoubtedly shorten the transitional period, greatly reduce any 'change tax' or transitional pain you may experience, and there is a chance it would make the switch painless whatsoever. And then there is the absolute shitton of time it would save for you by automagically copying all your existing playlists, favorites, compilations and any other forms of music collections may have with the old service to your new account. If you'd like, please repeat after me: "Change is good. Change is delicious. Especially if you're changing away from the capitalistic snake oil mongering pigs trying to scam you out of your money. Enjoy your last day of the weekend people! Tomorrow is Monday. Happy days, I hope 😇 Peace!
Problem with that, as seen by Golden as well, is that even if you stream HiFi there is high chance you'll get the folded MQA instead of the native 44.1KHz FLAC. That is for the tracks marked with the yellow Master sign.
This is incredible! Not only have you taught me more about MQA than tidal ever did, but you helped me understand digital audio better than I ever have before.
MQA do sound really good, IF you have a top tier expensive DAC unit with mqa. DSD is better, but few use it, prefer flac for easy of use and no need for expensive DAC.
@@Cpt.Zer0 Wrong and wrong. It doesn't matter if MQA sounds subjectively good to you, or if you believe the moon is made of cheese. Technically it is a degradation from any common lossless source format. It was that way 6 years ago when this was introduced and we pointed out the flaws and still is today after audiophools yet again fell for quality degradation marketed as improvements. DSD is even worse, being limited to 1 bit you get the highest possible quantization errors which means you need extremely aggressive noise shaping, which means your inaudible high frequencies will not be preserved anyway.
Given that MQA is clearly not mathematically lossless, but perceptually lossless with the right source and under favorable listening conditions, that does suggest an nicely alliterative marketing slogan: “MQA: MP3 for the Modern Mug!” They’re welcome to use it for the appropriate license fee.
Exceptionally well presented. I appreciate the professional approach and outreach to MQA for comment. I subscribe to both Qobuz and Tidal, and am seriously considering cancelling my Tidal subscription over this.
I knew something was up with Tidal when I started uploading my FLAC/ALAC files to my Plex server and was doing A-B comparisons. I swore Tidal's MQA streams were just container files with 320kbs MP3 and a trigger to turn on the MQA led. Thanks for doing the thorough research, I wasn't too far off.
Spotify have announced they're adding lossless support soon. I was considering keeping Tidal because I believed the stuff about MQA. Thanks for making this video as I now know, as far as objective performance goes, I do not need to worry about missing MQA with lossless Spotify.
I wasn't excited to try MQA but for me your video made it's point when they removed your content. If they try to pull a Sony move, I am not interested.
Terrific piece of analysis. I’m not an audio engineer, but an IT guy with years of testing experience. And I recognize your scientific approach here. Further, I’m concerned with the lack of response - or worse, sandbagging by MQA. I only ‘tripped’ over this article as I have repeatedly tried to convince myself that I must be missing something from Tidal/MQA in listening tests. I do not have ‘golden ears’. I am a 69 years music lover with decent sensitivity to pitch, dynamics and (I guess) timing / phase issues. I consistently prefer CDs and recently Amazon ‘Ultra HD’ sources. I’m becoming increasing animated by the scam here. It’s twice the price of other less pretentious (being kind) services and audibly worse. If an old guy like me can blind test in a three way bake off - then surely a teenage musician must be gagging on the artifacts? Great job. I feel better now.
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I can not like this enough! The entire hi-fi industry needs more of this kind of reviews. THANK YOU!! Greetings from Sweden!
Finaly someone, that puts in the effort to scientificly debunk mqa. This was something everyone in the soundengineer game new but we werent able to support with evidence
I now understand why you had an almost emotional response from my question on one of your live streams. I asked about which mqa enabled dac would be better. Just finished exporting my Tidal playlist to Spotify and canceled subscription. It totally sucks to be lied to and managed by a big company. Wish there was a better streaming service for Canadians. Maybe Spotify will fill this niche eventually.
This is a supreme example of investigative journalism and scientific method for peer review with presented data to back your position. Thank you for this incredible work.
I don't think there's much danger of that - I suspect it'll fade away over time leaving nothing but a smattering of files that become a legacy nightmare for manufacturers to be expected to support in the future.
God damn man I cannot be thankful enough for audio quality of your voice. It is so rare to find someone who decides to actually mix their audio properly even if they have a good mic.
I got into quite a discussion on FB when I asserted that MQA is lossy. The fog of unprovable nonsense on the other side of the argument is now quite nicely rebutted by this video. I appreciate the effort and quality of your presentation. Thank you!
Thank you. Unbelieveable how much work you must have put into this effort. You give a whole new meaning to the the phrase due dilgence. By deduction, I'd known since some of the first MQA articles released in the Nov/Dec 2014 (TAS and Stereophile) time frame that MQA was anything but what they, TAS, and Stereophile claimed it to be and iimmediately tried to warn others in variious audio forums. High-end audio is so subjective and since many lack the ability to discern / interpret what they hear, I thought our music was done for. I still cannot believe the milions of hours enthusiasts and so-called experts have spent in forums arguing this crap. Nor shall I forget the wholesale sellout some leaders did for some motive. Anybody know the status of MQA today. Are they still hiding in the marsh waiting to strike? Or are they done? Regrettably, I suspect if the high-end audio industry as a whole had some level of listening discernment, MQA never would have made it out of the starting gate or perhaps ever got off the drawing board. Yes, we are ultimately to blame for some of this.
That "strange band of distortion" mentioned at 10:20 is probably due to Universal Music Group's copyright watermarking, which alters the audio from around 1 to 3.6 kHz. Matt Montag has more information and audio samples of it on his web site.
Right smack dab in the sweet spot range where good speakers really shine. I assume they did it thinking no one but audiophiles would ever notice. I've not really analyzed this myself, but I know I have heard something in that range on many tracks. Like ive told others, I think I'm done with Tidal. I remeber doing a trial on qobuz closer to 2 years ago. Their audio was so much better to my ears, and closer to what I hear playing Tidal on an outboard dac or Audirvana. They didn't have the library then, but customer support was very friendly to me. They charged me a day early when I was trying to cancel, and offered me up some HD downloads to keep to make up for it. I'll gladly give them a shot tomorrow. :)
When I saw that spectrum waveform, I immediately thought it looked very much like a data stream. But I thought it was for decoding parameters and that "authentication" they claim. Well, you live and learn... A tip for those of you hunting for data streams embedded in audio is to read up on software defined radio, there are a number of sites that list the spectrum, waveforms and basic data about various modulation techniques, you can often identify the basic modulation type by looking at the spectrum waterfall. And you also have the option of using an audio signals as the input for some SDR receiver software when hunting for watermarks etc. What I'd prefer would be some very low amplitude Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum or Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum signal which basically smears itself over the entire audio as inaudible pseudorandom noise. Another idea would be to tweak a mix subtly for each release, like individual tracks being something like ±0.5 dB (whatever is small enough to not be heard but large enough to be reliably measurable) out compared to master. Only common denominator is that it should be transparent across formats. @Kesa Mek It's basically what it is, a steganographic delivery system, only what it delivers is some form of publisher, album, release and track identifier. I hope. :cue that Lalo Schifrin song:
you hit on the most damning point, with internet speeds today, there is no need for this clunky type of compression. This worries me greatly as better codecs already exist. this is a testament to slick marketing, and fancy logos.
