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

In 2018 I had the discs but couldn’t get a cheap MQA-CD decoder.
In 2024 I found a decoder for £80, but what happened to the discs?

* For the format itself...and for my old ears to get any benefit from it.

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[kingyachan]

"I wouldn't recommend any of this" is how I would describe all of my hobbies

[domramsey]

I just wanted to do a quick shout out for CDs in general. With everyone either streaming or going back to vinyl, the cost of CDs - especially second hand - has plummeted. Rather than subscribe to a streaming service, I've started buying a CD a week, ripping it into FLAC and putting it on my own Jellyfin server. It's so much better value, and I own the physical media so it doesn't go away if I stop paying.

[gpisic]

Normal Audio CD format is perfectly fine it's just that the music industry needs to stop mastering their shit with these insane loudness levels.

[JacGoudsmit]

I was wondering how MQA can be encoded on an audio CD and can survive being output through an ordinary 16 bit SPDIF output to a decoder. According to Wikipedia, the answer is that they use the lowest 3 bits of every sample to encode the extra information. They claim that even without the decoder, the MQA-CD sounds better than a regular CD but since they're basically raising the noise floor by 18 dB (20 * log10(2^3) ), I refuse to believe that an MQA encoded CD sounds better than a regular CD on a good CD player. But the use of terms such as "frequency de-blurring" should already be enough of a red flag to tell you that this is just another way to extract money from "audiophiles".

[videocouk]

21:30 And you know what set the sampling frequency of CD? It was video tape! When CD was developed, there was no practical way to store so much data on computers of the time. So it was recorded on U-matic video tape, using PCM adaptors of the models PCM1600, 1610 and 1630. The limits of the U-matic tape were pushed as far as they could go (pushed too hard to be honest, the format was always a bit marginal). The last iteration, the PCM1630 tried hard to overcome the error problems by reading the data twice with a special video head drum on the DMR4000 U-matic machine. I have working examples of all this kit and use it to digitally recover PCM16xx tapes for recording studios. These tapes were used to back up CD masters, to deliver them to CD manufacture, and to deliver CD quality audio from one recording studio to another. Cheaper Betamax based solutions came along later, they use a similar principle but not the same encoding because there wasn't quite as much bandwidth available on a domestic format. Models included PCM-F1, 501, 601, 701, Techmoan has demonstrated this as have I.

[tenorman]

For $80 you can turn a light on a box.

My 62 year old tinnitus hearing is ok with CDs.

[hrothgar]

A historical audio format from 2018. Who would have seen that coming?

[dbag]

It's wonderful to listen to someone with a purely academic interest in this and someone so concerned with not misleading the views. Thanks for your work.

[malmbergtube]

FLAC is free (open source), hence it's name - Free Lossless Audio Codec.

[BaileyMagikz]

if MQA Tribal Members actually watched Techmoans back catalogue of media types/formats
they know techmoan and subscribers are interested in unique formats and how they work thats all nothing more
we don't care about how it sounds (within reason)

[HandyAndyTechTips]

All of the so-called 'improvements' to the CD standard over the years - HDCD, SACD, XRCD, MQA-CD - are meaningless. 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality is pretty much perfect for consumer playback. All you need is some decent mastering on the original CD format (which unfortunately hasn't been the norm over the last 25 years) and it sounds brilliant.

[ZacabebOTG]

MQA-CD reminds me of HDCD. It's the same fundamental concept; sacrifice one or more of the least significant bits to store parametric reconstruction data and let those bits function as dither when the audio is played back without decoding. HDCD came and went too (Microsoft bought the company behind it; Pacific Microsonics, and eventually discontinued licensing of HDCD.)

[rjy]

I dropped Tidal due to their use of MQA. It is a compressed format sold as not being compressed and shrouded in mystery. It attempted to solve a problem that didn't exist to line Bob Stewart's pocket.

[jtsotherone]

I really like Matt's honesty about his experience with hi-res audio formats, and his argument is exactly the same when applied to vinyl - it's all in the mastering. A lot of people kid themselves into hearing differences between formats, but they rarely actually compare like with like.

[JDoawp]

Something to note about the comparison of MQA vs FLAC is that FLAC is a lossless codec. Meanwhile MQA is a lossy but the people behind it claim that it can be "packed" and "unpacked" restoring it to it's original form. That's not really quite true though. GoldenSound has done a great video about it.

[Wren]

A proprietary, DRM-laden, lossy, placebo audio format? Who wouldn't want that?

[Parlogram]

Great video as always. Many thanks for the shout out!

[Allan_aka_RocKITEman]

@Techmoan >>> *_"... Indisputably inconclusive..."_*

And THAT is one reason why we love your vids, Mat...😊

[jwhite]

Oh I've invented a new super format! It's MP3 written to a vinyl record. It works by having a special record played with a precision stylus (otherwise it will cut out), then you have to digitize it to a Windows PC running a custom Java software via a fiddly $1000 licensed decoder, and then you get the original MP3 file that you could have just downloaded off any service, but with maximum inconvenience. Ain't I a genius.

[michaelfrench]

I'll never forget going into a high-end audio visual shop right outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I had a nice stereo that I had put in my truck. And I bought all of my eclipse components from them. But they had this room completely soundproofed and inside of this room they had all the craziest most expensive everything that they sold or could get their hands on. And I used to go in and this one time they had a pair of floor speakers and now this was probably 1999 or 2000, but these speakers were like 12 grand! I'm pretty sure they had others that were more expensive. It was just the first time actually looked at the price tag of anything in that room. And I was talking to the salesman and he said yeah. It's kind of sad that the people that can hear the difference in these speakers and a $50 set of speakers won't be able to afford these speakers until they can no longer hear the difference between these speakers and a $50 set of speakers. 😂😂 I'm convinced that man has saved me tens of thousands of dollars. And he's right. All the years working on boat decks with diesel exhaust close to my head. My left ear definitely has hearing loss that's measurable and my right ear though it's my good ear is not great lol. I can finally afford some speakers that cost as much as a car but I would never waste the money because I'm not going to know any difference in them anyway. Other than the fact they look super neat when they're standing up