MQA-CD - Affordable playback, but it's too late* 

😂 🤣 😂

I can certainly recommend all of mine.... .. ... .. as an excellent way of wasting money.

I feel seen! 😂 Am I playing around with 80s and 90s PC hardware for the authentic experience? It's just a complicated and painful way to do what can be done much more simply with DOSBox.

@@AdamChristensen Painful indeed. I remember many a happy few hours trying to get a particular combination of 2D and 3D graphics card to play nicely together only to find that they had taken out your sound card that you had also spent many hours trying to get working. Fix that and then go back to fix your graphics again, rinse repeat and give up. Happy times.

Same here. I like to work and hoard with random tech, rust bucket cars and travel to less than safe locations.

Thing is though, Regular CD always was "only" 16 Bit, 44.8Khz and therefore not a source for High Resolution Audio for those who wanted it. Here lies the advantage in some streaming services, who do offer Audio in those higher resolution formats.

Next step is to set up your jellyfin for external access (safely!!!), and you'll have your own "Spotify" anywhere you are. ;)

I've been buying a lot of second-hand CDs too. The trouble is though that one in three of mine has had issues. I'm usually only paying £2 or so but it is still annoying.

@@allenellisdewitt I use a Tailscale VPN which automatically turns on when I leave my home wifi network, so yeah, it just works anywhere. 🙂

@@presterjohn71 That's annoying. I buy a lot from eBay, and the only times I've had problems, I've had no problem getting refunds.

Juuuuuuuupppppp, something that is lossy can't ever beat lossless, insane that soo many people support it.

Same "trick" that HDCD used to use.

So it sounds better (non-MQA CD compatible version), even though they’ve used 3 bits of every sample to encode extra data, instead of the original sample data that should have been encoded in those 3 bits for an accurate representation of the original signal??? If that was the case, why not replace more than 3 bits!

One way an MQA CD might sound better is in the sense that they perhaps aren't compressed to all hell and pushed to the max of the envelope like most CDs were from the mid/late 90s through to the 00s. Don't know about CDs from the 10s and nowadays as I basically stopped buying CDs for this reason. I believe this is also the reason why high-res CDs might be better than regular CDs, not so much because of the master, but more so because of the CD mastering process and the market forces involved in that. High-res CDs are a smaller and different market than regular CDs and thus it does not make sense to market to the "louder is better" gut feeling that regular CDs cater to, instead they are marketed more to the discerning listener who understands and appreciates dynamic range. For the same reason earlier CDs from the 80s and early 90s often sound better than later re-releases of the same album, as back then the market for CDs was very, very different. But yes, the MQA-CD technology does in and of itself not produce a better CD, and assuming the lower 3 bits theory is correct, then yes it absolutely raises the noise floor and a regular old CD would absolutely produce better quality *if* that CD would be produced with a sensible mixing and mastering process, but in the vast majority of cases they simply are not, or at least, they weren't. In those kinds of badly mastered CDs the dynamic range of a CD is utterly wasted and those lower 3 bits don't make a lick of difference.

A standard CD is 16 bit at 44.1 Khz.@@stuartmcconnachie

This!!!!

Bingo 😎👍

Yeah! Most digital music released after the 80s has been degraded by the loudness war trend. That is, the dynamics of the sound are very low and everything sounds loud. Only classical music is spared from this. That's why I still buy used CD albums released in the 80s because they simply have better sound quality than streaming services or remastered versions. I've tested services like Tidal, Amazon music, Spotify, etc., but record companies have rarely put dynamic masters on them.

Doesn't matter how good the format is, if the problem is the source. If everything is mastered and tuned to death, our home equipment won't solve the problem.

Compression is the absolute enemy of dynamics. I blame the Black eyed peas. They were at the forefront of this massively compressed, low dynamic, high master nightmare in which we find ourselves. I think it’s one of the reasons why older LPs are making such a comeback as well.

Whatever happened to ogg?

​@@ASBO_LUTELY Ogg Vorbis is a *lossy* codec designed to provide a free open source competitor to MP3, but it turned out that MP3 was open enough for most people/the licensing was cheap enough in most cases that only diehard free software users were using it in the end, and these days storage is so cheap that anyone concerned about codec licensing for their personal collection is probably just using FLAC.

@@ASBO_LUTELY Ogg is still used, but it's not lossless, it's lossy.