Watching this video again after I switched to Qobuz, I remembered that I said I liked Qobuz better because it sounded more "natural" than Tidal's master quality. I'm glad to see I'm not crazy.
I thought Tidal was the only ‘lossless’ service here in Australia. But I’ve just found that Deezer Hifi is available, so signed I signed up (3 months free) and dumped Tidal.
@@Grizzly1644 did the same about Qobuz, but after roughly 10 hours of listening im starting to think that it may have some loudness effect, or is it just that i have been listening far to long at streaming services like tidal and spotify my ears have got used to a type of sound. I dont know but its just a thought
@@andreaslindquist5415 You're used to the loudness normalization that Spotify and TIDAL still use. Qobus doesn't have normalization across the board unlike these platforms
@@elifaudio1472 Actually, there are published papers showing that the Compact Discs shelf life (about 30 years), combined with ever changing content delivery formats and manufacturing trends, creates a situation where CDs eventually become unplayable either due to degradation of the media, or a loss of the playback devices. This has happened to DAT for example and is happening to CD now.
100%, CDs and Bandcamp are my main music sources now, since all the artists and soundtracks I like show up there anyway, and good grief they sound great compared to MP3, I RIP the CDs (96khz and 16bit for no other reason than because I can) and download from Bandcamp in FLAC, feed it all to my Fiio M9 player and a nice pair of headphones, I haven't enjoyed music this much in a long time, and having it all loaded into and playing from a local file on a portable device is perfect, a far more convenient than any streaming music I've tested especially in my area with crap cell data costs and worse coverage. TL:DR; who needs cloud streaming when local storage is better anyway?
@@TheSteveSteele as a raw data source CDs are still just fine, rip them to FLAC and backup your data regularly and it should last well over 30 years, also I have a nearly 25~30 year old CD player that actually still plays modern CDs just fine, it's a Yamaha CDC-805 if you're curious, a big old 5 disc CD changer
This is really bad for Tidal right now, especially with giants Apple and Spotify going Hi-res. I've been a long time subscriber of Tidal but unfortunately this may have to change.
This is one of the most relevant review videos I have seen in a while. Luckily for every marketing snake oil salesman, there is someone like GoldenSound that takes his time to carefully deconstruct it piece by piece and help people come to their own conclusion. Keep this up, Sir. The community will not be fooled.
It's amazing how you tricked the entire system with tones inside tracks to give this to us. I really love when i find other persons that have deep critical minds, and question all sort of things, and this especially beats me hard. As i really love lossless music but i was from the beginning seing MQA with untrustful eyes. Thanks A Lot.
I just came out with a video in support of MQA based on some research, but ultimately I'm about the truth. Someone had commented on the video (via bell notif) saying here's proof that it's Snake oil, but I think they deleted it as I couldn't find it in the actual comments. Fortunately, a friend linked it to me on Insta, so I'm going to watch this, take notes, and really absorb everything you're saying so that I can summarize it and actually be able to explain the concepts myself (and perhaps come out with a follow-up vid). My initial impression after watching halfway through is that I want to get rid of my Tidal membership. I've gone back and forth on MQA for quite a while before taking a deeper dive via the video I posted a couple weeks ago, but this could be very damning. Kudos for the effort put in. Edit: 12:45 minutes in and my undivided attention + notes and all I can say is Wow. Scam of the century? Thank you for this.
Thank you, I wasn't even aware of what MQA is before watching this video, it opened my eyes to the fact that some advertised "lossless" streaming services weren't really streaming lossless audio, therefore I won't be fooled by those, you helped me to save some money.
I’m on your side. I’m using an MQA compatible hipDAC and a MSR7b on the 4.4mm output. I had Deezer Hifi for nearly a year and was pretty happy with it. Beginning of the year I’ve jump on the 3 month for 3€ offer from Tidal. I’ve started listening my favorite songs on the new platform and some of them, the MQA ones sounded pretty wrong. There was some harshness, some part of the song were too loud. I’m pretty high mids and low treble sensitive and, for me at least, some songs were pretty agressive there. I’ve tried to listen the songs in non-MQA but it still was not as smooth and pleasing then by Deezer. I’ve switched back to Deezer Hifi and now I enjoy the music again, it is just smoother and I have no more trouble. Thank you for proving I’m not just crazy 😅
You know what this whole thing reminds me of? It reminds me of when Kodak decided to 'revolutionise photography' in the 90s with Advanced Photo System (APS). APS was marketed as opening up photography to the average consumer, but it had a ton of issues that limited its shelf life, such as cameras utilising a smaller film size than the 35mm standard at the time, resulting in images having less definition to them, the 'Wide' and 'Panorama' options on each camera cropping the image from the top and bottom, rather than actually being wide or panoramic, film cartridges having to be processed and the film developed in very expensive machinery that only certain licensed stores had access to, the fact that 35mm cameras were becoming just as - if not more - compact, readily available, and cheaper, and Kodak's ardent refusal to even think about digital camera technology, among a plethora of other things. The difference is APS - although it still exists as a ghost haunting photography in the form of the APS-C sensor a lot of cheaper DSLR and mirrorless cameras use (like my Sony a6400) - served as a major blow to Kodak as a corporation. Kodak were already struggling in the 90s, but APS's abject failure at revolutionising an increasingly niche market in favour of the next big advancement has ended them, as they filed for bankruptcy just a few years after announcing it would stop producing APS cameras. MQA, however, sounds to me like something that's gaining traction because it sounds like something a lot of the big record companies want: some sort of complex security feature, irrespective of the damage it would cause to the listening experience compared to a proper Hi-Res FLAC file...and because it has actual industry support, it'll keep going, because record companies are some of the biggest dinosaurs of corporations on the planet, begrudgingly accepting streaming as a primary content delivery method, and finding ways in which it can inhibit people's ability to enjoy what they bought. It sucks. EDIT: I realised that it wasn't the sensor that was smaller; it was the film. Too much digital camera terminology in my head as of recent...
Original APS had no sensor at all! It was a system to let variable size cameras tell photo development laboratories where each picture was on a roll of physical film, so they didn't cut your pictures in half according to where 24x36 pictures would have been on the roll. At the time I suspected the actual cameras to be rolling shutters modified to only open up for part of the maximum camera aperture over the film surface.
Interesting. You confirm what my ears were telling me. I made a few early comments about the mathematics of MQA and their use of apodising minimum phase filters - to me this is the most obviously audible detrimental effect of the MQA processing (unless you like these effects of course) - it is ubiquitous and easily audible on any MQA processed audio. After a quick examination I have avoided MQA since it was released.
Precisely. It took about 30 seconds of reading about what MQA was doing to conclude that it was garbage snake oil that couldn’t possibly be improving the sound.
When I first came across MQA, I was sceptical with their claims. I tried to investigate how the folding/unfolding worked but all the information they provide is marketing based. It's just another lossy encoder that allows playing on CD-quality without unfolding (at some quality loss) or some vague hi-freq reproduction with folding. You can't magically break Shannon's law regarding digital compression/sampling. Yep, lossless FLAC is all you really need in these modern times.
