 I received many questions about a video Golden Sound published on YouTube in which the presenter claims to have proven that MQA should be avoided at all times. You furthermore called out to his viewers to bend Tidal. Well, here is my view on the matter. It starts out with his test tracks on Tidal being taken offline after sending his findings to MQA for comment. I understand his frustration and his frustration remains noticeable throughout the video. As where the author states he wants to keep the discussion civil and reasonable, at the end of the video he calls on everyone to boycott Tidal. If he wanted to keep things civil and reasonable, he should have trusted his arguments are strong enough to convince the viewer not to use MQA and thus Tidal. But are they? So before I go further, let me make my position clear. I have no financial interest whatsoever in MQA or any other affiliated companies. Nor did I ever receive money or goods except for tracks for listening tests from them. I wasn't invited to their initial press conference either. But I did have a one-hour, one-on-two discussion with MQA's Jonathan Joeid and Spencer Chrislou on May 6, 2016 at the High End Munich show. My videos on MQA are predominantly based on reading patents, AES publications and the like. I of course have studied MQA's commercial outings as well. Based on all this I have the following view on MQA. March 2018 I published a video called Is MQA lossless? You could watch this video first, I'll put a link in the top right corner. In short I took a holistic approach to recording music. The output of the mixing console should be stored in a manner that adds the lowest distortion and should be played back again with equipment that adds the lowest distortion. We all know the tricks needed to do this in analog and there will be no one stating that analog recording is lossless. Today analog audio can sound fantastic due to all kinds of tweaks that were considered to be snake oil by those that listened with their measurement equipment. When I refued the lingo kit for the Linn Sondack LP12, it was called snake oil while it gave a clear improvement in sound quality. And the only thing done was to drive a different motor with a cleaner signal. By the way, Linn's founder Ivor Tiefenbrunn suffered a fair share of name calling in those days too. Many didn't believe for instance his turntable sounded better because the platter bearing was better engineered. The advantage of feedback free amplifiers is another topic as is a good choice of capacitors, just to name a few. I was called names for hearing what is now known as jitter, for it was not measurable at that time. Back to the subject at hand. The history of audio gear is full of inventions and tweaks that we now understand or at least accept as a reality based on causality. The best analog gear is not only the best gear because it is designed and built by knowledgeable engineers but often also because the designer had an empirical approach. Sometimes even based on knowledge in other scientific disciplines, like Rob Watts that based the WTA filter found in Cordax and the upsampler on studying our auditory system. In the old days analog registration of audio, video, photos and the like was the only way to go. In 1928 Harry Nyquist described how a signal can be registered by measuring that signal at fixed intervals. The measuring is called sampling and the intervals are defined by the sampling frequency, how many samples are taken per second. Nyquist has mathematically proven that as long as the sampling frequency is twice as high as the highest frequency in the signal, that signal is sampled without any loss. He wasn't able to build a proof of concept since there was no equipment able to store the, for that time, fast amount of data. So it was a theorem. Wikipedia defines a theorem as follows. In mathematics and logic, a theorem is a non-self-evident statement that has been proven to be true either on the basis of general accepted statements such as axioms or on the basis of previously established statements such as other theorems. End of quote. And up till now, no one has proven Nyquist to be wrong. The catch lies in the rule that no information is allowed above half the sampling rate, so serious filtering is needed to avoid that. And all filtering causes distortion. The harsh mid-range associated with digital audio is the most clear example and can be caused by the anti-aliasing filter during recording and the reconstruction filter during playback. Jitter can be another cause. Watch my video The Truth About Nyquist and why 192 kHz does make sense for more on this topic. So stating that Flak is lossless only goes for the encoded signal. The process in the analog to digital conversion is not lossless and the same goes for the digital to analog conversion. MQA focuses on those two processes of the audio chain and tries to reduce the audible losses of those. Wobstew it is put away by some as a con man and snake oil vendor. You don't have to like MQA, but Stuart deserves very high respect. He has published numerous papers at the Audio Engineering Society, all reporting on findings he did in his quest for a better sound quality. Papers on using Ditter, noise shaping techniques for efficient managing bit buckets, several titles on psychoacoustics, lossless compression and more. He also developed MLP, short for meridian lossless packing that Dolby licensed for Blu-ray. It is said that Flak is based on the developments done for MLP. More interesting are the papers on dittering, noise shaping and remarks in papers about allowing some aliasing. As long as the level of alias signals is low enough to be masked by the intended signal, that should be no problem while making better sounding reconstruction filters easier. The raised noise level might be done intentionally, but this is guessing from my part since I have heard someone say that the noise might work as a kind of dittering for our auditory system. And no, I can't comment further on this. I just mention it for there still are things about our auditory system that needs to be explored. Peter C. Craven is the co-writer of some papers on MQA. He has worked in the field of radio telescopes at Scandal Universe. These generate fast amounts of data that has to be stored, so efficient storing is of the essence. I suspect that is where his knowledge of splines comes from. And splines allegedly are used in MQA for storing the information for rendering higher sampling rates. It's also the field where the data has to be converted to images to interpret what is captured. I understood that here aliasing is accepted to a certain degree. Let me start by saying that for me my ears are leading. I am a trained listener and I am not the only one. A number of them consider MQA to be sounding better and a smaller number don't. The MQA-equipped audio gear I have reviewed sounded very convincing in transients, stereo image and texture in bass notes. So I considered it to be a very good approach. Until I recently reviewed some rather costly DAX that were not equipped with MQA, like the Denofrips Terminator Plus and the Mola Mola Tambaki. Where I appreciate the MQA rendering in for instance the MiTech Brooklyn DAX, I didn't miss the rendering in those top-end DAX. It's too early to conclude anything but I am under the impression that MQA apparently is a cost-effective way to fight filter problems in DAX chips based converters. On how MQA achieves this, we can only guess. Stuart apparently has learned from earlier endeavors and has protected his system using American lawyers and other specialists. That is his good right. He has studied and worked for years on the development and it's only fair he should earn money from it, provided there is a market amount. I know I didn't go into individual claims made by Golden Sound. Since we don't know what philosophies and techniques are used, we will never be able to measure MQA in a useful way. The only way to test it is to do listening tests. Golden Sound might claim they did this and preferred the non-MQA version. But is this because their recordings were recorded mixed and mastered on their own gear and therefore will sound the best there? I don't know. But we can choose ourselves. If you like MQA, subscribe to Tidal and if you don't, subscribe to Kobusch. And since this again is a subject that brings out the worst in some, all comments will be moderated prior to going online. Not what I want to do all the time but I don't like to be insulted publicly on my own channel. Which brings us to the end of this video. There will be a new video next Friday at 5 pm central european time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. Help me reach even more people by giving this video a thumbs up or place a link to it on the social media. It is much appreciated. Many thanks to those viewers that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and lets me improve the channel further. If that makes you feel like supporting my work too, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.