Yawn. Heard all this before. I remember in 2013 Sony was supposed to open all their 'hi-res' vault, and release all those recordings. They even had promotional events for that. What happened? Nothing -- as I had already predicted. The whole thing fizzled out. Why? There was no money to be made for Sony. Money is always the bottom line, not some idealistic goal, even though audiophiles like to delude themselves that this is not so.
Schiit Yggdrasil DAC and MQA
- Thread starter Al M.
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Yawn. Heard all this before. I remember in 2013 Sony was supposed to open all their 'hi-res' vault, and release all those recordings. They even had promotional events for that. What happened? Nothing -- as I had already predicted. The whole thing fizzled out. Why? There was no money to be made for Sony. Money is always the bottom line, not some idealistic goal, even though audiophiles like to delude themselves that this is not so.
Sorry, but that doesn't answer my question, Keith. The consumers would have to pay $20/month for streaming anyway. Do you really think that Tidal would raise prices just for a few hundred MQA titles available at a given time? As I see it, at this point MQA is not paid for. Which means it will fizzle out, like all those fringe formats.
Honestly Al, you are just trying to support your purchases and pre-suppositions without consideration of any differences in the situations. SACD isn't close to MQA in any way.
Enjoy your silver discs.
No, you *hope* it will fizzle out because that is your predetermined outcome.
I'm sorry - this is WBF and clearly, what's best is hi rez music streamable for all.
What is the difference between Sony's 2013 promise about their 'hi-res' vault, and Warners 2017 promise of MQA?
No, Keith, you are the one who engages in wishful thinking regarding your desired outcome. I am just a boring realist.
and its not a few hundred titles - pay attention. There are thousands of titles available right now, at any time. this is so easy for labels to give access to. there is no need to produce physical media.
Nonsense. I'd have been happy if some hi-res medium would have replaced CD quality digital (not that it strictly would have been necessary, see my next post). It just didn't happen, as I predicted. As I said, I am a boring realist.
Peter, I think if in 1985 we had had CD sound at the quality as we can experience it now in in 2017, the whole high-res vs. CD debate might never have happened. My guess is, if you were to ask people with knowledge of the state of the art (SOTA) at every step, many of them might tell you that SOTA playback of CD in 2017 is of better sound quality than the best playback of SACD one or two years after the release of the format around the turn of the millenium, when SACD was widely hailed in HiFi magazines as the beacon of light that would save us from the (allegedly) irreparable vices and shortcomings of the CD medium (that SOTA playback of SACD in 2017 might be better still is a different matter). Point is of course, above a certain format minimum it is all a matter of implementation of the format rather than the format itself.
While the Redbook CD format may not quite fulfill the theoretically minimal requirements of absolute transparency to source, I assume that it is very, very close to that (at least if I correctly understand digital theory, which becomes vindicated in practice more and more). Some would say that theoretically the CD format is fully transparent -- there is a debate to be had of course. What seems clear is that in practical implementation we haven't even yet reached the theoretical potential of the CD format. dCS for example, who are at the forefront of digital SOTA implementation, admit as much when they describe in their manuals the diverse practical trade-offs of the several filters that the listener can choose for playback. And still, with the right recording/ mixing/ mastering CD already can sound so incredibly good. Yet even with that currently obtainable fantastic sound quality, there is absolutely no reason to assume that quality of CD playback will not improve further.
So-called high-res may, even when CD will some day be implemented to an optimum in the future, still have a slight edge over CD (again, debatable). Yet as I see it in the hindsight of 2017, high-res formats really were mainly just a band-aid to fix problems in practical implementation of digital in general. High-res just has much more of a technical buffer zone within which shortcomings of practical implementation may be hidden, while the CD format is just on the edge of theoretical minimum requirements even when optimally implemented. That seems to be the main reason why in practice high-res formats have often sounded better than CD, much more so than (alleged) shortcomings of the CD format itself. In that context, it is well known that SOTA implementation of CD playback is still better than high-res on lesser DACs.
Is the 16-bit container of the CD format good enough? It may very well be. Yet in order to avoid 'slipping over the edge' when it comes to losses of resolution upon mixing/ mastering, working in hi-res at 24 bit or higher during these processes is certainly beneficial and is practiced widely these days. In this application, manipulating digital data before they hit the storage medium of CD, high-res is certainly useful without a doubt.
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In practice, for whatever reason (shortcomings in file server, system configurations listened to, or others), the best digital playback that I personally have heard thus far was from Redbook CD over transport. And it is stunning. You of course have also had some of your best experiences with digital from CD playback.
Very good point. A few years ago, before I bought the Berkeley DAC, I auditioned two cheaper, well regarded DACs, and was gravely disappointed that my then 20 year old Wadia 12 DAC squarely beat them in some areas, such as drama, liveliness and freedom of coloration (these DACs were better in the bass, for sure).
Then I heard that a number of cheaper DACs these days are actually optimized for hi-res at the expense of 16/44, which would explain the puzzling letdown against my old Wadia DAC on Redbook CD.
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That is not an argument, Keith. And you still haven't explained to me how MQA is paid for. Once you come up with a cogent explanation, I am ready to listen.
Keith, I assume that by "hi rez music" you are referring to digital music. If so, you are presuming that we all agree that hi rez digital is clearly "what's best". I am not aware that we have all come to that conclusion.
And by the way, as I understand it, Tidal HiFi is in general 16/44.1 streaming -- CD quality thus (the few MQA titles account for 0.01 % or less).
What was your argument again?
I don't think we need a consensus on this, it's just a basic fundamental of digital audio
If you believe all digital audio is fundamentally flawed then I suppose no metric will ever satisfy you
If you believe digital audio has merit, but past attempts have been less than fully satisfying :- high resolution recordings ie 192 kHz or above is an excellent starting point as it conforms to the needs of Nyquist /Shannon as being twice the band limited content frequency sampling
All other lower samplings will always be digitally flawed, of which MQA is yet another "patch" solution
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