Let us not forget what happened at RMAF a couple of years ago when the CEO of MQA shouted down Chris of Audiophile Style (then: Computer Audiophile) when he tried to present criticism of MQA: th-cam.com/video/NSv0lcHlawk/w-d-xo.html
You got a good reason to cancel your subscription I don't have one MQA sounds amazing on my stereo Tidal all the way for me I really enjoy using this service
I remember seeing a video from Meridian where one of their spokespeople/employees was stating that the need for high res was because CD only had 1/44100 time domain resolution which doesn't meet the threshold of human stereo hearing. That kind of fundamental misunderstanding let me know that they are squarely pushing Woo, and that MQA tests reveal it's basically a destructive filtering process that the creators believe achieves subjectively better results.
Shenanigans like MQA are why I still stick to buying CDs when possible. Not only are CDs always full quality, sometimes they are even cheaper than the digital version!
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I am ZeosPantera and I approve this message.
Hai hai senpai
We need to tag Mike aka OCD Guy and Thomas too.
@@navinadv yes! We should!
I would love to see your take on your channel.
@@MrBouncingDeath how do we tag Mike and Thomas. This needs to turn into a movement. They are implicitly forcing companies like Topping to pay licensing because once they got PS and Schitt to sign on everyone else got FOMO.
And you were right. MQA bankrupt and Tidal switched to FLAC. Excellent.
As a mastering engineer, the essential thing to me is that FLAC can represent the data absolutely exactly as I have set it for the master, in a format that is about 65% the file size compared to the uncompressed PCM, and is taggable, streamable, multi-channel ready and capable of being fully hi-res - AND open source and license free. And I have been able to prove to myself numerous times via conversion round trips and null tests that it is truly lossless in its encoding/decoding. With MQA - it's opaque in its process, it is not lossless, and it's encumbered by a license that should in no way be considered acceptable for a "standard".
When i have mastered for a client, i receive a digital file, that comes from the studio DAW. I do my work and send a digital file back. I have 0 analog equipment in my chain. It is NEVER converted to analog in my end. There is nothing to unfold... The only thing would be the input converter in the studio, after that the signal easily goes thru 24 effects, can be AD/DAd in the studio to run one single channel thru some device, re-amping.. and then mastering engineer does his stuff. There is absolutely nothing that one could unfold after all the processing that happens.
@@squidcaps4308 - yeah, I probably do analog processing for about 90% of the orders I receive, and deliver back hi-res masters for about 50% of the orders - but plenty of releases sent out at 16bit 44.1kHz still as well.
One guy thought AIFF sounded better than alac. and the problem according to him is When the computer unpack file during playback. if He unpacked the file before playing it, it sounded as good as AIFF
Unfortunately, I do not agree with you. in my ears, the sound from flac is more boring than an original CD. the musicality is lower in the higher frequencies I perceive the sound as withdrawn and the trumpet never wants to jump out of the speaker as on the original CD. it can of course also depend on whether the person who has ripped a CD used volume normal normalization
@@Andersljungberg Please. Let the grown ups discuss this.
Congratulations on bankrupting MQA in April 2023! You did very well.
Probably thanks to this video, the MQA company has filed for bankruptcy. Hooray!
Of course MQA is lossless! They're giving you MORE noise, you aren't losing any!
LOL
Does the M in MQA stand for middleout?
So MQA is signalless!
additive compression lol
That's the psychological trick. It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be different to convince most people that it's better. You can hear the difference after all.
Them: "Nothing is wrong with MQA"
Also them: "And that's why we removed your content and banned you."
Like having officer Barbrady saying "Nothing to see here, move along".
Huh, Got my content removed and banned; Seems like they were right.
Is what they thought
and how exactly does one upload content to Tidal?
:c
@@TonyFernandezjkdjedi distrokid?
I think it's really funny that you made a musical Trojan horse
He even titled one of the songs he submitted “The Callout”.
Nickleback did it first, lol
That's a really clever way to put it
holy crap i didn't expect to see a touhou fan in this comment section
@Kaioshi K Touhou fans are everywhere fam
MQA: We're lossless
Also MQA: Make sure your audio still sounds correct
😲🙁😐🤨🤔
Yeah it makes NO SENSE 🤔
"It's lossless, unless it's electronic then it's lossy"
The only “unfolding” that truly happens is the consumers wallet.
Hear, hear!!!
GoldenSound did the true MQA unfold, and I saw absolutely nothing desirable.
Seriously underrated comment! 🤣
Proper lol'ed at that
It's like Origami. With dollar bills.
Gee, their response makes them look an awful lot like snake oil peddlers.
Their marketing screams of snake oil peddling. (Just going by the things shown in the video.)
*All* audiophile gear is snake oil, so I'm not surprised. (I'm only here because YT recommended it after watching a Techmoan video.)
@@RonJohn63 Sweeping much? You just listened to an audiphile pointing out how some audiophile gear *_measurably_* improves audio and how some audiophile gear is just (as you suggest) snake oil crapola. Not *_all_* gear; that's objective fact, you can check with signal analysers the improvements *_some_* gear gives. Whether you feel the improvement is worth the cost is another matter.
...because they are
@@RonJohn63 Dude no. Just stop. If your hearing is that bad just stop listening to anything. Sure, once you get so high end you're splitting hairs at $2,000 just stop.
But you can't in good conscience say there isn't a very clear and noticeable difference in everyday pocket buds and something like Sennheiser HD600 is just laughable.
Not sure if you saw yet Golden, but you're linked on the MQA Wikipedia entry now. Nice.
Wow you weren’t kidding, and the entry is pretty damning. “ the authors demonstrated how the MQA process alters the sound and how the claims made by MQA do not hold true”
Very awesome indeed.
Qobuz subscriptions on QBZstore Telegram has good offers, tbh.
and apparently wiki also says MQA is a lossy format, that's surprising :o () is an audio codec using lossy compression and a form of file fingerprinting, intended for high fidelity digital audio internet streaming and file download. Launched in 2014 by Meridian Audio, it is now owned and licensed by MQA Ltd, which was founded by Bob Stuart, co-founder of Meridian Audio.
I'm not a wiki editor, but perhaps someone should find a way to edit in MQA's attempted censorship of criticism.
HI, yes I saw this too, but the bad news is that today, May, 07, the link on that wikipedia page is deleted, I guess due to attempts by MQA to suppress inconvenient truths. Probably part of damage control, as I saw some MQA people trolling serious MQA discussions on some audio forums, even John Atkinson doing his part too... Hopefully truth and good will prevail in the end.
*Bottom line:* audiophile standards must be *_independently_* verifiable with no restrictions!
MQA is a step backward, for true audiophiles. This was a fantastic review & teardown of MQA's false marketing claims ("lossless", "authenticated content", "no audible artifacts", etc.). This review showed me that MQA seems to be primarily a marketing company, and its audio files seem to have flaws.
Their behavior of unilaterally removing your content then banning you appears to be bullying, and prevented transparency and verification of their likely false claims.
Everybody should make his oppinion based on this...
Any company that takes measures to shut down their critics out of fear over being criticized doesn't deserve my money. I was already skeptical of MQA before seeing this video, and now that I have watched it, I know for sure that I'll never use MQA, ever.
Facebook etc for banning Trump? Or just this?
