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Give a very warm welcome to Christopher
Engelman and Anton.
Yes, thank you.
This is a bit intimidating.
Large space.
Hello, everybody.
The topic of this talk is a new audio
format called MQ, a
master quality, authenticated
and URLs. As the title of our talk
suggests, it's more than just
an audio format.
And in order to explain how we arrived at
the title, a clever stealth DRM Trojan,
we have a lot of ground to cover and our
talk is structured as you see here.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about
audio files and audio files.
Then Antoniou is going to examine
some of the claims
that are being made about master quality
authenticated.
Then we will move on to 24
bits, got some room to spare to have a
look where they actually hide
the idea.
And finally, we're going to make some
remarks where we think Amcu
is actually quite clever.
So wait.
So it's good to be back here.
Some of you may know me already as I've
spoken at the conferences
a couple of times before and mostly
on policy related
issues, on ID,
digital identification and authentication
related issues.
This time I have to make
a confession. I am an audio file
and I believe that this cable
sounds different than this cable.
So I should be a millionaire.
As some of you may know, the James Randi
Educational Foundation had
offered a million dollars to anybody
who was able to identify the difference
between two audio interconnects like
these ones in a controlled
testing.
Here is a 10 year old
report on this challenge.
Of course, nobody managed
to find these differences and win the
million dollar.
And I'm pretty sure I would fail at the
test, too, but in my own experience,
if I put one of these cables in the
system for a week or two and then the
other cable
for another week, there will be some
preference that emerges.
And I cannot explain that.
But I guess if you asked me to
be a mattress, the subtle
differences in text and softness
won't be noticed by me by just laying
down on them.
But if I get to sleep on each of those
mattresses for a week or so, I might
develop some sort of preference.
I make this point here and I'm sure
Anton, who is more on the objective
side of things when it comes to
audiophile, will be skeptical about
it.
But what I want to illustrate is
that we are talking about a market
that operates and exploits the limits
of percept ability and
where environmental and habitual factors
play a role in what
you sense and what you notice.
And I believe that certain markets have
developed around those perceptible
limits and exploits something like
longtail phenomena in the distribution
of percept ability among humans.
In other words, in a saturated consumer
electronics electronics market,
there are a certain class of devices
which offer just noticeable
differences, and these can be
commercially attractive and command
premium prices.
To illustrate this point further.
Let me ask you, who are you?
Here is a gamer.
Quite a few.
OK, so how many of you have a 240
Hertz monitor?
Oh, two, OK,
how many of you have
high rate mouse,
quite a few more.
Um,
do you believe this makes a sorry this
makes a difference in your gaming
experience,
OK? These are all Objectivists here,
skeptical people.
OK,
values like 240 Hertz refresh rate
are astonishingly high.
And if you tell somebody 20 years ago
that people are able to discern 60 years
refresh rates from 100 hertz
refresh rate or 250 hertz,
they'd have told you that the latency of
the human visual system is far
exceeded at this rate.
And everything everything about 60 hertz
is moot.
Yet Apple now sells 120 Hertz iPad
and the difference is perceptible for
many. It turns out that peripheral
factors like head movement, haptic
interaction with the screen and so
forth modify
certain thresholds of visibility
in the VR context is created big
headaches. And anybody who follows John
Comics' Twitter Twitter feed will know
that he continuously is surprised
that some of his subjects are very
sensitive towards visual artifacts
that normal users don't notice.
So it's very easy to make fun
about all your files into two thousand
dollar Ethernet cables, does this one of
these and noticed a small error there
that's probably there because packet's
otherwise would get confused which way to
go.
So these kinds of gadgets and there are
many, many examples of those,
of course, give ample ground
to make fun of audio files.
But that's not what we want, what we want
to do here today.
Instead, we want to look at master
quality authenticated this new
format as a development in the audio
file world that deals with these
aforementioned elements of perceptible
otti in a clever way, exploits
them to create and legitimize
a new distribution channel for audio
content.
And we furthermore believe that these
developments have possible repercussions
outside of the audio of our world and
might affect music consumers and
producers. And that is you
and labels and the way
music is distributed in profound ways.
So again,
NPR stands for Master Quality
Authenticated and Promises Studio Sound
at home. This is a website or this
is some page on the website.
Join the Revolution and Recorded Music.
And there's a lot of a
lot to unpack into the statement
master and quality and authenticate
it.
To give you a little bit an idea of why
I'm talking about this.
As I already said, I'm an
audio file, but I also
sometimes spend time on the other side
of music, namely in music production.
I used to mention metal band or
combination metal band called President
Evil.
We call to style stoner trash.