@@ASBO_LUTELY ogg is only a container format, you could theoretically put whatever inside (like the old .avi for video). If you mean audio codecs, there are many, you could even put a flac inside, but this particular (container) format did not gain much adoption. If you want the BEST lossy compressed format, it is called OPUS and made by the same people, it surpassed both vorbis and speex so it works as the universal format from the lowest to the highest levels of average bitrate. Heck, you just listened to it because youtube uses it...

@@ASBO_LUTELYSpotify uses ogg

Yes, a better option would be to update the video titled to contain the preface "[Outdated]" or something and link the update in the description.

yup, there is nothing wrong with the current digital formats but for the awful masterization of particular albums.

And the speakers that you are playing it from, and in the case of a CD the quality of the laser. And conditioning of the disk

Yet the Japanese remastered and released 6 Huey Lewis albums on MQA just last year!

But what about the blue light?

@@Techmoan for £20 I'll make you a box with a blue light that works "wirelessly" with any/all your audio gear 👍

I used to be able to hear CRTs so easily. Told my grandparents when they left the TV on with the cable box putting out a black screen.

Tinnitus is so freakin annoying. I forget about it until I want to listen to music, especially with headphones, and there it is. Bloody pita!

@@TheTruthKiwi mine limits how long I can listen at a reasonable volume.

I know right?

That you have to pay extra for! A 'mug's ear full' to be sure.

It's an opportunity to own Brothers in Arms and Tubular Bells in yet another pretentious and expensive format that nobody knows or cares about. Millions of balding Gen X'ers salivate at such an opportunity.

@@Rutherford_Inchworm_III They neglect to research as well that Brothers in Arms was recorded in 16bit digital, since that's all that was available at the time. There literally cannot be more than CD quality to that album since that's how it was captured.

@@bluespiritrecords1709…b-but muh temporal deblurring???

SACD is really DVD-based, despite the name. The big thing it and DVD-Audio brought was more channels, though the utility of that was debatable.

Exactly CD mastering has been atrocious since the mid to late 90s

In practice, most digital music released after the 80s has been degraded by the loudness war trend. That is, the dynamics of the sound are very low and everything sounds loud. Only classical music is spared from this. That's why I still buy used CD albums released in the 80s because they simply have better sound quality than streaming services or remastered versions. I've tested services like Tidal, Amazon music, Spotify, etc., but record companies have rarely put dynamic masters on them.

​@@CptJistuce No, it isn't, SACD is actually quite unique and can only be played by SACD players because the data is arranged differently on the disc. That's why people go to the lengths of acquiring first-gen modded PS3s to rip them - because that's pretty much the only way to do that (you can't do that in a normal DVD reader). I think you might be confusing it with DVD-Audio - which was also a thing.

Thumbs up this comment!

They got it right the first time. Human hearing limits never increase.

The human ear is only improving at evolutionary speed if at all. 🤣

And it will be until the day comes when some sci-fi tech or evolution causes human hearing to go beyond 20ish kHz.

Exactly! that's what kills me. human biology isn't going to have to worry about anything beyond CD quality for hundreds of thousands of years lmao

I think the thing that's incredible about this is how little data our ears actually process. We're still decades away from being able to comfortably max out our eyesight or other senses, but all our ears need is 1400 kbps

Bob Stewart: but but but but we have green discs?? you should try our physicals come on you know you want a cool looking disc... 😂

Apparently MQA is now being phased out of Tidal in favour of HiRes FLAC streaming. Not that it's enough for me to switch to Tidal.

A problem that did exist, if MQA files are smaller than flac. Also if flac is created based on a regular CD it has the same limitations. I don't know what MQA does but if it's supposed to be better than a regular CD the resulting flac will also be better.

Its not compressed! Its folded™ Big difference! /s

@@radry100/videos That's nonsense though. MQA is a closed format so we don't know the specifics of how it works. What we do know is that it's missing data. It's therefore not loseless. If the CD is loseless, FLAC will be better than MQA. I mean, if FLAC is created properly, it's better than MQA either way because it's one-to-one. And as for the size, sometimes (maybe often, I don't remember for sure), MQA files end up _bigger_ than FLAC. So as others have said, MQA tries to solve a problem that didn't exist because money.

To me the format itself is mostly irrelevant. What really matters is the care that went into production, mixing and mastering of the destination format, be it vinyl, cd, tape, or digital. That last part in particular makes all the difference between some brickwalled version or something that indeed has dynamic range and detail. Or not.