@@wvincus5522 Facebook didn't shut down Trump because he was criticizing Facebook. They shut him down because he was inciting violence and insurrection and was a clear and present danger to the democratic process. Not, in any way, shape or form the same thing.
@PenileAugmentation agreed
@@jimfarrell4635 You follow independent people in audio, but don't realize the opinion you shared was created and assigned to you. Ok.
@@jimfarrell4635 Dont wanna dwell too much into politics; but US democracy has been undermined for a long time, maybe since forever. You can go back as far as Reagan and find him comitting high treason with the contras. I doubt it was much better before either. Right now you got authoritarian shit like Bush's "patriot act" still living on in spirit, both continued by Obama and Trump. All that talk about how freedom of speech is so important, yet theres a history of constant attacks on the press.
The only difference with Trump is that he also undermined some of the established politics as well. That was obviously unacceptable; and it helped turn a lot of established media into propaganda platforms akin to Fox news.
MQA stands for Medium Quality Audio...
LOL
underrated comment
This is "The comment" of the year.
Any comment on MQA cds? I could care less about streaming. Too old, and old school.
@@mikeclark7429 Same here, I want to feel like I own my copy of the album. I have collections of FLACs that I store on my SSD, USB drives and other places. Streaming also works only when you have internet.
this is investigative journalism, and deserves a lot more attention
Brilliant and thorough detective work.
finally golden getting some recognition
Too bad he's being dishonest. Did you actually read the response from MQA? (No need to answer that ...)
@@TheSineira LOL bruh what
His going ape about how _audible_ 20,000 Hz is surprises me, does he work with a trained detector bat?
@@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935 not sure i get what you mean. 20kHz is within the human audible range. Obviously not everyone will have the hearing for it depending on their age (among other things) but I dont see why it wouldn't be mentioned
Of course they removed you from Tidal and tried to get your publisher to block you as well, even though you had the decency to send them everything ahead of time and acted in good faith, lol. That ALONE proves they are scumbags, regardless of the results (which are also pretty damning as well.)
I didn't get to even listen to anything on Tidal and it tells me to get a subscription, good thing i didnt pay for it
@Dylan except for that time they were inflating artists streams like saying people listened to Kanye's album 200 million times in the first week... Tidal is heavily invested by artists themselves so inventing fake streams helps them.
Yeah, if what they say in the response is true, the right way to do things is to discuss and perhaps guide this youtuber to improve and achieve what they are claiming, despite the manner of this youtuber shows that this is for seeking truth not trouble.
I've released a new audio format called "BBF". It takes a flac file, encrypts it, then doubles the encrypted file 20 times. This creates a "Big-Bloated-File". The "BBF" format can only be played on licensed products that will cost thousands more than standard players, but it's well worth it because as everyone knows bigger files means better quality.
You could advertise it as offering 20x the quality of FLAC, because it is literally true.
you are my hero…I have been reaching out to Tidal asking them why they’re removing the flac choice’s and they have not responded. I’m so glad to have some proof or explanation of what i am hearing. I also warned Tidal that audiophiles are who is paying the higher price for loss less content and many of us want that choice - that replacing flac with MQA would eventually lead to their demise.
Reject MQA, embrace FLAC.
Amen. Interested in some 7.1 FLAC pipe organ recordings? If so, you should double-check the video descriptions of my music uploads here on YT. Enjoy!
What about original format from the studio? Is that PCM? Can u stream that anywhere? :) It would be cool to stream the original not compressed to FLAC :)
Actually noone can stream FLAC so on if u just wanna "hear some music" when outside, just buy any cheapest plan.
@@johanlindhe7378 FLAC is a lossless, open-source, and taggable compression of the PCM format.
It wouldn't make sense to stream uncompressed PCM when FLAC exist.
Dont return to MonQA
Hi. I am a concert pianist and I want to thank you for saying the truth and contributing people to understand how they’re constantly fooled by marketing. Unfortunately music is suffering a lot because of marketing, arts and business are rarely compatible.
I like your content😃
Keep going! Improve on your production quality a bit and surely more subscribers going to come your way.
Unfortunately, it is way easier to fool people than to be convince someone they've been fooled.
Disproving extravagant/misleading claims requires a lot of effort and expertise and usually a lengthy explanation - while marketing just needs one sentence to find its way into the brain.
But I still think it is of vital importance and that it needs to be done by good communicators in every field.
Your research confirms the 6moons mqa industry feature from May 2017: MQA does not want anyone to be able to do a QC. The fact that your encodes were removed from Tidal, the fact that the encoder checks for test signals and does not allow those signals to be encoded, ... The HighResAudio Press Release also mentioned that no analysis tools are available to verify the encoded MQA content. Therefore no quality control is possible, and now already three sources have confirmed this in public.
This is one of the best video's on the subject and thanks for mentioning our truncation experiments.
I had no idea what MQA was but I bought an MQA capable DAC and after some Googling I wanted to try it out and bought the HIFI+ subscription on Tidal. It's sad to see now that I was fooled by the MQA marketing into thinking that this is better than standard HIFi. And it was quite shocking to me too realize that MQA is not lossless.
Anyway, thank You for this informative video.
MQA is basically if EA published music on its own platform.
Only if you had to buy specific CPU's to play the game completely too
@@kyoyeou5899 Better with DLSS
@@Dan_Mellinger DLSS has noticeably (positive) difference in games that have solid support. Unlike mqa, it has been proven many times. Comparing that to mqa is a bit odd
@@damienriot just making a joke. Wasn't reading too far into the implications.
@@damienriot Dayumn man, Daddy Chill... wtf is wrong with you, that guy was clearly making a joke. shesssssssssssssh
You sir are a hero. Thx for taking the considerable time and effort to simply provide facts. Lies are too easy to fabricate, hard work like this to expose them is very welcome.
Finally someone make this video. I'm from Oslo Mastering studio and have claimed this since day one! Thanks 👍
I'm glad that this is the first thing that appears when I search for Mqa on TH-cam.
excellent!
I'm disabling MQA on Tidal right now ..... In fact will be cancelling Tidal altogether
I hope thousands follow your example!
Just did it too
Isn't it still better than Spotify still? At least we can get CD quality over simple 320kbs mp3s
@@el.blanco552 Quboz is a good alternative to Tidal and Spotify Hi-Fi is on the way as is lossless on Apple Music. Plenty of alternatives.
@@FlamencoOz I didn't know that, I've used Quboz, selection is small and Ui is awful, at least for mobile. If Spotify gets at least CD quality I'm ending my sub to tidal.
_"Firstly I don't think the filter itself has feelings, but if I have hurt them then I apologise"_
Simply Excellent!
I've got's lots in my studio, and I hear them cry all the time and I don't care. Does that make me a monster?
It wasn't a competition... Untill he said that. Then, he won. Such a sick burn!
thank you for this amazingly detailed video on what all you encountered. it definitely helps to see what all goes on behind the scenes and how legit some of the services are that we pay for
Shut up Skullcandy Evo's!
👍🍒
Damnnnn its Gamesky!
@@10shanwei 🤩🍌🤯🤫😈👻
An absolutely fantastic deep-dive. This is the kind of investigation that HiFi magazines should be doing. Thanks so much!