This is a great record.
You just shouldn't look at the waveforms
because it clips all the way through and
has a d.r of three for those people who
know what that means.
We toured with ministry and so forth,
and on the other side of things, I am
also interested in
acoustic music. This is me at the studio
in Berlin where among others, David
Bowie, Depeche Mode and U2 have recorded
erbium albums.
And we recorded this album by a bit
like Spika, which is piano and clarinet,
music and cello music and a wonderful
record.
So coming back to M.K., you will
understand that as an audio file and as
somebody who
likes to be in studios, I'm somewhat
familiar with music production,
distribution and their marketing claims
of studio sound and take
me into the studio and so forth.
Of course, raise an eyebrow with me.
And furthermore, somebody tells me or
promises that they want to authenticate
a digital file and not only raise
my eyebrows, my professional
curiosity is peaked.
I have given talks here about the
history of authentication media
and I publish on these issues,
on the questions of media, of
authentication.
So all things authenticating
of interest to me and making a promise
is something like that.
So what they say is it sound
like what the engineers heard and
they are going to authenticate that on
your playback device.
Everybody with basic knowledge of
intellectual property enforcement and
digital rights management by now should
be a little bit skeptical about
their claims.
As we're going to show,
this is rightly so.
But the devil's in the details.
And Makua offers an interesting
and clever design of how to bring
digital rights management back into music
and the music distribution context.
As some of you may know, the
music music industry has tried to
do that several times and
always failed to
implement and sell digital rights
management to consumers
and most distribution
channels these days.
And most files come without DRM.
So this again is
the website of Abakua and you can
see how they explain
authentication and they have this
interesting term provenance.
And there's the important thing is here,
the blue and green light that will light,
that will go on on your
device.
Um, if a file
is played on this device and
authenticated and they promise
sound like in the studio.
Right.
So in order to understand
what they mean by quality
in the acronym, it's important
to go back a little bit in history and
give you a background about digital
audio.
So what is quality?
In the 1980s, digital
audio was introduced.
That means for the introduced to the
consumer.
Here you see the CD as
advertised by Sony.
I think this ad is from 1984.
For the underlying
format of the city is Redbook audio,
where you have a signal that sampled at
16 bit, what,
44 K
44 a thousand times a second
and with 16 bit, we have
a dynamic range of 65000 values
to represent the difference between the
most silent and loudest signal
in the format.
And with 44 K, we can
represent frequencies up to
22 kilohertz.
This is about 10 percent higher
than what humans was.
Very good and that usually means very
young ears can hear.
Most music today is
recorded and distributed in this
format.
The Audible Will and 44 one k,
the video broadcasting
world standardized and forty eight K and
those of you who have surround systems,
DVD and Blu ray based will be familiar
with the forty eight K sampling rate.
So in the 1990s
we need to see another step.
We see music production becoming fully
digital audio workstations.
The first 20 24 converters
arrive in the studios.
We see higher sampling rates.
So this is one of these converters from
the from the 90's and
the 24 indicates that
it can do 24 bits.
And there was also an attempt
to sell these higher
resolutions to the consumer in the late
90s with a little bit different format
as the SSD introduced
by Sony in 99.
It's a different encoding scheme called
TSD offers
120
120 decibels
of dynamic range and in its
initial form went
up to a 30 kilohertz way above human
hearing range.
But as many of you know,
this failed in the market.
And it is, of course, an interesting
backstory to this, too, because the
SSD was introduced in the very moment
the patents for the CD
expired, and Sony tried to
put a new format into the market and have
a new patent licensing regime
to generate revenue.
So why did the CCD and the supposedly
higher quality fail?
Not only because people couldn't really
hear it.
On the turn of the 2000s, we had empathy
and empathy pretty much
on the market.
And Steve Jobs
put it best when he said convenience
beats quality.
And as you know, he turned around Apple
basically on with the iPod,
which could hold in its initial form, I
don't know, five thousand songs or
something.
And Steve Jobs knew what he
was talking about.
He was actually an audio file with a
system worth north of fifty K in his
home and supposedly only listen to vinyl.
This together was Napster basically
killed the music market and
especially the market for high resolution
audio, as these formats are called it
exceed the Redbox standard
audio files. To come back to our story
line here, of course,
Fort Holy Wars against MP three
and any form of lossy compression.
They deemed the format is inferior and
argued that it destroys a generations
hearing and even Insight's brain damage.
And I was actually surprised that
Douglas Rushkoff made this argument to
me. Three is bad for you.
And he asked down there, will the next
generation of music, music listeners
be able to hear reality the same way
we did? So the idea is that
we somehow lose a
contact to reality if we
are exposed to lousy formats.
