Berkeley Audio Design and MQA?


Why did they espouse MQA, knowing, as we all do now, the inherent flaws and falsehoods?

ptss

@erik_squires 

We already have technology that can do this and you don't need to pay a third part to use it - cryptographic hashes.

@yage - That's kind of a straw man. Yes, we could do it, but no one is doing it so it's not really the point.

The point is,  I wish some one WOULD do it cheaply.

@erik_squires 

What makes you think that Qobuz is meddling around with lossy compression? Do you have any evidence of this? Qobuz is very clear that they are using FLAC to compress the data stream. Why would they do anything more than use FLAC? Their entire raison d'etre is to stream non-lossy CD quality files. I can't imagine that they would risk their reputation by trying to squeeze out a few less gigabytes of bandwidth using some sort of lossy compression. If they were doing that they absolutely would have been busted by now.

I have compared at least half a dozen Qobuz streams to the corresponding CD, where I was sure they were the same version, They all sound identical. If Qobuz is messing around with the file, I sure can't hear it.

I've also read several forum and reddit threads about Qobuz streaming quality and the most credible people, such as recording engineers who have looked carefully at the Qobuz files, say that they appear to be identical to their CD counterparts. Qobuz streams at about 900 KBps which is normal for a FLAC file.

Qubuz sneaking in a lossy compression scheme would be like Mobile Fidelity having a digital step in their "One Step" vinyl record process. I don't know how much damage that did to MoFi but I'll bet it was a lesson to everyone else in the industry. Your dirty little secrets will always get out.

What makes you think that Qobuz is meddling around with lossy compression? Do you have any evidence of this?

 

My statement was purely a hypothetical to illustrate why authenticated music files is a valuable feature. @8th-note

I picked Qobuz purely as an example, but it holds.  If Qobuz or Tidal or anyone else does any sort of manipulation of the original source files I would have no way of knowing. 

@8th-note 

 

+1 I have compared red book CDs with Qobuz FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and they sound identical.