​@@thewestwardskyThe comments on Techmoan's earlier video, as I recall, basically went along the lines of... >CD as it is can theoretically sound "perfect", all the sonic capabilities it has to reproduce every nuance of human hearing is there. >The "Loudness wars" ruined this because everything has the knobs turned up full in mastering. Most people didn't adopt CD's until the loudness wars were in full swing so other than the absence of crackle or tape hiss, they never really heard how good it could be. >Vinyl sounds "better" because if you mastered vinyl the way you mastered a CD, the needle would be physically jumped out of the groove. >Various "HD" CD formats could be acheived by just putting the vinyl master on a normal CD.

@@michaelmartin9022 that sounds simple and logical, I'll buy that explanation (but not any of the high res audio formats)

I remember that video but I also remember that the methodology and way he tested was not perfect and imho he tested for the wrong thing. In a way, he wanted to prove that MQA is some sort of snakeoil that does nothing, but he fell for the same problem that many fell for by MQAs marketing, that assumption that MQA is a lossless audio format, which it is not and never was. It always was a lossy format to begin with, just like MP3.

@@Sheepy007 Problem is that site that sold MQA DID claim it was lossless as I recall.

Some of the Bluetooth speakers out there are quite good. I have two of the Anker Motion+ speakers and they truly push above their price. I still like my full-size 2 channel HiFi, but the price to get good audio these days is amazingly low for what you get.

You're joking, but from what I've read- and I'm not an audiophile myself- many viewed MQA as little more than an excuse to lock down and control the entire audio chain and to coerce existing manufacturers into paying royalties and going along with its rules.

​@@NotATubeyep, thats why tidal stopped offering flacs (iirc?)

I would use that tech to press computer games on vinyl. I figure you could get Doom II on a 90 or 60 minute cassette if they used modern encoding methods.

@@lutello3012 Actually games for some 8-bit computers could just be recorded from a cassette to a record, and loaded from one. I.e. albums "Electric Eye" and "Heartware" contained a C64 program You can order any game (or indeed any audio) custom-recorded onto a vinyl record as long as it's short enough, although I would recommend using a fastloader, ideally with some CRC recovery data.

@@jwhite5008 Yeah but it you want 7mb for Doom II you'll need faster encoding. Daniel Faradey is working on software for streaming mp3s off of analog audio and cassette that looks promising.

I see you watched any RU-vid video featuring a DAC. There are no well-designed double-blind studies verifying the claims of any DAC. If anyone knows of one, please let us know.

As both a technology fan and a *massive* lover of German metro systems, 🆄-Matic keeps making me think of a future of driverless trains on the Hamburger Hochbahn... 😇 Though more on-topic; Someone (Tech Connections, perhaps?) did a video on a home data archival solution which stored and retrieved computer data from VHS, using a customised video I/O device and any standard VCR. Can't remember the capacity per tape, but I _think_ it might've been about 1-2GB SP (Obviously ~4GB LP and perhaps 5,5GB at SLP) for a standard quality 180-min cassette. 😇

Yeah, while that's true they actually rounded up a bit. If most people can't hear above 20kHz, then 40kHz sampling rate would have been fine per Nyquist-Shannon. They added extra bandwidth to make it 44.1, they didn't reduce it because of U-Matic. I'm curious why DVD and Blu-ray went with 48kHz, though. I think the PCM tracks on laserdiscs were CD spec.

@@drfsupercenter They are. LD is 44kHz, and so close to CD format, I think that Domesday project actually decodes both LD digital and CD audio with the same code. (IIRC.) I've always heard that the choice of 44.1kHz instead of 40kHz was a combination of using timing based on existing commodity crystals for video use, and a little bit of leeway so the reconstruction filters didn't have to be quite as steep for the same bandwidth. I've heard the explanation of why 44.1 and 48kHz both exist more times than I could count, and I never remember exactly why. Without looking it up again, I want to say one is based off the horizontal scan frequency and the other is the color burst frequency. But I'm probably wrong.

@@drfsupercenter The sample rate was chosen because somewhere in the colour video circuits there was a convenient source of 44.1 kHz which just happened to be about right for the fledgling CD format. By the time DVD came out, the pro audio studios had moved to 48kHz with the next generation of recorders.

​@@nickwallette6201 : 44.1 kHz vs 48 kHz was because of differing source formats- though I think that both were _technically_ from the same tape format, with the two of them coming from a slightly different encoding choice or something.

