The Mike Moffat (#2 at Schiit) Blog

Wait a minute. It's a DSP device that "re-configures" the incoming digital music stream and outputs a supposedly better digital audio stream. So what exactly prevents people from copying/capturing the output of one MP from someone else and using that instead of actually buying MPs? Schiit DACs output analog so that I get. But what about MP?

EDIT: Turns out someone asked the same question on HF. Here's a reply from Mike:

As a computer science major, this goes against the philosophy of easily distributable and replicable data for me. It's gonna be quite a tough sell unless it also does quality SPDIF/AES output like the Hifiberry for not much more. But I'm always prepared for surprises, especially with Schiit .

 

Stereophile is still wetting themselves over MQA, I see:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/mqa-encoded-cds-yes#QyTMFW7bhM36XXKV.97

It is a pleasure to see new recordings coming available for the progressive audiophiles.

Brings to mind the plaintive recordings of the Dhung Clup, one indigenous Amazonian tribe whose mournful recordings were spatially recorded in the wild and made available exclusively on DVD audio multichannel format. The fact that the Dhung Clups communicate only in clicks and grunts make for such a thrilling recording of total empathy. It is well worth searching out the players which have not been made in 20 years.

A similar thrilling moment was the men's chorus of the Latvian men's sex offender's prison chorus singing Steven Foster Songs for children, spectacularly recorded in HDCD. An HDCD player was offered on eBay less than a year ago, and well worth the wait.

Finally we have the Poems of Ecstasy live recording by Shepherds in the wilds of the northern Scottish Orkney Islands. The shephards are clad in kilts, so there are no annoying zipper sounds destroying the ambience and spatial coherence of the happily bleating sheep. The best news is that this DSD recording at 32X DSD is only a 150 Gigabyte file. Since DSD is still only on deathwatch, it is still reasonably easy to find a suitable decoder.

 

Thankfully you posted this here. You would have caused an internet stampede if this was on Head Fi.

 

Sometimes one must post twice.

 

Not that I'm sticking up for MQA, but...

At least you won't have to hunt down obsolete playback hardware in the future. You'll still just be getting redbook.

How is MQA supposed to give "better" sound on a regular CD player?

 

I wasn't sure where else to post this, but this is a delightful teardown of MQA...
http://positive-feedback.com/audio-discourse/questions-answers-mqa-interview-andreas-koch/

 

LOL!!!

 

@baldr, since you specifically mentioned listening to the Grateful Dead through TMP, have you heard the releases done using the Plangent process? This would be the hi-res complete albums collection, Winterland '73 releases, Red Rocks '78, and most of the other live albums released in the last few years. Plangent sounds somewhat similar to what you've hinted at about TMP, a DSP that corrects timing errors found on the original tapes. You've hinted at TMP doing more than that, but I'm wondering if you've heard anything that's gone through the Plangent process as it seems to be in the ballpark of what you've described. The Dead albums I've heard sound incredible.

 

Wow, that MQA teardown was absolutely scathing. Unbelievable what gets fostered on to the buying public at times. Hopefully MQA dies a fiery death and Schiit never has to worry about adding MQA capability to any of its products.

 

Sounds super interesting - here is a technical tear-down:
http://audiophilereview.com/analog/plangent---a-better-way-to-transfer-analog-tape.html
Seems like it is based on tape transfer at high sample rate to capture the bias tones, tracking the pitch variation in these to quantify the wow and flutter on playback and then undoing it with retuning in DSP.

EDIT: here is a plugin which tries to do the same sort of thing without the bias tones:
http://www.celemony.com/en/capstan

 

Bookmarking that, need to have it on hand for when arguing about MQA elsewhere.

 

Exciting times. This is going to be a huge difference. The one time I've experienced this was a live recording (orchestrated) of a film score piece, vs one that was orchestrated in the digital domain. There was something that sounded more "right" but less organic about the digital version. Sounds like this will give us the best of both worlds.

 

Haven't heard of plangent before, but Capstan is a well know piece of software. I rented it for a small-ish job during college, it was really easy to work with. Fixed up some warped old vinyl for archiving just fine.

 

Jamie Hogarth, president of Plangent, has been active here: http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-plangent-process.399347/

He discusses Capstan and other similar DSP programs and mentions the ways in which they negatively affect sound as well as positively (the short of it is that unless applied very carefully it can auto tune some of the music in addition to fixing the sound problem).

There's a lot of great info in that thread. After listening to several albums put through that process, I'm a believer. Apply this at the source and TMP at the point of delivery and I bet you could give vinyl a run for its money.

 

I'm wondering if the MP would leverage the burrito algorithm for the DSP hanky-panky... To minimize potential negative effects of DSP, that is.

 

I'm sure Mike would want to retain the integrity of the original samples as much as possible.

 

Add a multibit ADC for the digitisation process. The GAIN-era MSFL stuff I've heard is spooky good.

Indeed! Step 1 in plenty of DSP algorithms is to upsample a bunch to avoid the subsequent manipulations introducing aliasing.

 

Some more tidbits on Manhattan by @baldr, including a tentative release schedule...

 

Mike is being extremely tight lipped about this. So Jason confirmed its called the "Schiit Eitr" but Mike's post is a bit confusing. Is Eitr the official name for "MP ... Manhattan Project"?

Mike's wording could suggest that Eitr is a different product entirely, unrelated to "MP".

Either way, my guess is that MP or Eitr is some kind of tunable DSP box combined with a USB / SPDIF reclocker. It sounds like it won't be officially announced at CanJam either. I have no idea what "concealed" means? I guess we'll just have to hassle them about it at the show.

 

Eitr is going up In about six weeks. MP/gadget fall