So but however, audio files
to abandoned
physical media and
things like these standalone digital
audio converters found
a way in in their systems of
streaming amplifiers
that either via USB, either it
allow you to stream music from
local networks or from the Internet
into your system.
And these converters
you can see here, it offers DSD, which
is as the format, and 16, 24
bits and higher sampling rates allowed
access to high resolution, higher
betrayed files.
So
this is important because we come back to
this in the context of Makua
and of course, you can ask about
the benefit of these kinds of
devices and audibility of
resolutions higher than 16 BITTON
44 one key.
Um, again, I
think there might be individuals that
actually have differences.
Let's jump to the current decade
to 2010.
I think we are actually in a golden age
for audio files because music
comes basically into the house more or
less at very low prices
via streaming.
And furthermore,
they can actually buy lossless files
in resolutions up to 24 bitta 192
kilohertz in online stores like this one
is the French company, Cobos.
And you can see that
some of the contemporary current
records are actually offered in these
formats. So you can buy the new
Bjork record in high
risk audio. I actually haven't looked at
what resolution, I guess 2106
or something like that.
Incubus will even stream at that
resolution
over the Internet.
There's this little website where
you can compare the the different
offerings. You just enter some band or
some music and it will list you
the availability of these files
at different resolutions.
So, again, in essence
to 2010, some kind of a golden decade
for audio files. They got docs and
streamers in their homes and could play
the files at the same resolution
as their recorded, mixed and mastered
in the studios,
in their homes.
And it is this context, basically, that
the master quality authenticated format
was launched and promoted
into 2014.
There was a big launch event at the chart
at this high rise in London.
Looks a little bit like this tower in
Middle Earth for Zahran resides
and they claimed
a revolutionary advance
in audio and to deliver studio sound at
home.
But not only that, and that's where the
story gets interesting.
The inventors credited
as Peter Craven and Bob Stewart.
You already saw Stewart on a picture.
I'm going, where is it when it
comes back later, they backed
their claims with a paper that was
published in the Proceedings of the Audio
Engineering Society.
And they say that M.K.
builds on advances in neuroscience
and also sometimes say advances
in assembling theory beyond Shannon
Nykvist, which are strong claims
to make. So if you go to the website,
you will find this explanation
in the Q How does it work?
And it says, Makua is based entirely on
science.
Specifically, it's based on new findings
in neuroscience that have told us that
the resolution of timing information is
critical to our hearing and our brain
into action.
So if you look in this paper
published in the proceedings
and look specifically at the neuroscience
work site, it there is I think it's seven
or something like that.
There's only one paper that actually
deals with humans.
The other papers test
hearing with Mongolian Gabriele's
and barnacles.
Right.
And it's probably
another mistake to believe
that these animals have a very different
auditory system than we have and
that the hearing exceeds
our hearing when it comes to high
frequencies.
So building on these neuroscientific
advances, they claim to correct
for the time domain errors in digital
audio chain, namely errors introduced
in analog digital converters.
So when you record an analog signal
in the studio and convert it to digital
and
they say that this would create temporal
blurr, this is what they here say.
There's a problem with digital,
with digital. It's called blurring.
It's also from the website.
And it's temporal because the is
basically the main marketing mantra of
Makua.
And the quality argument, the argument
that it sounds better
rests to a large part
on this claim, not only to bring the
studio sound to the home, but by
reducing what they call
temporal blur
the format, the format so they claim
contains mechanisms to cope and correct
these temporal inefficiencies present
in all digital systems where an analog
digital analog conversion takes place
and remove their temporal blur.
And reviewers and the audio file press
called. Innovations revolutionary
and claimed them not only to be audible,
but to lift music to a whole new level.
This is from an audio file.
Public online publication,
The Sound, they say, let the revolution
begin.
And here they're more or less compared.
Bob Stewart with Einstein.
If you read this here,
this captures a lot, Kevin, up there.
There's nothing new to be discovered in
physics. Now, all that remains is one
more precise measurement.
Lord Kelvin, five years before Einstein's
paper on relativity.
And if you look deep in the text and I'm
sorry for this, I know you can
read that now,
but they basically bring forward Thomas
Kuhn revolution, the structure of
scientific revolutions and talk about a
paradigm shift in digital audio and
even come up with the Copernican model
supplanting plutonomy worldview and so
forth. Right. So big things are happening
already right now. You probably haven't
heard yet, but we're entering
a new paradigm and we are currently and
the fact that we are standing here is
actually an indicator of the of the
scientific crisis because we belong to
the old world view and think
probably not.