And the unfortunate fallacy is that those lower bits were already tactically dithered with shaped noise. Throwing them away and filling them with non-shaped non-applicable noise is not going to make your dithering any less obvious. :')

HDCDs are fun to collect, I don't see the same for MQA

HDCD basically gave you 15 bits undecoded and something approaching 16 bits with peak extension turned on, with shaped dither being used to get more mileage out of the bits you had either way. So basically releases could be made louder for the general public while discerning listeners would spring for an HDCD decoder. Sort of a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario. In practice, the undecoded part doesn't sound pretty whenever peak extension would be needed, so it isn't something you would have wanted in peak loudness war era releases. The best quality option would have been just mastering a regular 16-bit CD with all the dithering bells and whistles on just like the HDCD peak-extended version would have been, which I assume did probably happen as well (the Pacific Microsonics converters were excellent pieces of kit and would have seen use at some mastering studios; their Model Two would reportedly do over 120 dB of dynamic range in a loopback test, which back in the '90s would have been astounding).

This kind of reminds me of the musepack audio codec. That one could go full lossless, lossy, or a hybrid with reconstruction data, interesting stuff :)

​@@arturomonterroso8277you mean wavpack?

YOU BASTARD 🤣🤣🤣

I see what you did there :D

punny.

Lovely... well done sir. 🤣🤣🤣

Make sure it's Paul VI, the newer stuff is garbage.

I have a bit of string that was once used as an emergency shoelace by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Does that count? 🙃

My mate bought some high end av cable for £120. It picked up the local police😂

True. FLAC is even lossless enough that some people use it for the raw rf capture from laserdiscs, I don't think people can say the same for MQA lol

​@@robot_madness3164lossless is binary. If the data/signal can be perfectly recovered from the compressed format it is lossless, otherwise it is lossy. There is no difference in the data recovered from different lossless formats per definition.

The funny thing is, MQA can be delivered in FLAC. If you didn't know the music was encoded in MQA and just saw the file as a .FLAC, I reckon 99% of people wouldn't even be able to tell. When it comes to audiophiles from my experience, it's mostly clueless keyword warriors fighting over nonsense. Judge with your own ears, not some random graph someone online with no credibility shows you.

​@@Turak_64But that would defeat the point of MQA, as it's supposed to be a 'lossless' lossy codec. That's like saying you can hide a JPG in a PNG. Like yeah you could. But why? You're already losing out on the benefit of a small file.

@@JDoawp People with "golden eyes" would still insist that the PNG version is better :D

You are referring to audiophools, not audiophiles.

The problem with this video is that he used coax. You need a gold-plated optical cable to get the fully experience.

I used to think that was just a joke but then I met a guy who actually believed that his gold-plated power cord made his music system sound better. I pissed him off because I honestly thought he was joking and I was mocking the idea. Oops, guess I didn't make any new friends that day. Not losing sleep over it lol.

Not to mention exotic fuses, these things sell for a fortune claiming all manner of sonic benefits, a "new model" came out recently I believe, often wondered how many they sell.

@@BrianHall-Oklahoma audiophiles are fools, same difference

I love the way he summarised it too, 'basically hi-res means somebody has made an effort to get it to sound good'.

they likely used the master intended for making the plates for vinyl pressing. LPs are due to the physical limitations of record grooves far less capable of handling the loudness wars BS that blew out the dynamics on a lot of CDs from the late 1980s and a bunch of the 1990s. I suspect this is part of where the myths of Analog is superior to CD as a format came from, Masters for vinyl simply by the nature of the final product had to be done with actual care given. Probably does not help that the industry saw CDs as something to shovel out to the mall music store, throw a video on MTV, and collect the winnings. While the LPs were seen as a higher tier market segment.

I think that's why people are spending crazy money on Japanese blue-spec discs, for the unique tape transfers and mastering of classic titles.

I recall Amazon being better when books and recorded media was its core business.

Amazon's search has really turned to garbage over the last few years. It says something when I have to Google an item on Amazon because it refuses to show up in Amazon's own search.

Generally I think search in Amazon is really bad. If you search for a specific brand,let's say "Sony led Tv" it will put some sony TVs on top but then millions of other brands products you didn't want to look at.

I have noticed that a lot of Amazon's business practices have gone down the drain lately.

@@dschult3 Amazon is just as bad, if not worse than Aliexpress and Banggood now. There's hardly any brand name products left and they do their best to hide them in the search results.