I came here from Techmoan's summary of the Japanese "MQA-CD" format. When he described how this "folding" works onto standard 44.1KHz audio CDs my bullshit-ometer was off the scale. This video just confirms that for me. Thanks!
I love when people use facts and science to expose a company’s purposeful distortion of truth.
they distort the truth just like the music
@@Blacktronics bruh moments
"Unfold," "Origami," "True sound," etc... Yeah, if anything would sound like snake oil, this is it.
I know right? Who are these ‘audiophiles’ that are falling for unsubstantiated marketing bullshit like “unfold” and “origami”? 😆
Within the first 2 minutes,, summary of findings and a clear table of contents. This is how all informational TH-cam videos should be!!
I was a Tidal fan thinking that I was getting hi-res files at standard res size. Then I received Mark Waldrep (AIX Records) emails regarding MQA and it's shortcomings. Now your video has out the nail in the MQA coffin for me. I was a Tidal subscriber twice in the past and went back and forth with Qobuz. Tidal's interface is better but Qobuz gives you the real thing. Thanks for all the great info. I am now a subscriber to your channel.
The problem is that Qobus is so expensive. what do you say about Amazon music ultra HD
@@Andersljungberg I pay $14.99 per month by paying for a year at a time. $5 cheaper than Tidal.
@@bobromano7548I'm on the same boat as you but Tidal is €10 per month as a student. Qobuz has no student discount. The €5 a month is essentially a free kebab every 30 days. Also Qobuz has a more limited library, especially for songs in my language.
Years ago, when the annual audio expo was held in the metropolitan city I live in, someone from Meridian had a room demonstrating MQA shortly after its launch. The guy was doing very controlled auditioning demos where he would play some generally well known music tracks encoded with MQA and then went on to ask the audience if they agreed on how wonderful MQA sounded. Most people noded in agreement with some verbally expressing their positive impressions. But I, being the unfaithful and scientific minded bastard that I am, despite my name, had to be the only fly in the proverbial ointment. So I asked the showman to play an MQA track followed by its red book CD counterpart. He responded that he couldn't do it because he didn't have the original file on his server and that they didn't perform their demos in that fashion and asked me if I didn't agree that it sounded great. I replied, sure it seemed to sound good but unless we could compare it to the original CD track, we the audience had no point of reference to compare to, specially since the playback was performed under a setup, i.e. speakers, audio gear and a listening room that we were unfamiliar with. So I told him that his demo was not valid and didn't convince me of MQA's claims; you could tell from his facial expression that he didn't like that. It just goes to show you how unscientific and deceptive their whole approach to selling MQA technology is.
👏🏻
I listened to a Bose demo, where halfway through, the salesman walked from the back of the room, right up to the wall mounted speakers, and removed a large speaker cabinet that was covering the small speakers which were playing.
Most of the room gasped and they were impressed that the small speakers were making the sound. But I thought, "Well that's why they sounded tinny and washed out".
I had the opposite happen when I worked in a hi-fi shop. After a demo, because they were sold, I was asked to help disconnect the speakers, and I started on the wrong ones, because the soundstage was so wide, I thought we were listening to the large Dynaudio floor standers, but actually the Dynaudio bookshelf speakers next to them were playing.
This is huge and needs widespread attention.
One of the most vital pieces of info to become available to the audiophile community this year. 👍🏻
There's nothing wrong with Flac.
Yep, FLAC is actually lossless. MQA is lossy. Has been since its introduction 6 years ago. People who know what they're talking about said this 6 years ago. Said it for years.
But that doesn't stop audiophiles from falling for marketing, hype, biases and then "hearing" the improvements (that are actually degradations in sound quality). Seems like it's a mandatory component of the hobby.
The sucess of MQA proves an underlying problem in the audiophile community. Past a certain point, humans cannot percieve improvement, only change. Past this point (around lossless) any change at all is so celebrated that it insantly becomes recognised as an improvement. No matter how good your ears are, you cannot rely on them for solid analysis, no matter how "expert" or "trained" you might be. This hobby isn't about finding the objectively best sounding thing on the planet, It's about enjoying the music you love how you want to listen to it. People relying on their ears to prove that MQA is better are the essence of everything wrong with this community for many more reasons than just being wrong.
@@NVRSE500 You make some good points but I have some comments.
We cannot reliably hear small changes, regardless if they are improvements or degradations. We're fooling ourselves and prone to cognitive biases, that make us hear differences even when there are none.
That's why controlled listening tests are the only thing where there is a hope of producing reliable results.
Secondly, audiophilia is not about music in my book. It's about the equipment. It should be about striving for highest fidelity in audio reproduction, but it often is not. Why? Because the audiophile industry abuses people fooling themselves, hearing what they are told/want to hear, etc. to sell them two lies:
1) different = better
2) and that their product makes an audible difference.
Contrast that with musicophilia, when people actually love to experience the music, not drool over scammy, expensive audio equipment.
@@xnoreq fair enough, I agree with what you say, although I'm pretty sure musicophilia is an extension of audiophilia, rather than a separate entity. I think every audiophile can relate to the feeling of high fidelity listening suited to their tastes, whether their tastes be incredible detail or anything else. People can enjoy the sound of MQA if they want, what they can't do is call it lossless or "better than lossless", because that is objectively false. And you're correct, almost no objective arguments can be made through just a listening test, and the combination of objective performance and subjective enjoyment in audio is what audiophilia is at its essence. MQA only blurs the line between subjective and objective, which degrades the integrity of the hobby as a whole. Luckily, lossless is still accessible and common, and can still provide a benchmark for objectively perfect sound :)
@@NVRSE500 I didn't say no objective arguments can be made through listening tests. Quite the contrary. Properly controlled listening tests are the only hope to arrive at any objective conclusion regarding audibility of small differences.
But audiophiles have been sold the idea that different = better and therefore nothing can be objective and anything objective is the enemy ... by the industry, by magazines and this has spread to communities where now brainwashed people brainwash each other while calling it a hobby.
Professional audio engineer here. Great video! When mastering a try to tell my clients to avoid MQA like the plauge! I try to tell them that my ears hear things that theirs don't and it's not anything like the dream that they are selling!
Yup just like flac. Avoid it like the plague.
MQA: "Just trust your ears, stop asking questions."
MQA: Master Qanon Audio
"Just trust your ears and stop asking questions" has been the audiophile motto since the beginning and so many audio manufacturers have cashed in on the vast subjectivity. Well those days are OVER, more and more people are testing, tinkering and publishing all the BS these companies may have a rude awakening in the next few years. We get better fidelity when we call the companies out and vote with our wallets.
More like "audio cancel culture!"
Yeah, my many thanks also go out to subjectivist audiophiles in all the forums, who keep this murky culture going of "anything can be true depending on whom you ask" and who keep shilling these BS technologies like MQA and NOS DACs with leaky filters.
@@iowaudioreviews those days are not over, there are still people that think 1000USD power cable sounds better than a 5USD one.
MQA always sounded worse to me. Deezer hifi and Amazon HD sounded immediately better and I dropped Tidal. This excellent video confirms what many people heard.
This video popped up for me when it came out and I barely understood much of it. One year later I’ve become interested in better gear and suddenly everything makes sense. Thanks for the fantastic explanations here.
