Traditional audiophiles share much with their computer-based brethren, not least a love of music and of high sound quality. But they also differ from each other in important ways. Computer people are more comfortable than the rest of us with information technology—indeed, they enjoy manipulating data, including the data employed to make music. Some spend many hours managing often vast, if sometimes ill-gotten music libraries, using open-source, open-standard programs—even programs they wrote themselves. They likely have set up sophisticated digital-signal processing systems to perfect the frequency response of their high-end headphone rigs, using command-line tools that look like gibberish to the rest of us. They may have written their own custom upsampling code using SoX to mimic MQA's sound, and have put together their own digital front end out of low-cost Raspberry Pi processors.
Computer audiophiles like nothing better than to play around with computer audio files. (Sorry.) Take away their ability to manipulate those files and you destroy much of their hobby's appeal.
Does MQA give them reason to worry? I think it does. MQA is not in principle incompatible with DSP-based room correction—Bob Stuart told me that in an interview—but current implementations of it that I'm familiar with are incompatible with other DSP systems. In many other respects, MQA files are locked up pretty tight. The fact that you can't mess with the code is a selling point aimed at both music suppliers and consumers—it's not a bug but a feature. That little blue or green authentication light on your MQA-ready DAC implies that you're getting what the artist intended—although who actually signed off is, for older recordings, open to question. And Spencer Chrislu's remarks surely imply that if MQA succeeds, the "crown jewels"—open, high-rate PCM files—will be withdrawn from the market. Buy those 24/192 downloads while you can.
Another group that engages with musical data in a serious and active way is those who make the music: musicians and sound engineers. Younger ones—those reared on digital—may find certain aspects of MQA quaint. Engineers who've gotten used to digital may find MQA's notion that their work needs fixing offensive (footnote 3). A handful of mastering engineers have energetically expressed such opinions on online professional audio forums, even as other prominent mastering engineers have expressed support for MQA. But what does "analog-to-analog" even mean for music created in the digital realm?
A list of groups that have reasons to dislike MQA must also include digital designers and engineers. Designers of digital audio equipment—even those who like MQA and appreciate its elegance (not all do)—may still resent the imposition of a single "best" solution to the problem of digital recording and playback. In an MQA world, the sound of your DAC will be determined mainly by MQA's technology, and not by your own choices of reconstruction filter and design skill. (Of course, that's on the digital side; there may still be some meaningful work for analog-stage engineers.) As MQA gains momentum, digital audio companies could face the difficult choice of jumping on the bandwagon or losing market share. In fact, this has already begun.
However wonderful MQA may be, it is, in some ways, monolithic, and hence old-school. I miss the pre-Internet world. If I could go back, I would. But I can't. We can't. So what's the way forward? What does it look like—and sound like? Does it involve MQA?
The world has been forever altered by the Internet and information technology. To me, the resulting world—the one we now live in—seems, compared to the old, rather dissipated, as in "broken up and scattered." Broken up isn't all bad: It can be fun to watch monopolies busted and political machines get their comeuppance. But recent experience has shown that there's always a cost, and usually that cost is borne mainly by regular folks. When things are broken up and scattered, some new entity eventually collects the debris, and replaces old monopolies with new. Compared to Amazon Prime, the old Ma Bell looks like a pussycat. Please just give me back my record stores.
The Internet is a nifty, fun toy, and a boon for the kind of research I do. I can learn stuff in 15 seconds that, 25 years ago, would have taken me half a day to look up. But I've seen the damage done by freeing up information—not just in music, but also in journalism and politics. I've watched valued journalistic endeavors close for the lack of a viable online business model. I've watched clickbait crap trump serious journalism, Russian trolls poison political dialogs, and ignorant Twitter mobs destroy careers. Yes—if I could go back, I would.
The music industry is not yet at an end point. There's no serious question about it: The music ecosystem—the industry and delivery system—will continue to change. The serious questions are: What form will that ecosystem eventually take? Will it be good or bad for music, music listeners, and musicians? Will it be good for audiophiles? These questions extend to MQA, which seems poised to play a part: Is MQA good for music, music listeners, and musicians—and audiophiles?
"We are trying to reverse the damage [wrought by the Internet] so that a whole new generation can enjoy music through better sound," Bob Stuart wrote in an e-mail to me several weeks ago. He made it clear that he was speaking of all music listeners, not audiophiles in particular. I trust his idealism. I'm sure it's genuine. He is not, as the most irresponsible online critics have maintained, a charlatan. But that doesn't make him right.
