WHEN: October 2, 2015 @ 4:45 pm – 5:45 pm WHERE: Marriott Aspen Amphitheater, Lobby Level Moderator: Chris Connaker, Computer Audiophile Panelists: Pål Bråtelund, TIDAL; Bob Stuart, MQA
Computer Audiophile’s Chris Connaker, talks to Bob Stuart, innovator behind MQA (Master Quality Authenticated), and Pal Bratelund, Strategic Partnership Manager at TIDAL, on how to achieve the highest quality audio in today’s streaming services. The discussions will touch on the history of streaming audio and examine how services have evolved to meet the increasing demands of today’s music fans. How can music streaming services thrive in the future?
I have my ticket and plan to be at this seminar. It will be a rare opportunity for me to meet Bob Stuart again. I will be happy to report what is presented.
I was at the presentation yesterday. It will take me several posts to get through everything. I will start with the comments from Pal at Tidal.
Pal was a good representative from Tidal and well spoken. He spoke roughly a third of the hour seminar. Tidal is working on adding vendors to their platform, they had just added Naim. Pal indicated they had 600,000 subscriptions to Tidal. 45% of those subscriptions are for the lossless service, which Tidal is pleased with. Tidal is now up to 35 million tracks.
It was obvious that Pal was a huge fan of MQA. Pal and Bob shared a number of stories together. You could tell they had collaborated on a number of occasions. In an answer to a question at the end, Pal indicated Tidal plans to stream music higher than 16/44 only by using MQA.
There was no definitive date given on when Tidal will start streaming high res MQA. The holdup is the studios. More on that when I post about Bob's MQA presentation. At the end of seminar, I asked Pal for more details. He indicated there will likely be a new pricing tier for high res MQA streaming. The studios are all over the place on when they will release MQA titles and what they will price MQA at, he indicated. This makes it extra hard for Tidal to price out an MQA tier. Pal guessed that it will be CES in January before they are ready to announce MQA high res streaming.
Thanks for the update, I look forward to the others, MQA tidal streaming at a higher price and "studios all over the place on timing and pricing" is not very encouraging.
thanks, mw, for the update. Sounds like a great presentation, glad their was HH representation there!
I will say, there is very little incentive for investment in new technology without opportunity to earn more money. Tidal was already forced to offer a cheaper tier for the cheapskates.
I would be happy to pay more monthly for a MQA delivered high resolution music streaming service. I am an outlier, I pay much more than average per month on music and movies. Netflix, TIDAL and Hulu Plus (access to over 900 Criterion films) and I'm in heaven.
Our music hobby (just the hardware ...) is expensive and it is obsoleted terrifyingly quickly.
The studios are all owned by different people with differing motivations and backgrounds. Have a read of "How Music Got Free: The End of an Industry, the Turn of the Century, and the Patient Zero of Piracy" to read a rather sympathetic account of Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Music Group.
In my previous post I covered Tidal at the RMAF streaming seminar. This post is the MQA portion with Bob.
Bob took nearly two thirds of the allocated time of an hour for his talk. Rather than discuss technical details on how MQA works, he focused mainly on why it is needed.
At some point, RMAF will post this presentation online. I cannot do it justice. Since most everyone on the forum knows most of the basics of MQA, I will post what technical details I can remember that I had not heard before.
Since the audience for this seminar was quite aware of music that is encoded higher than 16/44, Bob talked about what increasing sampling rate brings. A 96k sampling rate makes most of the difference, but each successive doubling of the sampling rate up to 768k makes some difference. That makes sense given the SE Meridian speakers sample up to that rate.
Bob reiterated that 20 bits is really all that you need for the highest res there is.
The highest resolution recordings Bob is aware of, which there are just a few of, are effectively 19 bits. The noise of the recording venue and recording microphone are the limiting items. There are not that many more effective 18 bit recordings and you are doing well to get 17 bit or 16 bit.
Bob brought up the time domain studies that were a big breakthrough in the development of MQA. Those of us on the forum that have read about MQA technical details know the importance of 8ms time domain performance. Bob continually referred to this portion of MQA encoding as de-blurring. Pal at Tidal did that as well. Although both Bob and Pal emphasized its importance, de-blurring was not otherwise explained.
Bob indicated MQA encoding was unique in one more important way. Every other form of digital encoding adds noise to the recording. MQA adds none. Bob was quite emphatic on this. Absolutely none. All other digital encoding adds it to various degrees to their sonic detriment.
MQA offers the unique ability to fix a to d conversion and microphone errors in the original recording, as long as you know the devices originally used and the specs of the devices are known. When you get a recording that does this, it is referred to as white glove service and will be MQA authenticated. Studios can, of course, skip this step and still refer to that music as MQA. Bob says not all music is worth the cost of white glove so studios will decide.
On the subject of when studios will release MQA, Bob made a funny joke about how much any one man can do talking to as many studios as Bob has talked to. MQA will happen. Studios will release as they see fit.
Bob does see MQA content for download coming. No details yet.
While waiting for MQA content, Bob indicated that all the work to make the 818 MQA compliant improves the performance of your existing digital files. Did I hear the word stunning?
MW- thank you for a well thought/written feedback- appreciate this
Originally Posted by Mwiebelhaus
...While waiting for MQA content, Bob indicated that all the work to make the 818 MQA compliant improves the performance of your existing digital files. Did I hear the word stunning?
The processing (including up-sampling) carried out by the 818v3 playing CD-quality files is completely different to that employed in the 818v2 in the same situation, as a result of what they learned from the whole MQA project.
What exactly they are now doing when playing back those files is a secret of course...
Is all internal processing now at a higher rate, ie a processor would currently upsample 44k input to 88k and all internal processing would take place at that. I assume that in light of the time based limitations that internally, 88/96 is no longer fast enough?
Don't know if same internal upsampling applied to 818.
Meridian owner since 1992 Prime & PSU, Focal Elear headphones, Roon (ROCK 8Gi5 NUC), Explorer 1 & 2, F80. 200/203, various Sonos (via Roon).
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