Ok, very short synopsis - "MQA is marketting bullshit". "Buy our crap", says MQA CEO.
any company that takes criticism as an attack and does such petty sorts of things is instantly blacklisted in my books
From the mere fact they blocked your content after your email I've disabled MQA on Tidal. Good grief guys.
Maybe you should double down and cancel your Tidal subscription. It'd serve them right after the shit they've pulled.
@@Some-guy-on-the-internet yeah! There must be alternatives you can switch to, right?
A possibility very valuable suggestion if you're truly (considering) switching between audio streaming services is that if you take a look around the internet and possibly Google a little bit you may get lucky and come across a tool to facilitate the switcheroo and help you with the whole shebang 😎 It would undoubtedly shorten the transitional period, greatly reduce any 'change tax' or transitional pain you may experience, and there is a chance it would make the switch painless whatsoever. And then there is the absolute shitton of time it would save for you by automagically copying all your existing playlists, favorites, compilations and any other forms of music collections may have with the old service to your new account.
If you'd like, please repeat after me: "Change is good. Change is delicious. Especially if you're changing away from the capitalistic snake oil mongering pigs trying to scam you out of your money.
Enjoy your last day of the weekend people! Tomorrow is Monday. Happy days, I hope 😇 Peace!
Problem with that, as seen by Golden as well, is that even if you stream HiFi there is high chance you'll get the folded MQA instead of the native 44.1KHz FLAC. That is for the tracks marked with the yellow Master sign.
Soon it won’t matter once tidal uses MQA exclusively for its source property encoding scheme
@@porkrinds9572 But where to can we go? What about amazon music (ultra) HD?
This is incredible! Not only have you taught me more about MQA than tidal ever did, but you helped me understand digital audio better than I ever have before.
As a professional mastering engineer, this confirms some of my suspicions about MQA and highlights further issues. Great work!
@@tdmduc It's never too late to get some knowledge. We learn all our lives.
Great work!
So, are you officially endorsing the view that MQA is snake oil? I heard it was used in the recording of Sandstorm, by Darude. ;^)
I always knew Tidal is snake oil
Hey man i saw your vid on streaming services and would be nice to see a new version but with amazon hd and apple lossless
That's a real pro stuff. Canceling my TIDAL HiFi sub for good.
You just saved me from the folly of keeping my top-tier Tidal subscription.
So MQA is garbage. This confirmed my suspicions.
MQA do sound really good, IF you have a top tier expensive DAC unit with mqa.
DSD is better, but few use it, prefer flac for easy of use and no need for expensive DAC.
@@Cpt.Zer0 doesnt matter 'how good' it sounds if its adding artifacts and fucking up the audio completely in some points
@@Cpt.Zer0 Wrong and wrong. It doesn't matter if MQA sounds subjectively good to you, or if you believe the moon is made of cheese. Technically it is a degradation from any common lossless source format. It was that way 6 years ago when this was introduced and we pointed out the flaws and still is today after audiophools yet again fell for quality degradation marketed as improvements.
DSD is even worse, being limited to 1 bit you get the highest possible quantization errors which means you need extremely aggressive noise shaping, which means your inaudible high frequencies will not be preserved anyway.
@@Cpt.Zer0 no matter how good it subjectively sounds good if it doesn't accurately reproduce the original sound, it's not a big deal
Given that MQA is clearly not mathematically lossless, but perceptually lossless with the right source and under favorable listening conditions, that does suggest an nicely alliterative marketing slogan: “MQA: MP3 for the Modern Mug!” They’re welcome to use it for the appropriate license fee.
Except MP3 has excellent file sizes but MQA is the same size if not bigger then FLAQ.
@@groundzero_-lm4md and MP3 is not known to be related to audiophiles.
@@citycultivator2101 so it fails on 2 fronts. It isn't lossless, and it is either equal or bigger then FLAQ.
@@groundzero_-lm4md But it is at least audiophool certified. 😄
Yeah, it’s just bullshit. Amazing the crap they are spouting. No one who is competent in engineering should fall for this.
Exceptionally well presented. I appreciate the professional approach and outreach to MQA for comment. I subscribe to both Qobuz and Tidal, and am seriously considering cancelling my Tidal subscription over this.
I knew something was up with Tidal when I started uploading my FLAC/ALAC files to my Plex server and was doing A-B comparisons. I swore Tidal's MQA streams were just container files with 320kbs MP3 and a trigger to turn on the MQA led. Thanks for doing the thorough research, I wasn't too far off.
MQA content often didn't sound "right" to me, and this probably explains why. Thanks for the enlightenment!
Spotify have announced they're adding lossless support soon. I was considering keeping Tidal because I believed the stuff about MQA. Thanks for making this video as I now know, as far as objective performance goes, I do not need to worry about missing MQA with lossless Spotify.
Qobuz offers high res lossless without MQA
I wasn't excited to try MQA but for me your video made it's point when they removed your content. If they try to pull a Sony move, I am not interested.
Yes, that alone speaks volumes.
Terrific piece of analysis. I’m not an audio engineer, but an IT guy with years of testing experience. And I recognize your scientific approach here. Further, I’m concerned with the lack of response - or worse, sandbagging by MQA. I only ‘tripped’ over this article as I have repeatedly tried to convince myself that I must be missing something from Tidal/MQA in listening tests. I do not have ‘golden ears’. I am a 69 years music lover with decent sensitivity to pitch, dynamics and (I guess) timing / phase issues. I consistently prefer CDs and recently Amazon ‘Ultra HD’ sources. I’m becoming increasing animated by the scam here. It’s twice the price of other less pretentious (being kind) services and audibly worse. If an old guy like me can blind test in a three way bake off - then surely a teenage musician must be gagging on the artifacts? Great job. I feel better now.
I can not like this enough! The entire hi-fi industry needs more of this kind of reviews. THANK YOU!! Greetings from Sweden!
Most stuff is actually passable despite huge marketing claims but MQA is simply the Pyre Festival of the music industry
Yep, just stick with FLAC. If you need lossy, then do Ogg Vorbis. And screw Tidal for getting involved in this MQA scam.
Brilliant! Is all I can say. The whole MQA presentation from the beginning has ben an embarrassment to the engineering community.
Good take on the presentation Scott I am in total agreement!
Yes. A great example of how the internet gives ordinary people a voice against companies that offer digital products. Great presentation!
This clearly shows that MQA is just a scam. Thanks mate. Cancelled my Tidal sub long ago because of that.
U can just use Hifi quality
Tidal is not just "mqa". Tidal fell for the bullshit of mqa also
@@shadouxg7150 he said in the video that the HiFi versions of songs are just the MQA version but with truncated bit depth
@@Roxor.Z sorry I didn't watch the video
This video was great. A thorough and well supported argument, which by virtue of the receiving end just not deserving any, was absolutely merciless.
Also, I'm glad you mention Chris's panel. Takes balls to call them out like that.
Finaly someone, that puts in the effort to scientificly debunk mqa. This was something everyone in the soundengineer game new but we werent able to support with evidence
Solid video. Thanks for doing this.
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it. Hopefully it was sufficiently thorough :D
I now understand why you had an almost emotional response from my question on one of your live streams. I asked about which mqa enabled dac would be better. Just finished exporting my Tidal playlist to Spotify and canceled subscription. It totally sucks to be lied to and managed by a big company. Wish there was a better streaming service for Canadians. Maybe Spotify will fill this niche eventually.