And in my opinion you can pay far less money to look at bar prettier things while they're standing up.

I wonder if that's the same shop just outside of Philly that was on Baltimore Pike in Delco. Small world if true.

@@deathleopardsmusicIt was by montgomeryville Mall. I can't remember the name though to save my life. Lol

Sounds like a rare honest salesman!

@@michaelfrench3396 It wasn't "World Wide Stereo" was it? I sometimes hear them advertised on WMMR.

I still do.

I'm the only one in my circle too.

People look at me like I'm nuts when I tell them I'm buying CD's. After listening to streaming for so long, these things just POP! Bought more used CDs just today. Also, rediscovering my collection that just sat in a room for 18 years. They're alive again!!!

Rather than delete, can't they be retitled with the date of release as part of the title? I think I've changed my youtube video descriptions but I'm not sure if I've ever changed the title.

@@martytoo Yes, the titles can be changed. You could put something like [Outdated Info] at the beginning of the title rather than deleting the video.

I’m the Captain now.

​@@Techmoanlmao

@@c.james1The date now says "4 years ago" (or however long it's been) but if you hover the mouse over it you get the exact date. No idea if that info is visible to people on consoles, and on computers it might vary depending on how zoomed out you are. I'm on a 50 inch screen, and someone using a 70 inch screen could be more zoomed out while having the same size text as I'm seeing.

Vinyl is a bit different because it's a substantially *lower* fidelity format than CD and some people like the particular pattern of degradation imposed by that quality ceiling from a direct analogue format (even if they don't realise that's what's actually going on).

@@bosstowndynamics5488 nope, it's mastered completely differently to a digital master, it can't be limited in the same way as a digital delivery as the needle would actually jump out of the groove. This has the insane effect of actually giving greater dynamic range on some recordings because it isn't brick-walled for loudness in the same way as digital masters. Humans are strange creatures!

@@jtsotherone Brickwall limiting isn't an inherent effect of digital mastering though, it's just a popular effect that winds up applied to them

@@jtsotherone No.

@@mechadeka how many records have you mastered?

This! The tech behind MQA players personally I find far more interesting anyways then the sound quality debate

It's funny that the most interesting music formats for Techmoan fans usually sound like crap

The sound quality debate is interesting! It's interesting that it's a debate! I thought I just cared about the music, then just about the interesting ways we're trying to make recorded music playback. The difference between things became obvious. If I wanna dub a tape to a tape I lose half the volume and power. That's obvious to everyone right? And that generational loss SOUNDS interesting, and is an intersting phenomena. I dunno why people who are interested in different formats and equipment stop their interest at the differences between how they sound. You don't need special ears, you can already probably hear what happens when you dub a cassette to a cassette, what it looked like when you recorded TV to VHS and maybe then what it looked like recording TV to DVR or the way digitial TV looks compared to the old antenna and the way DAB+ sounds compared to antenna (within range)... it's ALL interesting, why make tribes if some of us find the sound of SACD different? The whole debate would be ended if the crowds understood that, for example, a 2xDSD digitized copy of a 1/4" tape is gonna be pretty much as good as 1/4" tape, so it's smarter to keep the master at 2xDSD digital than to keep relying on the 1/4" tape BUT it's safer to go 4xDSD, 2 more octaves. If the audience was more informed, they could advertise "Disc printed from 2xDSD Digital" and people would go OOOOOOHHH not "yuck it's not analogue". The half quality, twice quality thing is OCTAVES, like on a Piano. We can hear between 20-20,000hz but not really, but that's 10 octaves. The numbers are beautiful, halves and doubles and it results in complex harmonics really quickly. But the simple stuff is A in the 4th Octave is 440hz, A3 is 220hz, A5 is 880hz, A2 is 110hz and that's now Subwoofer range, A6 is 1760hz, A1 is 55hz so we've got 1 octave in that Subwoofer range, A7 is 3520hz, A0 is half of 55hz so that's 27.5hz, see how all these numbers give the concepts their actual scale and shape?, A8 is 7040hz , go another octave higher, A9 is now 14,080hz, about where most people's hearing tops out BUT YOU CAN FEEL IT, all of those shakings, those frequencies, the thing that's shaking, the powered speaker, if any of the notes hit any of those A's then it resonates everything else that's happening giving the sound Timbre. Timbre is the result of Harmonic Resonance. It doesn't matter if you can hear the top notes harmonics of a Viola or a Violin, once you can identify the difference of a Viola or a Violin then you're there, it's intellectual not "talent" or biology. If you like music you can't be tone deaf, you're ability to recognise that your note isn't hitting the note is developed Relative Pitch. It isn't a talent, you developed it out of an interest. The devil's in the details here but I think we need to all keep learning from each other's experience and try and find the ways to teach each other the mix of Physics, Electronics, Music Theory, Acoustics that are happening with these gadgets. As a community we mightn't be learned, but the details can give us all the grounding to at whatever age still be able to get a proper start on learning those things.