Merits and Demerits
One person in a good position to judge MQA's merits and demerits is Karlheinz Brandenburg, inventor of MP3, whom I wrote about at the beginning of this article. Brandenburg has gone on to an illustrious career. He is, like Bob Stuart, a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), and has won most of that society's awards. He is currently a full professor at the Institute for Media Technology at the Technical University of Ilmenau, in Ilmenau, Germany, and director of the university's Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology. He's also a member of the AES Working Group on Internet Audio Delivery Systems. Who better to ask about MQA's technology and prospects? I sent him an e-mail. He quickly replied. "[T]hank you very much for asking me and pointing me to the documents," he wrote. "I have known both Bob Stuart and [Peter] Craven for a long time. I discussed some of this with Bob Stuart a few years ago. I have to say: After reading through part of the Q&A, I do not yet know whether I agree or not, I have to do more reading. I certainly agree with the importance of timing accuracy. I have my doubts (but need to read more what they are actually doing) about the interpretation of the sampling theorem and the conclusions of that. What is your time plan, when should I be ready to give you some more conclusive opinion?"
I wrote back, informing Brandenburg of my timeline, but he wasn't able to get back to me until after the deadline for this issue. His thoughts will appear in a future issue.
If we can't anticipate MQA's impact on the industry—and we can't—then how should we judge it? By focusing on what we can know. We know, for example, that MQA's compression is lossy, but in a clever and innocuous way. Next, we need a clear demonstration that MQA does what it claims on two levels: technical and musical. We deserve that. On the technical side, we need to see beyond doubt that MQA removes digital artifacts and measurably improves time-domain performance, as claimed. We need to be convinced that any trade-offs are valid—that the cure isn't worse than the disease. I plan to address these questions as best I can in future articles.
On the music side, we need to do what audiophiles always do: listen, and judge MQA's musical merits. This is something that each of us can decide for ourselves—but it takes only an hour spent on Internet forums to realize that what we hear is dictated by our passions. Those militantly opposed to MQA think it sounds bad. Anyway, one person's opinion isn't sufficient to judge a technology that could shape the future of the music industry, and the future musical experiences of all of us. MQA could well become our record store, or an element of it. This is a case—one of rather few, in my opinion—that calls for rigorous, controlled, statistically valid listening tests: tests involving both casual and, especially, trained listeners. We need to know, decisively, what MQA sounds like. Such tests are planned to be conducted at McGill University, in Montreal; by the time this article is published, results may have begun to trickle in.
Stay tuned.
Footnote 3: MQA has an answer for this: A digital audio workstation plug-in that allows recording, mixing, and mastering engineers to hear what a recording will sound like in MQA—but that only works with new recordings, not existing ones. In the long term—I can hear the howls of derision even now—MQA A/D converters could take the place of the machines in today's recording studios.—Jim Austin
One person in a good position to judge MQA's merits and demerits is Karlheinz Brandenburg, inventor of MP3, whom I wrote about at the beginning of this article. Brandenburg has gone on to an illustrious career. He is, like Bob Stuart, a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), and has won most of that society's awards. He is currently a full professor at the Institute for Media Technology at the Technical University of Ilmenau, in Ilmenau, Germany, and director of the university's Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology. He's also a member of the AES Working Group on Internet Audio Delivery Systems. Who better to ask about MQA's technology and prospects? I sent him an e-mail. He quickly replied. "[T]hank you very much for asking me and pointing me to the documents," he wrote. "I have known both Bob Stuart and [Peter] Craven for a long time. I discussed some of this with Bob Stuart a few years ago. I have to say: After reading through part of the Q&A, I do not yet know whether I agree or not, I have to do more reading. I certainly agree with the importance of timing accuracy. I have my doubts (but need to read more what they are actually doing) about the interpretation of the sampling theorem and the conclusions of that. What is your time plan, when should I be ready to give you some more conclusive opinion?"
Footnote 3: MQA has an answer for this: A digital audio workstation plug-in that allows recording, mixing, and mastering engineers to hear what a recording will sound like in MQA—but that only works with new recordings, not existing ones. In the long term—I can hear the howls of derision even now—MQA A/D converters could take the place of the machines in today's recording studios.—Jim Austin