@@MisterChibs Spotify HiFi should hopefully shake things up a bit!
@@GoldenSound Amazon HD is pretty good, but has a horrible interface and terrible suggestions. SMDH
@@MisterChibs I'm on Deezer hifi
This is a supreme example of investigative journalism and scientific method for peer review with presented data to back your position. Thank you for this incredible work.
Glad I signed up for Qobuz recently. Looking forward to watching your findings.
Just here after getting the email from Tidal saying they were abandoning MQA. Looks like it's actually a good thing. Phew.
good work.
I seriously hope that hifi audio won't get consumed by MQA in the future
I don't think there's much danger of that - I suspect it'll fade away over time leaving nothing but a smattering of files that become a legacy nightmare for manufacturers to be expected to support in the future.
@@philharris9631 This..... our very own digital Sony Betamax.....
God damn man I cannot be thankful enough for audio quality of your voice. It is so rare to find someone who decides to actually mix their audio properly even if they have a good mic.
To be honest, the only editing I did to the voice track was to remove breaths. Other than that, no EQ/Processing.
@@GoldenSound then combination of your mic's response and your voice is perfect because it sounds *really* good
@@xentiment6581 Not encoded with MQA
@@nicoras8803 lmao *WASTED*
@@GoldenSound What microphone and equipment do you use to record audio? Your voice sounds fantastic
I got into quite a discussion on FB when I asserted that MQA is lossy. The fog of unprovable nonsense on the other side of the argument is now quite nicely rebutted by this video. I appreciate the effort and quality of your presentation. Thank you!
Thank you. Unbelieveable how much work you must have put into this effort. You give a whole new meaning to the the phrase due dilgence. By deduction, I'd known since some of the first MQA articles released in the Nov/Dec 2014 (TAS and Stereophile) time frame that MQA was anything but what they, TAS, and Stereophile claimed it to be and iimmediately tried to warn others in variious audio forums. High-end audio is so subjective and since many lack the ability to discern / interpret what they hear, I thought our music was done for. I still cannot believe the milions of hours enthusiasts and so-called experts have spent in forums arguing this crap. Nor shall I forget the wholesale sellout some leaders did for some motive. Anybody know the status of MQA today. Are they still hiding in the marsh waiting to strike? Or are they done? Regrettably, I suspect if the high-end audio industry as a whole had some level of listening discernment, MQA never would have made it out of the starting gate or perhaps ever got off the drawing board. Yes, we are ultimately to blame for some of this.
That "strange band of distortion" mentioned at 10:20 is probably due to Universal Music Group's copyright watermarking, which alters the audio from around 1 to 3.6 kHz. Matt Montag has more information and audio samples of it on his web site.
So MQA has claims they cannot follow thru in that case....
Wouldn't that only apply to Universal owned music?
Right smack dab in the sweet spot range where good speakers really shine. I assume they did it thinking no one but audiophiles would ever notice. I've not really analyzed this myself, but I know I have heard something in that range on many tracks. Like ive told others, I think I'm done with Tidal. I remeber doing a trial on qobuz closer to 2 years ago. Their audio was so much better to my ears, and closer to what I hear playing Tidal on an outboard dac or Audirvana. They didn't have the library then, but customer support was very friendly to me. They charged me a day early when I was trying to cancel, and offered me up some HD downloads to keep to make up for it. I'll gladly give them a shot tomorrow. :)
Intelligence agency steganography delivery system.
When I saw that spectrum waveform, I immediately thought it looked very much like a data stream. But I thought it was for decoding parameters and that "authentication" they claim. Well, you live and learn...
A tip for those of you hunting for data streams embedded in audio is to read up on software defined radio, there are a number of sites that list the spectrum, waveforms and basic data about various modulation techniques, you can often identify the basic modulation type by looking at the spectrum waterfall.
And you also have the option of using an audio signals as the input for some SDR receiver software when hunting for watermarks etc.
What I'd prefer would be some very low amplitude Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum or Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum signal which basically smears itself over the entire audio as inaudible pseudorandom noise.
Another idea would be to tweak a mix subtly for each release, like individual tracks being something like ±0.5 dB (whatever is small enough to not be heard but large enough to be reliably measurable) out compared to master.
Only common denominator is that it should be transparent across formats.
@Kesa Mek It's basically what it is, a steganographic delivery system, only what it delivers is some form of publisher, album, release and track identifier. I hope. :cue that Lalo Schifrin song:
you hit on the most damning point, with internet speeds today, there is no need for this clunky type of compression. This worries me greatly as better codecs already exist. this is a testament to slick marketing, and fancy logos.
same with large hard drive sizes. we dont need mp3 anymore. you can even get a 1TB micro sd card now.
We routinely stream 1080p video at 4000-6000kbps, what's the big deal with delivering 1400kbps lossless
Glad I took the decision to buy a DAC without the MQA option. Good work. I'll stay with FLAC. All the best, Rob
Watching this video again after I switched to Qobuz, I remembered that I said I liked Qobuz better because it sounded more "natural" than Tidal's master quality. I'm glad to see I'm not crazy.
I Spend one Month to compare Tidal and Qobuz. Qobuz is significantly more cleaner, more Detailed and resolution.
Some heroes don't wear capes. This is painstaking ,careful work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Spotify Lossless and Qobuz are coming to Australia! .......... hard times ahead for Tidal and MQA?
I thought Tidal was the only ‘lossless’ service here in Australia. But I’ve just found that Deezer Hifi is available, so signed I signed up (3 months free) and dumped Tidal.
@@PaulGreeve I just signed up for Qobuz tonight. It’s just became active.
@@Grizzly1644 did the same about Qobuz, but after roughly 10 hours of listening im starting to think that it may have some loudness effect, or is it just that i have been listening far to long at streaming services like tidal and spotify my ears have got used to a type of sound. I dont know but its just a thought
@@andreaslindquist5415 I don’t perceive any loudness effect. Check the software for normalisation. I stream via Roon, not via the desktop software.
@@andreaslindquist5415 You're used to the loudness normalization that Spotify and TIDAL still use. Qobus doesn't have normalization across the board unlike these platforms
CD/FLAC is all I need.
What to do after CD's dead, like they almost are?
@@pftvfc66 Any data that show CDs are dying? I think they're still being produced, it's just that vinyl has this resurgence and streaming is hot now.
@@elifaudio1472 Actually, there are published papers showing that the Compact Discs shelf life (about 30 years), combined with ever changing content delivery formats and manufacturing trends, creates a situation where CDs eventually become unplayable either due to degradation of the media, or a loss of the playback devices. This has happened to DAT for example and is happening to CD now.
100%, CDs and Bandcamp are my main music sources now, since all the artists and soundtracks I like show up there anyway, and good grief they sound great compared to MP3, I RIP the CDs (96khz and 16bit for no other reason than because I can) and download from Bandcamp in FLAC, feed it all to my Fiio M9 player and a nice pair of headphones, I haven't enjoyed music this much in a long time, and having it all loaded into and playing from a local file on a portable device is perfect, a far more convenient than any streaming music I've tested especially in my area with crap cell data costs and worse coverage.
TL:DR; who needs cloud streaming when local storage is better anyway?