Yes @christeuma but again this channel isn't about quality we don't care within reason as long as it sounds good. this channel is about exploring unique and lesser-known formats across different types of media and how they work not their quality. There are other channels, websites and platforms like reddit if you're specifically interested in audio and quality discussions.

@@christeumamost tech people know everything you’ve just said, it’s all basics. You don’t go in to brain chemistry and developmental factors when discussing some failed tape format. Also you can’t tell people what they’re interested in. If they’re not, they’re not.

Some 80s CD's are better

Vinyl fans often note that CDs only encode frequencies up to 21kHz, but ignore the fact that only infants and young children have hearing that extends that high. If you’re over 50, it’s likely that your hearing falls off very rapidly above 10-12KHz. Same goes if you’re in your 30s and spent a lot of time in loud clubs or concerts,

Meanwhile, all of my classic rock CDs have a slight background hiss ... from the analog master tapes those albums were recorded on back in the day. 🙂 (It disappears noticeably in the gaps between tracks.) And yah, a properly-mastered CD is still _more_ than good enough. I doubt my own 40-year-old ears can hear much difference in high-res audio, beyond _maybe_ a better master like Matt said. Most of what I listen to sounds decent enough anyway through RU-vid's compression and my PC's old, non-spectacular speakers, let alone on CD or lossless files played through my good headphones.

I'll stack up my early seventies German vinyl pressing of Sgt Pepper against the 1987 worldwide cd of same any day of the week - the vinyl is much more relaxed and open sounding. There are a handful of amazing sounding eighties cds, but they were not necessarily an improvement on the discs that preceded them.

I have a FLAC rip of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album in quadraphonic, it sounds AMAZING when I set my receiver to Dolby ProLogic II and turn off the center channel! I'm not a huge fan of surround sound, but I think if quad equipment had been at a better price point for the consumer, it very well may have changed audio recordings as we know them.

As an audio engineer, I can't even tell most times between a WAV file and and ('good') 320kbit mp3...

​@@katho8472Yeah, cd-quality is the upper bound, any individual's level of what format is perceptually indistinguishable from the source is practically guaranteed to be lower than that.

@@urgay1992 Indeed! The only "better quality" you can achieve is higher dynamics because of less dynamic compression added in the mastering. Metallica's Death Magnetic vs its Guitar Hero version for example - and strangely, also Black Sabbath's 13 album, which has more(!) dynamics on vinyl than on CD. All the "hi res" music online shops are only interesting to me since I can be guaranteed to not get some butchered low-res mp3, but thats about it. Whenever I see 96kHz or even 192kHz, I can't help but laugh. Same goes for the whole hardware. Any decent speaker system with a 8" woofer will usually do for the living room, even if it is cheap(er). The rest is just some basic EQing, like turning up the bass... Of course, 10 or 12" will give more lower end, but who can afford that when you have neighbors?

​@@urgay1992 CD quality is not exactly the upper limit. It's actually just below the upper limit. 16 bit still has an audible noise floor that is mainly solved by dither. But if we're talking about full information fidelity, the upper limit would have a precision of 20 bits with no dithering needed. That is the lowest bit depth you can theoretically have before quantization noise becomes audible.

This, so many CDs are compressed to all hell utterly wasting the fantastic dynamic range of CDs. 90% if not more of the difference between regular CDs and high-res CDs comes from the mastering process, not from the format.

Garbage in; garbage out.

It's also that different genres lend themselves to different media. I think Steven Wilson once said that he prefers buying classical and jazz records on CD, because of their ability to put out nothing but silence, while there's always some level of noise with vinyl.

Yeah, it's all mix, eq and mastering I think. Recently started making bootlegs on cdrs in favour of annoying vinyls and it makes me happy. Too bad 24 and 32 bit CD players are not a thing

People always forget that it doesn't matter if the music is 16-bit or 24-bit, for example. The most important thing is how it is recorded and mastered. Unfortunately, since the 90s, record companies have been mastering digital music loud (loudness war trend), so the dynamics of the sound is very low and everything plays loud. Only classical music is spared from this. I've tested services like Tidal, Amazon music, Spotify, etc., but record companies have rarely put dynamic masters on them.