Right.
So, um,
there is, of course, a big debate
happening all over the world around
claims like this.
And much of this debate
is happening on a website called Computer
Audio File.
And there is
specifically this thread, which was
opened on January two this year,
and it has amassed 250 K views
by now. It's really interesting because
there's a couple of of really reputable
people publishing
on this on this forum in this
thread.
For many outspoken critics, one of them
is mastering engineer Brian Lucey, who
has six Grammys and mastered, among
others, Depeche Mode and Merriman's and
so forth.
And he basically said that
the available MQ airfoils that you can
buy now a stream via the tidal service
were not created in mastering studios,
but encoded in an automatic way
somewhere probably on the cloud.
So the claim of Makua that,
you know, you get the sound that the
artist and the mastering engineer signed
off on is
definitely false for the files
available now.
And we must presume that it remain
remains false because
there is no commercial
convertors available that include
MKR encoding.
So nobody running a studio can actually
use this format right
now. You have to send the files often and
encoding house where they get
encoded and signed.
So
part of this controversy is a couple of
people online who did deeper
research, one of them is Archipelago, a
blogger, an anonymous
blogger who actually set
up an Internet blind test,
quote, According to our standards, high
virus files. If you're interested in
that, please look it up.
It's actually pretty complicated what he
does, because since
the encoders are not available,
we cannot properly encode music
Abakua. And in the past four years,
the company has not allowed anybody to
basically sent them files in
order to create a proper comparison
between Mkhitaryan
codified sound files that in PCM
or any other format that you would have.
So I can invented a pretty
interesting way to work around a
limitation.
I can't go further into that.
If you want to take this test,
look at this website.
Another Hecke that had a look and
is Mansor God, who
is who's working on the Sox
resampling package.
And he
has a Gitlow site up
where you find a filter coefficients of
a in tools to actually
look into control bits at the
street, at the control
stream of a.
We will also list later
in the.
Presentation once we put it up, so
to wrap up my part so far in 2017,
24 bit files as
they are created in the studio, worked on
Scutti studio, available for audio files
so they can actually listen to what's
happening in the studio in a way.
Of course, there's other, you know,
like the listening room and the playback
change and so forth. Our other parameter
affecting that, what they hear.
But does that actually matter?
Because most music is all
of you will know gets consumed
in lossy formats via Spotify
or any other streaming service and
listened on speakers like this,
mono Bluetooth speakers.
So in this context now, empty
promises, lossless studio sound at home
that is authenticated.
And they also
promise a sound improvement via fixing
the temporal blur of supposedly
happening in the adult stages.
So Anton, who actually
works on these matters, will now
investigate these technical claims sort
of further.
OK, you go to
your high
school as Christopher introduced
himself, I do the same,
my background in digital
audio stuff, it's
changing slides by itself.
Is there a way to to press?
All right, so my background in
digital audio started in nineteen ninety
three when I bought this CD player
together with an amplifier and two Hakoah
speakers.
And looking back at that time, it was
the only point in my life where I
actually carefully listened to
audio quality as
a listener and I repeatedly
listened to my favorite records,
which were mostly dense music at that
time. Again and again,
the player did so well and
still makes the job today.
Later on in 2000,
I started studying at the Teacher
Ilmenite close to lapsation,
and I heard the lectures of Karlheinz
Brandenburg, who led
in the 90s group that developed
the military algorithm.
And with that invention, I later
in the decade, in the
last decade, I became a very convenient
listener. I downloaded continuously
and then in the current
decade I am streaming.
So nevertheless,
or of course, Anku
wants to sell
a system again to me and I'm inclined
to do to to do a purchase
soon, but not
the one that comes with
me and why
that is like that.
I'm going to show up now.
So apart from the DRM, I,
I do not appreciate the
audio quality quality of
of.
And before we have a quick look.
At the audio technology,
let me state the following, there's not
much information out there
from McCooey on the algorithm
itself, there are Cristoff
mentioned it already. There are mainly
two papers,
convention papers of the A-S.
There are patents which, of
course, highlight the crucial
parts and increase
their freedom to operate.
So it's it's vague,
but there's luckily a lot of information
from engineers that
that looked into
the details and
did a reverse engineering.
So MQ is an encoder
decoder system nested in a container
such as FLAC, free lossless audio
coding or audio
recording of Apple Lossless or Decoding
ALAC or the Microsoft
WAF.
Container.
And thereby can be read
and decoded by standard
audio players
in hard and software.
Of course, MTV wants to replace
the entire audio chain,
the entire audio chain of ad
converters and de converters
and wants to get
royalties also from the streaming
services.