@@TheSteveSteele as a raw data source CDs are still just fine, rip them to FLAC and backup your data regularly and it should last well over 30 years, also I have a nearly 25~30 year old CD player that actually still plays modern CDs just fine, it's a Yamaha CDC-805 if you're curious, a big old 5 disc CD changer
This is really bad for Tidal right now, especially with giants Apple and Spotify going Hi-res. I've been a long time subscriber of Tidal but unfortunately this may have to change.
Well they are shitty but you didn't notice the "mqa". So does it matter?
@@NamTran-xc2ip If you listen to shit long enough, then it becomes the norm.
Spotify is going hi res?
@@coin777 who's to say at this point
@@DonJuanMair they tried to go hi rez a few years back and charged 7.5 extra per month lol
This is one of the most relevant review videos I have seen in a while. Luckily for every marketing snake oil salesman, there is someone like GoldenSound that takes his time to carefully deconstruct it piece by piece and help people come to their own conclusion. Keep this up, Sir. The community will not be fooled.
Wow, seriously impressive work! I hope for you that this goes viral. 👏👏👏👏
MQA - Mediocre Quality Assured!
It's amazing how you tricked the entire system with tones inside tracks to give this to us. I really love when i find other persons that have deep critical minds, and question all sort of things, and this especially beats me hard. As i really love lossless music but i was from the beginning seing MQA with untrustful eyes. Thanks A Lot.
I just came out with a video in support of MQA based on some research, but ultimately I'm about the truth. Someone had commented on the video (via bell notif) saying here's proof that it's Snake oil, but I think they deleted it as I couldn't find it in the actual comments. Fortunately, a friend linked it to me on Insta, so I'm going to watch this, take notes, and really absorb everything you're saying so that I can summarize it and actually be able to explain the concepts myself (and perhaps come out with a follow-up vid). My initial impression after watching halfway through is that I want to get rid of my Tidal membership. I've gone back and forth on MQA for quite a while before taking a deeper dive via the video I posted a couple weeks ago, but this could be very damning. Kudos for the effort put in.
Edit: 12:45 minutes in and my undivided attention + notes and all I can say is Wow. Scam of the century? Thank you for this.
Perfect phrase Scam of the Century ⭐😊😀😎⭐
Thank you, I wasn't even aware of what MQA is before watching this video, it opened my eyes to the fact that some advertised "lossless" streaming services weren't really streaming lossless audio, therefore I won't be fooled by those, you helped me to save some money.
I’m on your side. I’m using an MQA compatible hipDAC and a MSR7b on the 4.4mm output. I had Deezer Hifi for nearly a year and was pretty happy with it. Beginning of the year I’ve jump on the 3 month for 3€ offer from Tidal. I’ve started listening my favorite songs on the new platform and some of them, the MQA ones sounded pretty wrong. There was some harshness, some part of the song were too loud. I’m pretty high mids and low treble sensitive and, for me at least, some songs were pretty agressive there. I’ve tried to listen the songs in non-MQA but it still was not as smooth and pleasing then by Deezer. I’ve switched back to Deezer Hifi and now I enjoy the music again, it is just smoother and I have no more trouble. Thank you for proving I’m not just crazy 😅
Simply Golden note! Thanks for bringing MQA issues to the table!
You know what this whole thing reminds me of? It reminds me of when Kodak decided to 'revolutionise photography' in the 90s with Advanced Photo System (APS).
APS was marketed as opening up photography to the average consumer, but it had a ton of issues that limited its shelf life, such as cameras utilising a smaller film size than the 35mm standard at the time, resulting in images having less definition to them, the 'Wide' and 'Panorama' options on each camera cropping the image from the top and bottom, rather than actually being wide or panoramic, film cartridges having to be processed and the film developed in very expensive machinery that only certain licensed stores had access to, the fact that 35mm cameras were becoming just as - if not more - compact, readily available, and cheaper, and Kodak's ardent refusal to even think about digital camera technology, among a plethora of other things.
The difference is APS - although it still exists as a ghost haunting photography in the form of the APS-C sensor a lot of cheaper DSLR and mirrorless cameras use (like my Sony a6400) - served as a major blow to Kodak as a corporation. Kodak were already struggling in the 90s, but APS's abject failure at revolutionising an increasingly niche market in favour of the next big advancement has ended them, as they filed for bankruptcy just a few years after announcing it would stop producing APS cameras.
MQA, however, sounds to me like something that's gaining traction because it sounds like something a lot of the big record companies want: some sort of complex security feature, irrespective of the damage it would cause to the listening experience compared to a proper Hi-Res FLAC file...and because it has actual industry support, it'll keep going, because record companies are some of the biggest dinosaurs of corporations on the planet, begrudgingly accepting streaming as a primary content delivery method, and finding ways in which it can inhibit people's ability to enjoy what they bought. It sucks.
EDIT: I realised that it wasn't the sensor that was smaller; it was the film. Too much digital camera terminology in my head as of recent...
Original APS had no sensor at all! It was a system to let variable size cameras tell photo development laboratories where each picture was on a roll of physical film, so they didn't cut your pictures in half according to where 24x36 pictures would have been on the roll. At the time I suspected the actual cameras to be rolling shutters modified to only open up for part of the maximum camera aperture over the film surface.
It reminds me of Sony and Minidisk...
@@johndododoe1411 It just dawned on me that 'sensor' wasn't even what I was looking for...
Interesting. You confirm what my ears were telling me. I made a few early comments about the mathematics of MQA and their use of apodising minimum phase filters - to me this is the most obviously audible detrimental effect of the MQA processing (unless you like these effects of course) - it is ubiquitous and easily audible on any MQA processed audio. After a quick examination I have avoided MQA since it was released.
Precisely. It took about 30 seconds of reading about what MQA was doing to conclude that it was garbage snake oil that couldn’t possibly be improving the sound.
When I first came across MQA, I was sceptical with their claims. I tried to investigate how the folding/unfolding worked but all the information they provide is marketing based. It's just another lossy encoder that allows playing on CD-quality without unfolding (at some quality loss) or some vague hi-freq reproduction with folding. You can't magically break Shannon's law regarding digital compression/sampling. Yep, lossless FLAC is all you really need in these modern times.
Let us not forget what happened at RMAF a couple of years ago when the CEO of MQA shouted down Chris of Audiophile Style (then: Computer Audiophile) when he tried to present criticism of MQA: th-cam.com/video/NSv0lcHlawk/w-d-xo.html
Nothing to say but I want to help you with the algorithm. More people need to see this 👍
canceled my subscription to Tidal today. thank you for this exposé
I canceled my subscription today after watching this. Qobuz is all i need
You got a good reason to cancel your subscription I don't have one MQA sounds amazing on my stereo Tidal all the way for me I really enjoy using this service
I remember seeing a video from Meridian where one of their spokespeople/employees was stating that the need for high res was because CD only had 1/44100 time domain resolution which doesn't meet the threshold of human stereo hearing. That kind of fundamental misunderstanding let me know that they are squarely pushing Woo, and that MQA tests reveal it's basically a destructive filtering process that the creators believe achieves subjectively better results.
Shenanigans like MQA are why I still stick to buying CDs when possible. Not only are CDs always full quality, sometimes they are even cheaper than the digital version!
There is also MQA-CD. Why is there a need for that? I have no idea