Well said!

i can tell the difference between 16/24. But it all depends on orignal master. IMO Miicheal J albums sound so crips and clear at 16-48 than alot of more modern tracks at 24-96, because they took the time to master them. I would say any sample rate past 24-192 is a bit pointless. I also think 16-48 foramt for CD was chosen due to the limitations of DAC decoders at the time. 16-48 ensures 99.9% of DAC chips from thye 80's can play it.

Before that loudness war got out hand. I have just collected some late 80s and early 90s, sounds fantastic through my portable CD player and Austrian audio Hi-X15 headphones. But when listening to late 90s early 2000s albums I need to put the volume lower and not as good mix. For my phone and laptop I use HIBY FC1 DAC which cost me about £39. No need for expensive DAC. More expensive one in the Range but I don't need MQA or higher sound quality DSD. I'm happy with CD quality or just above CD quality in Lossless sound from my phone as well as my portable CD player. No need for the very high end Hi-Res Lossless audio. But what really matters is the different mixes and different remastering versions.

MQA itself is a scam, but some high-res audio is legit. I've downloaded FLACs from Qobuz and they usually do have frequencies there when looking at FFT. Qobuz is also good about not overselling things, e.g. if it's digitally mastered at 24-bit 48kHz, the highest quality you can choose is 24-bit 48kHz, not 192kHz.

Like the song "Go Now" from Moody Blues. Every time I hear the song I feel as if it was recorded with a desktop tape recorder set in front of a TV set whose volume is too loud for the cheap condenser microphone.

It's no surprise that CD's can sound better than records. It was very much a successor and rapidly took its place. It was an upgrade in every technical aspect.

​@@AnnaVannieuwenhuyseUntil the music industry said NO.

​@@jerryspann8713 I specifically said technical aspect because of this. What you put on the CD is unrelated to the CD's capabilities.

But isn't FLAC supposed to losslessly reproduce the data that was compressed into it, bit-exact to the raw data extracted from the CD (one would hope)?

@@gregx5096 it absolutely is! That's why it's lossless.

This sounds like people who spend years and £££'s trying to brew the perfect cup of coffee...

I've got so many discs that were in that great mix of formats :D

@@Longplay_Games I got curious and looked it up, and it turns out that of the nine DAD albums they list on Wikipedia, I had* at _least_ four. Which was a little unexpected! * well, technically still have, they're all in a box somewhere

When I was young a friend of mine's parents had a first gen CD player and they didn't like it. They had a Simon & Garfunkel best of CD album. They said it sounded 'brittle'. That would have been down to an inaccurate sample clock in the process.

The three letters in the box was to tell the listener the recording, mixing and mastering process. A was for analogue and D was for digital so a DAD disc was recorded digitally, converted to analogue in the mixing process and then remastered digitally for CD. I believe this was the norm at the time due to there no way to mix digitally cheaply at the time. My Erasure The Innocents was such a disc. The first DDD disc released I believe was Dire Straits Brothers In Arms as it had DDD on the back however I did read that it was actually a DAD disc as it wasn't mixed digitally but the cover did say "A Digital Recording" so they weren't strictly fibbing.... The SACD stereo/multichannel remaster that was released in 2005 was remixed digitally I believe so it was eventually a full "Digital Recording".

@@Safetytrousers I remember those early Simon and Garfunkel CDs and also the original CD releases of Fleetwood Mac's 1975 self-titled album and Rumours didn't sound good at all, but I've always seen it explained by "the labels didn't know how to master to CD properly yet" and never a more detailed technical explanation.

you know that thing that shows youtubers what other channels people watch. i would be surprised if Parlogram wasn't at the top

Yesn't. The audio put onto the disc is a Redbook/CDDA compatible signal. But the requirement for decoding hardware and the contents of the file being partially encoded does violate many of the principles on which the Redbook/CDDA standard was built. While it is a Redbook or CDDA compliant signal, it doesn't effectively pan out as one (as you stated). I can imagine whoever releases these MQA-CD's is not interested in a legal battle over semantics.

It's not like anyone would care. The rainbow books have been fully finalized and every single possible technology around them has since matured and deprecated. There is no consortium anymore that will control the prevalence of these weird and unconventional implementations of the red book. Normal CD PCM keeps winning just by being very good.