And the two main approaches
to
reduce defiles size
such that you sent a
24 hour 20
to a bandwidth
file over the Internet,
but nevertheless by unfolding is it
you can still have the high
resolution audio.
So the MQ claims are
there, it's lawless, and
it shall improve the audio quality.
Is scalable, the more
you pay, the more bandwidth you get.
So from
the sampling rate, forty eight kilohertz
you can unfolded four
times
and download prices are currently at
2L, higher than
for the original high relative high
resolution audio, the 24 bits
and sampled at 192
kilohertz files.
Important to note, the end user does not
own the file.
This has implications.
For example, if you do a allow less
loudness normalization on the file itself
or a room compensation, you lose
the you lose
the MQ a
license, so to say, and it's
reduced to CD quality
or below.
So one of those claims in the
U.S. paper, which is written at
the bottom, is we advocate
lossless compression, lossless processing
and hierarchical updown
sampling. We highlighted the quality and
efficiency gains possible if the
encoder and Dakoda are mutually
aware and each matched to their analog
converters.
So this is a bold claim
and not based on evidence,
so we look into that
lossless compression in audio means
a redundant redundancy removal.
And the possibility to reconstruct
the original recording bit by
bit, including the noise,
whether it had been and the noise belongs
to the music or not,
lossy compression removes information,
be it audible or not.
So it's a lot less
Shannons. Entropy allows to us allow
us to assess the maximum redundancy
in an audio file that can be removed
without information loss.
So on a data set of music,
Stefan Hotto
a link is given to his paper.
Not a link, but the paper itself is given
in the bottom of this slide.
Did a
entropy optimization and FLAC
compression and reached for
a certain high resolution
data rate
50 percent of
a file size.
So this is quite a lot, and
nevertheless, eight, however, has
a data reduction of 57
percent.
And it's it's
obvious that this reduction,
lowering the depth and changing amplitude
and phase response is a loss to process.
This is also highlighted in the
paper that I give here by Stefan
Otto.
So them Slide
16 exclaim, MQ
approach of recoding results is
superior in superior sound
and significant lower data rate when
compared to unstructured
encoding and playback, and has been
enthusiastically supported in listening
trials with a number of recording
and mastering engineers, artists and
producers.
So this is
a truly scientific ruling that
may give you an impression of
the ASX publications
that
that we have as the resource
and we analyze that.
I quickly take you
through the sampling process.
On the left side, you see two columns
in the top.
You see a drawing of the sampling
scheme.
Fifty minutes. Yes.
So we start with a blank, limited
analog time function.
And this is then multiplied in
the time domain
with a series of pulses.
Then in the search row
search line,
we have the multiplication.
Uh, the right column
shows you the frequency
equivalent and
the time discrete signal
gets quantized sized with certain steps,
steps for high
resolution audio. It's 24 bit per sample.
And then if you put an analog
Lopez filter on the on the signal,
you can reconstruct the
original analog signal
bit by bit and
at 24 bit practically
equal to the original signal.
What a change this
is for. For example, the
DB spline kernel
for a sparse sampling scheme
and this shall improve the
temporal resolution.
It's the highlight
Cristoforetti already mentioned that they
highlight the detection of
humans, the ability to detect
transgenes with 10 microseconds,
and the colonel
also saw match to the song.
So a second
point is they change the
the low the
low pass filter for avoiding
pre ringing and
for improving together with the kernel
to time resolution.
They call it deploring and
compensation for signal distortions
from the analog
digital conversion during
the recording process.
So is it actually
improving sound quality, the temporal
resolution, or
I should start with a listening test that
Chris already mentioned,
there was no preference
towards EMCDDA compared
to high resolution audio.
In fact, in some situations,
standard high resolution audio was
preferred.
So in terms of temporal resolution, is
it improving or
sound quality?
If you look at their
claim, it shall
allow for the detection of events
that are as short as 10 microseconds,
which would be a bandwidth of
100 megahertz.
They call it blurring from forty
eight kilohertz sampled signal.
This is questionable.
So I don't think that's actually
the case.
The next point is, is it tuned
to the song at first they
call it the day they post
to change the balance between
time and frequency representation of
their filters.
Both are equivalent representations
of a filter, but if they use an
adaptive filter.
We don't know actually what is what is
tuned to the songs, so there's
information missing in terms
of the minimum phase photos to suppress
pre ringing
minimum face photos have their
shortcomings. They change the
frequency response, the
the amplitude and the phase response
that has been also shown by Stephane
Hotto and
in the last.
