JeffA2

melgross said:

jasenj1 said:

I love that Tidal offers lossless & MQA formats. But in reality, Spotify's & Pandora's free bit rates are good enough for the vast majority of listening I do. IMHO, to really appreciate CD quality & higher, you need decent equipment and a decent listening environment (meaning quiet). I have such, but rarely have the time to dedicate to serious listening. While I'd love for Apple or one of the other major music streamers to offer CD & higher quality, I recognize such is the realm of enthusiasts - people willing to pay lots of $$$ for what others would consider minimal improvements in quality. e.g. Buying a dedicated subwoofer that goes down to 25Hz rather than using bookshelf speakers, or the speakers built into a TV.

I think Tidal makes a mistake by not offering a free, ad supported tier - like Spotify. I've been using Spotify free for a few years and I am now very used to their UI and way things work. If I ever step up to subscribing to something, I'll most likely go with Spotify because I'm familiar with it, and I'm pretty happy with how it works.

I don’t like MQA. I’ve been at enough audio shows around the country where some vendors use it. But it’s almost impossible to get a comparison between MQA and a CD, much less the 24/96 it’s supposed to equal. But I’ve spoken to the two guys who run the company a number of times, and they’re rather squirmy when I try to get real technical answers out of them. Much of it is highly compressed, and you even lose something from the CD, in the bass, and high frequencies, which, with a good system, you can hear that.

tidal doesn’t make it easy to determine whether something is MQA or not. You have to dig into the menu to find out.

and without the special D/A for MQA, it definitely sounds worse than a CD, much less a 24/96.

I'm listening to Tidal as we speak. Streaming a CD quality track off the new Ranky Tanky album via a Bluesound Node2. I have decent equipment and do appreciate lossless streaming. I'm not up on the details of how MQA reduces bandwidth but both NAD and Bluesound are fans and they are pretty serious about audio quality.  Tidal's MQA streaming can be a bit dicey -- their servers don't always keep up. But it's pretty nice. When played through my best system (which is quite good actually) MQA can sound very good (try Tidal's MQA of Diana Krall's "Like Someone in Love" on a good system and you'll be impressed). The entire question of CD vs. HiRes is fraught. I have a dozen or more HiRes albums but the vast majority of my music is CD quality (ripped and stored in Apple Lossless format). Even under the best conditions it's hard to be sure there's much real difference between CD and 96/24 or god  help us 192/24. What differences I'm sure that I hear when playing the same albums back-to-back are probably due to difference in the mix, not the data rate/width. But subjectively 96/24 does seem to have a lower noise floor and clarity especially on female vocals. Again, probably the mix but I'm not sure.

But all that aside, I do enjoy having a streaming service like Tidal that can at least deliver lossless CD quality music. I use it to explore music before I commit to buying it (like Ranky Tanky for example).  I find that I listen to more new music this way -- once you've paid for the month you might as well explore, right? There's a lot of hate for Tidal in this thread but if it goes under I'll be sad.

applesauce007 said:

1.  Jesus dude, nobody in their right mind will run a 10Gb/s network in their house because no home device will support it.  It is too fast.

The next version of WiFi will be 10Gb/s.  Do you understand?  That kind of speed is meant for interconnecting large businesses and entire cities.

2.  The next Cellular network known as 5G will be a gigabit network and will be very well suited for video delivery to mobile devices.
Very few homes today have gigabit connections.  

I'd run a 10Gb/s wireless connection from router to router in my house today if I could. The bottleneck in my house is the 802.11ac wireless connection between my servers and my ground floor distribution system. It's theoretically a 1.3Gb/s pipe but the fastest real-world stream is half that. It doesn't matter if the ports on the switch at the other end are 1Gb/s.

OttoReverse said:

JeffA2 said:

Your analogy is also incorrect. Apple is not being asked to create a skeleton key. They are being asked to create a procedure for unlocking phones. The software itself -- the 'key' in your parlance -- only fits a single lock. But the procedure could be used to create other keys for other phones. But -- and here's the big difference -- each of those new keys must be separately authorized by a warrant and a subsequent court order. Then that specific 'key' must signed by Apple before it will open the lock. That means there is judicial review for each individual case. That's exactly the type of protection guaranteed by the US constitution.

No Jeff that is not the case at all.  The FBI are asking Apple to create a version of iOS that allows infinite attempts at the password.  If such a version were created and subsequently stolen/leaked it could be used on any other iPhone.  Hence the "skeleton key" that opens all the locks analogy.

The other issue Apple has is where does this end?  At first the FBI said this is just for this one phone but them Comey (spelling?) admitted they would want to use such a compromised version many many times.  So that would compel Apple to constantly maintain a compromised version of iOS in perpetuity.  

Why do people keep saying this as if it were true? The 'version of iOS that allows infinite attempts at the password' is to loaded onto the phone in question via DFU mode. An iPhone will not load arbitrary software that way. It must have a valid signature and only  Apple can do that. Furthermore, the software can (and by court order must) include the specific UUID of the target phone. Therefore even if this patch got out of Apple's hands, was disassembled and the UUID changed, it would fail to load on any iPhone because it would fail the signature check. To further ensure security the phone is allowed to remain in Apple's possession for the entire time it is running the altered software. As a final condition of the court order, the entire patch must be RAM resident. No flash memory on the phone can be altered. Therefore the patch will be erased from memory as soon as the target phone is unpowered. 

What we have here is a procedure for producing a key for any specific phone, not a skeleton key. The difference is fundamental.

Your second point that Apple will be asked to do this over and over is probably correct. However, even the FBI admits that the utility of this approach is short-lived. All Apple has to do render it obsolete is require a PIN during DFU. I would expect them to add this to upcoming iOS update very soon.

Given a choice between signing their own software and handing over the signing key to the FBI, Apple would be insane to do the latter. Losing control of the signing key is tantamount to losing control of the entire system.

radster360 said:

Though I hope that there is no GovtOS, would these employees be charged with "Contempt of Court"? 

No, no individuals are named in the court order. Apple is named and therefore Apple would be cited as in contempt. It's up to them to manage their employees.