Talk:Hatsune Miku/@comment-92.10.102.219-20120330164946/@comment-53539-20181008154515

Welll lets put it this way, if we had to rank V2 English Vocaloids the ranks are;


 * HQ; Prima and Big Al
 * MQ; Sweet Ann and Tonio
 * LQ; Megurine Luka and Sonika

HQ refers to the exceptional vocals, Big Al is a flexible vocal that morphs into other sounds easily with no plucking, he is the clearest spoken of the generation and can easily dominate all others. Prima is a realistic vocal with sharp and clear sounds. She has some plucking but not much, its able to be hidden especially when imported into V3.

MQ refers to vocals... That just missed the mark. Sweet Ann is a vocal who can do a variety of singing roles, but has lots of glitchiest and Big Al is just better, though she is a better singer then here is she is realistic but not as good as Prima. Tonio is a good singer, but due to tons fo glitchiest never meets the mark versus Prima. Both are not so bad their unusable or diasterious and both are "good enough" to be used with decent results.

LQ usually refers to Vocaloids who fell far from the mark. Luka for example has lots of sounds missing and struggles to match up to all ther English vocals of V2 for this reason. She is far softer then her Japanse problem and among the same set of sounds she does have has trouble with some lack of distinction. Sonika can say a lot of words, but mumbles them all and was an experimental vocal that went horribly wrong. She was an attempt to recreate Japanese style of Vocaloids in English vocaloid and was not the usual "let it be natural" like all others are.

Basically, things are not so bad overall. I exampled the English V2's here for this because their the easiest. In V2 with Japanese you have all pre-2009 vocals as mostly being LQ, with most vocals post 2009 being MQ except Gumi. Luka V2 is the worst of the HQ, while other HQs are the Appends, VYs and Iroha. As I said, a lot of it is just due to progression of budgets, time and technology or experience. There is a moment in V2 wherein everything was coming out half decent with minor issues, but there was a moment that every Japanese Vocaloid had its fair share of problems, there was also an era wherein we were seeing the standard jump up with the VYs. So within 1 era the sharp contrast of quality was big, so there was no real black and white moment throughout, there was bad, good and exceptional vocals within 1 generation. So yeah, MQ exists as a concept.

You may think there is no such thing as a Vocaloid that is "middle of the range" but this idea is not foreign. Their "of standard", they meet expectations, they don't exceed them, but their not below them either. V3 is full of MQ vocals as it happens and most are just that because the standard was raised less LQ vocals came out overall. Bare in mind, each generation marks the start of raising of expectations. V3s are all better overall then V2 vocals and V2 better then V1s. V4 is on par with V3 because not much change occurred overall and what changed, changed in a different way entirely both good and bad (adding more traits to voicebanks, loosing ease of use).

IF we're talking Mirai versus Meiko V3 for example, as good as Meiko V3 is Mirai's 1 voicebank out excels Meiko's "Standard" which means Mirai is just better then Meiko based on this. I'm ignoring Meiko's other voicebanks for the moment to keep things simple, but it means that Meiko is LQ compared to Mirai. The two are in the same vocal type group the mid-tones of which is a fairly common type of voice, so there is problems for Vocaloids in this group standing out overall, so for Mirai to be better then Meiko (she is in fact the overall best of her group) is something to note about.

But Mirai wasn't instantly popular because she was better then Meiko Standard voice which is a thing about quality. Even if you have the best Vocaloid it can mean, which is the same situation with Miku. IA for example is far better then Hatsune Miku, but IA isn't more popular then her. Quality is only 1 of many factors producers look for.

Basically, once you have more then 1 of any Vocaloid you get ranking going on regardless. People form them into LQ, MQ and HQ. Their just words in the end and honestly not everyone knows what this ranking means. HQ doesn't mean "realistic" or "can do everything" and LQ doesn't mean "unusable" and "does nothing", MQ just means "does what the label says but there are better alternatives". Consider it like buying a kettle in a super market. Usually they arrive things into cheap Low end kettles that may last 6 months, the ones that actually last long enough to be worth the money and the over priced range that really aren't anything special but their price makes you think they are. There are Vocaloids who don't, meet and exceed expectations just the same. The funny thing is, you kinda accept this yourself you just want there to be 2 sides to the argument when there is not.

Saying that I could discuss the subject of quality all day. There was a time that nobody had any idea on quality at all. That was in 2010, the English vocaloids got labelled less quality then the Japanese during that time and often less realistic. Wasn't the case and in many cases even now its not true. Japanese Vocaloids are more precise, quality controlled due to the smaller size and cheaper to make allowing more to be put into a package such as appends, but English often more expressive/realistic it turns out due to the larger array of sound choices and more variation with lots more sound options for phonetic experiments. But you can't get HQ English from a Japanese vocaloid and you don't get good Japanese from an English vocal. But back in 2010, people believed such nonsense and thought otherwise.

I'm not referring to a sunset. Yet if you example how it can be red and that means I'm wrong, you have to accept the metaphor it represents, which is opinions can be wrong due to our perception of things. So you have to accept that while most of the time I'm right and the sky is blue, I can be wrong and it can be red. But likewise I would have to accept the same thing. Still, the sky only turns red at sunset if there is particules to catch and refract the light, so the sky is still blue technically in a sunset, its just the angle catches a different set of particules and refracts in a different way. Technically, the light itself is white, so the fact blue stands out just means all other colours are removed. How deep do you want this metaphor to go? But either way, the original metaphor was just me example how you can perceive Miku to be a good vocal and how wrong you could be.