The last point I want to make on that
slide is the deputization
and in the time domain
to avoid the ringing
of the filters,
the minimum phase has
ringing after the center of the
filter and
to improve also temporal resolution
and to compensate for the
signal change.
That is also a point Stefanutto
looked at and he clearly shows
that polarization.
So windowing, in
fact, is a Lopez filter and not
improving sound quality.
So do we need extra
enhancement based on today's evidence
from neuroscience and
we heard we need a
time resolution in a paper
of six microseconds
and it was referred
to the binaural hearing.
And in fact, we are able
to discriminate into all time differences
with just noticeable differences of
10 microseconds.
Those differences are,
however, based on a central auditory
comparison of sound waves
between the ears and
because of the spatial nyqvist limit.
Only defined structure of the frequency
up to one point three kilohertz
is analyzed.
And if we remember, the
department, for example, has of course
years that are closer together.
And that's why they
can even detect
differences that are smaller then
than in humans.
So and from the media
production side, there's no
need for an enhancement of audio from
a scientific point, as well as from an
artistic point of view.
The artistic concept with all variables,
composition, performance, practice, etc.,
is captured on multichannel, multichannel
files. And the transmission chain
has always been kept free from
influences.
Quote, The music is the message
and finally interpreted
by the interpreters, by the auditory
system. So we don't need a channel
that is preprocessing
what's going on in our heads eventually.
A general question, do we need a
HRR audio, high resolution audio
based on today's evidence from
neuroscience for listening to music?
And I have here a
graph from Speaker and Fasel and
psychoacoustics.
So the audible threshold in
quiet is this
solid line and it shows clearly we
are not able to listen
beyond, let's say, 20
kilohertz.
Moreover, music has a
amplitude spectrum
with one over F, so
beyond 20 kilohertz,
the sound power is very faint and
it's from my point
of view, hardly.
I can hardly imagine that we are
able to listen
beyond 20 kilohertz.
Nevertheless, in the
production on the production side,
we use filters that
perform interpolation and for that case
it's good to have high, really high
resolution audio.
Another point is conservation
of of recordings.
So if we store music
digitally, then of course it's
good to have a lot of
samples such that we can interpolate
once there are errors
arising.
So conclusion, there is no evidence based
research that supports audio quality
claims of McCooey MKC
losse because it reduces
Tibbett depths and the frequency response
with the degradation of audio
quality, which in
its current version might not always be
audible to algorithm of a
folding scheme, is only vaguely
described, and its disadvantages
for high risk, high resolution
audio are obviously disguised by
marketing slogans like The Blurring
Once and MTA infrastructure
is established, audio quality can be
easily scaled down and a description
of kernel optimization for each track
song alludes to a perceptual
coding scheme which might eventually
end up at an auditory quality.
One thing to remember, there are free
high rollers, high resolution audio
codecs that compress audio lawlessly
like FLAC.
Internet bandwidth is not a big concern
and the Western world anymore.
It increases.
Hence there's no need to
follow the audio coding.
And most of the music, as Chris have
already told us, is still
stored in CD quality.
If we sample
those, um, those that
information signal to
noise ratio decreases.
OK, thanks.
All right, so
things aren't on
cash or that.
Good. So the question is, where is the
and
basically Enten already has showed that
MQ employs a clever encoding scheme.
And as far as we
know, because this is proprietary
technology and we have to work
with what we got, and that is reverse
engineering by some people online and
some of the papers and other
publications.
That makes this is, again, from
the paper that Anton just mentioned
for Stefanutto,
where he drew up
the MQ encoding scheme.
And important part, I don't have a laser
pointer here, but is the PCM simple up
there, which you can see is 24 bits.
And as you can furthermore see,
it's divided into two parts
of baseband. It's the audio bits and
the serpent is the data bits.
So basically what Abakua does
is using a 24 bit sample,
throwing away eight bits of that, more or
less eight bits of that audio
information and very
other stuff basically in
the noise floor that a 24 bit sample
allows for.
Give me a second.
So
what if you look at the history
I just gave you on digital audio, this
isn't a way back to square one because we
had in 81 with the city Redbook standard
16 bits at 44 one kilohertz.
What we now would get with Makua
is, in their own words, right.
Something to the extent of 15 to 17
bits of dynamic
bandwidth sampled
at forty eight kilohertz, everything
about 48 kilohertz
is encoded in a lossy compression
scheme, as Anton just showed the sisters
folding what they talk about,
how this actually is accomplished in
detail, we don't know.
It's supposedly I
guess it's a pretty clever way
because you have to basically get
spectrum from 24 kilohertz to 96
kilohertz into just a few bits and
bury that in the
six, seven, eight bits that you get
with a compression.
