Regarding: "There is absolutely no justification for calling these MQA-CDs “high resolution” at all! If anything, technically, they rob resolution from standard CD!"
This was very easy for me to see with my own eyes a while ago, when I was comparing the Tidal 1st unfold in Roon vs Hi-Res purchase vs CD quality, for the album MAGNIFICAT and a couple other albums where you are able to purchase the same mastering (DXD version) that these other versions came from.
The CD quality version I purchased turned out to be MQA CD (unexpected when I bought it). And when I did a digital capture and looked at the spectrum analysis, it looked yuck - worse than ‘normal’ CD quality.
When I sent my results privately to a few very clever people that I greatly respect (whose products support MQA) - they agreed, MQA CD is crap.
The MQA 1st unfold (up to 96kHz) is very much like the Hi-Res that you can purchase though (when the mastering is the same), as Archimago himself agrees:
From Archimago:
"Objectively with the songs I examined, the software decoder works well to reconstruct what looks like the equivalent 24/96 download."
and
"Bottom line: TIDAL/MQA streaming does sound like the equivalent 24/96 downloads based on what I have heard and the test results"
https://archimago.blogspot.hk/2017/01/comparison-tidal-mqa-music-high.html
This applies to the 1st unfold only (up to 96kHz)… he’s done plenty of analysis on the stuff after the 1st unfold, which doesn’t need repeating of course.