#Audirvana mqa blue light full#
#Audirvana mqa blue light pro#
#Audirvana mqa blue light license#
#Audirvana mqa blue light free#

It does look like MQA is adding its own dithering, as in the 24 bit un-dithered file I provided the noise floor had been raised, even in silent portions of the tracks. Lastly, the high frequency noise was not simply dither. Not only is it showing minimum phase, and non-linear ringing characteristics, the ringing also does not decay linearly. This was that same portion in the MQA 44.1khz file (time-scale is kept the same): This is the impulse test in the original file, one sample with digital silence surrounding it (note adobe audition adds the interpolation line hence the squiggle, but you can see the samples): This causes some portions of the track to appear louder, transients to 'overshoot' and be more likely to clip. I don't actually think this is due to necessarily an overall volume increase though, but simply that even in the 44.1khz file, MQA adds what looks like minimum phase resampling artifacts. MQA was consistently louder and would clip more often. This also seemed to be a common theme among commercial tracks I tested. Immediately it was clear that there was more high-frequency noise, and the MQA version actually generated clipping warnings (see top of image) whereas the original did not. However the Tidal version was NOT the same

The first thing I wanted to test was whether the 44.1khz master track was lossless, both on other platforms such as Deezer, and on Tidal.įor this I used the tool 'DeltaWave' on the Original 44.1khz master and Deezer version. This is about MQA specifically, not the products that support it. There are a huge number of fantastic products which happen to have MQA support. This post is intended to inform you about the issues and false claims surrounding MQA. This is NOT an attack on any manufacturer that has incorporated MQA into their products. But MQA removed all of my content from Tidal before this went live and so I was not able to test this. I did also create another 88.2khz track with the amount of ultrasonic content drastically reduced, and no white noise. Reduced duration of digital silence at end of file Added a 35khz+40khz sine, to test if this is removed or retained during MQA Unfolding Test components such as impulse, whitenoise, RMAA test sequence were adjusted for 88.2khz, so white noise goes up to 44.1khz and impulse is one 88.2khz sample etc I did publish both dithered and non-dithered versions, and both exhibited the same issues that i'm about to show.įor the 88.2khz test I included a few changes.

As well as the musical content itself of course.

#Audirvana mqa blue light full#

So, I put together a basic acoustic track, and hid the impulse response, white noise, square wave, 32 tone test and full RightMark Audio Analyzer test sequence inside it with a few seconds of digital silence either side. To my knowledge the Chord M-Scaler has something similar for impulse response detection. I therefore assume that MQA has detection in place to ensure no one gets any test files encoded. When I attempted to simply submit these alone as 'Alternative Electronic' tracks, I was told by the publisher that 'The MQA Encoder was unable to encode the file'. I wanted to get test files such as an impulse response, white noise and -60dB dynamic range test sine encoded in MQA. Only after I made these posts did I receive an email response which i'll discuss at the end of this post. I posted here, APS and Head-Fi to encourage people to search for and confirm the existence of the tracks, so that MQA could not later claim they never existed. I did contact MQA prior to posting the video (and this post), but their reaction was to immediately have my tracks removed from Tidal, and to have the publisher remove all my content. If you have 40 minutes spare, I would recommend watching the video as I explain a little more about the context surrounding some of these tests, MQA's response, and other things.īut if you just want the hard data, read on.

#Audirvana mqa blue light pro#

I've included analog recordings of a 'Full Decode', outputting from an ifi iDSD Diablo into an RME ADI-2 Pro FS R ADC at 24 bit 768khz.

#Audirvana mqa blue light free#

And the tracks, including original masters, MQA encoded 44.1khz versions, and tidal 'hifi' versions are available here: įeel free to have a look at them and poke around yourself. My tracks were published using MQA's recommended method for indie artists. I was frustrated with this, and despite the fact that there is excellent testing that has been done by Archimago, MansR, John Atkinson and others, I wanted to get something done quite conclusively, to get some files encoded in MQA and published on Tidal, so that I could compare them to the original masters.

#Audirvana mqa blue light license#

It requires a license fee for manufacturers to implement it, and due to the lack of transparency from MQA, there has been relatively little conclusive information about exactly HOW it works. MQA is a proprietary music compression solution that uses the FLAC container.