So in a way, MQ
A acknowledges
that the standard that Sony and Philips
arrived at sixteen bits, forty four
one K is good enough for human
hearing and all the information above 16
billion above forty four or forty eight
kilohertz. And it is more
or less useless, not
audible. We can do something else with
that. So what do you do,
what do you put there.
Um and it's a fairly complex
and sophisticated cryptographic scheme.
Oh wait. I forgot this one.
This is the blue light on the, on
the on one of these
MQ adex that lights up
when the file is authenticated
and authentication to remind you of that
it's a loaded term
in the digital realm.
It promises to verify the origin
of the data that so who is the
sender and integrity
of the data under the conditions of open
networks where data can be altered
at any point in the transmission.
And these requirements can only be met
by a cryptographically means,
as the continuous continuous reports
on hacked cryptos indicate,
MKR has to come up with a workable and
sufficiently secure system
to to to make this possible.
And MQ a partnered with the German data
security company TIMAKOVA
Macau to create an authentication
component for the format, which
includes a major purveyor
of cryptographic products and well
established in the banking sector in
Europe and also in the health care
sector.
And this is the website for DeMarco.
So they offer lawful interception data
retention services, which is nice to
have, and they offer these hardware
security modules,
which actually would make a
user's
automatical. Also published a white paper
on MQ A it's available on the website.
It's very sparse on details,
but it suggests that Emeco
and tales of public key infrastructure
and that hardware security modules like
this one shown here will
be deployed in at least the Makua
and coding houses and properly
later on in the mastering studio.
So the convertors in
mastering studios would need to
have this hardware security modules
in them or some sort
of hardware security modules derived from
from these devices and
automatical. Was IMNSHO nice?
Is it to provide hardware
security modules for Dummies book on
their site, which apparently audio
so far I haven't been able to find
and is hardly a secure module.
Security modules basically provide
the means to embed the necessary
keys in the encoded
files.
The exact means of this key management
schemes and the handling of the route of
trust is unknown at this point.
MQM might outsource this to what
you might call or might use
this crypto servers that
do the key management.
OK, I have to come to an end
in-house, so
I'd like to ask the audience here.
Is this DRM?
I don't hear anybody
I guess that means yes, yes,
OK, so I'm asking this
because Akua claims, of
course it's otherwise
they say it's not DIAM.
And here's from ARS Technica.
Abakua has no idea.
Uncommon application outside of the
studio. We have no opinion on this beyond
nothing, noting that DRM is a futile
exercise.
And this is like a large part of the
narrative and the online debate because
EMCDDA and all the people involved,
including the all you press, keeps
touting this is not DRM because
you can copy the files.
Right.
But copy protection is just one form of
the goal of DRM.
If you just look it up on Wikipedia, for
example, it is the first thing you see is
the rights of a user with data.
And this means both in a restrictive and
a permissive use cases.
So NCUA permits copying,
but it restricts
access to parts of the file, namely the
higher resolution parts.
So India and its conditional access
and the access only granted if you have
an acceptable digital audio converter,
which you have paid for, of course.
So I guess what we can say is
that Amcu is something like a freemium
model, right?
You get the file that you can play
on any kind of convertors that
you can vote on, it actually would
be playable.
But if you want access to the premium
part of that file, you have to buy a
device or software that allows
that.
So why do they do that?
Oh, one more point and then I'm going
to end the
film as it has been
a reverse engineered so far shows
that they actually have provisions in
place for copyright protection.
Um, there are provisions there
to encrypt
the files and
with all sorts of 20 cipha.
And there's also Britton's transposition
schemes in there.
Why do they do this?
Jimmy Eivind just said to Apple Music
boss that the streaming services have a
bad situation. There's no margins.
They don't make any money.
So he's talking about titles, Spotify and
so forth.
Um, whereas Amazon sales
by Prime Apple sales, telephones
and iPads and so forth.
So the problem is that you have to sell
something else outside of
your streaming service in order to make
money, which of course, everyone would
place.
Um, Amazon
is currently the biggest speaker
company in the world with these kinds of
devices, and Google is catching up.
So our interpretation
of what it's trying to do is
it's trying to generate a new licensing
stream for the music industry or
specifically for Makua.
These elements
of the music production, distribution and
consumption value chain
would need EMCDDA licenses, the recording
software and plug ins, the recording
Marsing Studios new convertors.
The artists would get their
back catalogs remastered and
would have to agree on that.
Streaming services would have to sign up
with them.
Physical media manufacturers if it comes
to that. And of course, all the hyphae
manufacturers and
customers also are looking
at paying MTU out.