Only copyleft like the GPL you have to share your changes, BSD licence has minimal restrictions. The library part Tidal would use is BSD.

They don't use apostrophes for plurals either.

@@ericthemauve I bet you get laid all the time.

Don't forget $400 stones to place on each speaker which expands the dynamic resonance. If you can't hear the difference then YOU ARE THE PROBLEM.

It's because he was using coax instead of the recommended gold-plated optical cable.

You can tap/click on that to see the actual date though

in the uk too

RU-vid’s interface is the same everywhere. It varies by device, not by location.

@@PixelatedH2O Thanks , I didn't know that

The "years ago" isn't accurate. I checked today on my phone and videos from October 2022 are labeled as 1 year ago. So annoying. Luckily on my TV I get the real upload date instead of that years ago nonsense.

Yes the Huey Lewis MQA-CDs seem to be the most recent (last?) pop releases from June 2023.

​@@TechmoanHave you ever listened to DTS audio CDs? There are some great 5.1 mixes of albums out there.

The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost

of course.

If you're getting dsd masters, I don't see the point in degrading it down to mqa instead of just having a bit for bit carbon copy on sacd.

Cute, but in a room with 20-30dB of background noise and 80-90dB listening level - ultimately useless, funny how math works out...

​@@VEC7ORltBut the number is bigger! Seriously, it's mostly about marketing stats, it's the same as how manufacturers are bragging about 108+MP sensors in phones when even high end medium format cameras are only just in the triple digit territory - a bigger number means more money please and thanks! (Technically those larger smartphone sensors to produce better images, but they don't perform anywhere near as well as the MP count might fool a consumer into thinking they should).

@@VEC7ORlt I wonder if greater dynamic ranges could matter more if we are moving toward active noise cancelling in most headphones. Just a thought.

@@christianseibold3369 does it matter if most program material cant do more than around 25-35dB?

@@VEC7ORlt agree. Also with "vanilla" PCM you can apply dithering during mastering to increase the dynamic range, soo..

Yeah, didn't DJ myself but recorded gigs on MD and it was "exciting" to hear differences between vinyl, cd and "mp3". Maybe that's why i "hate" anything under 280kbps, even with tinnitus.

Ur still young bruddah

I just saw a video where a dj (cannot find it now) claims 320Kbps mp3 sounds better in a club compared to cd if you play electronic music. A lot to debate over I think 😁

MP3 just sucks at filling up the room with sound.

If you're archiving/saving/collecting, it's always worth compressing in FLAC instead: Since it's truly lossless, you have the complete file and it can always be converted into any other format you'd like - as well as being there for others when the younger ears can listen to it ;P

PlaysForSure wasn't really a format by itself, it was just a certification that meant that a device is able to playback WMA and WMV formats encoded with the Windows Media DRM

@@rubeusvombatus That's a very good point, well taken.

"Two slightly distorted guitars..."

@@MarkTheMorose lol, there more to it then just that section though 🤣

Audiophile here. MQA was essentially a scam from day one in an age where 24bit FLAC, DVD-Audio and Blu-Ray-Audio were already a thing

@@Brownd55 But do 24bit FLAC, DVD-Audio or Blu-Ray-Audio really sound better than cd, or if these formats do really sound better than cd, is it because of the mastering?

@@mrlightwriter obviously a bad master will still sound bad at 24bit, it's not some magical solution to improve why piece of audio but merely a more detailed replica of the source in terms of audio data, and ideally the recorded tracks it's made from would've been produced at equal or higher standards. In most cases it's the same master that will later be converted to 16/44.1 CD quality.

And answers you may never get. The original company behind MQA went belly-up and their assets were sold off not too long after.

That's very interesting. I have an Apple music subscription and see it supports dolby Atmos on devices that are capable of it (my phone is) but I don't have Dolby Atmos headphones to try it out with. 🤔

I'm the same, interesting though is that Peter Gabriel released the Atmos Mix on Apple Music@@JessicaGorehamPenney

why did you say mqa when this is mqa lol. cd is all you need

As I understand, susceptibility to disc rot seems to be about physical manufacturing issues in assembling and sealing the layers together. There might be a difference between CDs and other optical discs, but I don't think there's any difference between different data formats of CD. When rot problems appear, it tends to be with batches of discs pressed in a certain plant in a certain time frame.