OK, let's skip all this.
Why is that clever ways of stealth?
I think the encoding schemes
that Amcu employees
make very clever use of the space
afforded by 24 bit samples,
namely to stealthily
introduce a DRM in the music,
uh, um, production,
distribution and consumption value
chain. And they don't openly talk
about it and it makes it actually very,
very difficult to find these elements.
And if you ask what
to do to that in this context of the
conference here, it would be worthwhile
if people start to dig deeper on
what Amcu is actually doing.
OK, I just stop here.
Thank you.
So thank you very much for the talk
we have now like five minutes for
questioning and answering, so please line
up to the microphones.
And do we have a question from the
Internet?
No.
So microphone number one,
hello.
Thanks for your talk.
You talked about the reverse engineering
of the firmware, so it somehow
sounds that they wouldn't have these
complicated hardware security modules in
the techs.
Well, it's a specific
firmware in one product.
It has been reverse engineered from
boozehound.
I don't know the
security provisions of that, but
there's a lot of security modules
won't be at this point part of
the consumer products.
They will be part of the convertors
encoding house and the distribution
context, um,
how the exact, uh, crypto
works between DMCA
files and
the consumer docs is not yet known.
There's some hints and indications you
will find this in the resources of how
that works.
Um, but the hardware security models
would be employed in the in the
production distribution part of
the, um,
of the scheme.
OK, thanks.
I have another question from microphone,
phone number four.
Yeah. Thank you for a talk.
Um, I have two questions.
One of them is, do you think
that this marketing concept will
have any success at all?
And the second one is, um,
do you think that music
and coding does evolve anywhere
else than multi-channel and
coding instead of, uh,
increasing sample rate and sample
bits? Oh, thank you.
Good questions. Uh, I think
this, um, this
is a good example of how not to market
something because I cannot think of any
product. It has managed to create more
doubt with both the consumers
of of this product and also hardware
manufacturers and all kinds of other
people which are involved in digital
audio. Then MQM.
I think they went out, um,
with very bold claims,
try to play the audio files
with their easy, easy suggestibility
and were surprised by the competence in
the audience.
So I don't think this will
go anywhere in this terms.
Uh, what was your second question again
about how the encoding of music
evolves? If we are going
for more channels like five
channels, eight channels, maybe
sixteen channels at some point,
or do some people still try to increase
the bitrate and
frequency?
Yeah. So, um, it's
probably a question for Enten.
Um, I can only
as audio file answer.
There's, uh, in the audio market,
multichannel audio is dead.
It's stereo.
But I mean, for the consumers, this is
why as short as Bluetooth speaker,
everybody's happy with mono now.
Um, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.
Um, stereo files will have,
uh, audio files will have stereo set ups,
uh, and multichannel setups, create
problems with Groomes and, you know,
calibration all kinds of things.
Um, it
might be different in the AV sector.
Um,
in more general terms, I think audio is a
solve problem. Really, 24 bits in one
hundred ninety two kilohertz should
should be enough.
Um, the front here now is
room correction and face correction
with speakers. So that's where the real
problems are, where there's actually real
progress. Digital.
Um, um,
what do you call vison.
Uh,
crossover's. Yes.
Digital crossover's. These kinds of
things I think you
can add to parametric coding
is used in multichannel audio.
So you sent one mono signal
and then you can reproduce by parameters.
I have room
for for a multi-channel,
uh, setup.
Yeah. That's often used
since I think we have time for
another question.
Do we.
Yeah. OK, another question format for
number one.
I went to three conferences and
digital audio and computer music this
year. I didn't hear anybody mention this
inquiry.
I think the story about the
toxicity authentication
and what did you call it?
Can you step up? Because it's it's
fabulous. I wonder if they do they
make any claims they do like virtual
analog models of the original
converters or how do we
this story is just completely like
crazy now.
Yeah, that actually is being
mentioned in the marketing model
that they they call it fingerprint the
original analog digital converter
and compensate for for the
deficiencies.
Then aerostats convertor makes
and that's one of the big claims that
there is a device specific compensation
embedded in the file
being called upon upon replay and
hence a better quality
experience for the listener.
But all the evidence so
far shows that this is absolutely
not true. What we have is a pencil and
chording, just like you would have an MP
three or something else.
The encode, it apparently analyzes
the file that the song or the track,
um, in makes certain provisions on
how to fold the signal.
So how many bits get allocated in the
dynamic range?
Um, on a per track
basis.
So there is no authentication
or fingerprinting or any kind of modeling
of the analog part or
the part
in the chain.
So thank you very much for the
questioning and thanks again very much
for the talk about.