That’s your opinion in your system. My experience in my system to me is different.
What’s the problem with people making money? You get paid don’t you?
I haven’t bought anything I wouldn’t have bought anyway to enjoy MQA.
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Wrong. Fact: even MQA Ltd. admit that MQA is a lossy compression scheme.
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Chris, I am not going to contradict you as much as point out that it is a highly subjective issue and you cannot say it’s nonsense if someone has an opinion that redbook CD is preferable. Your statement overreaches.
Some are on about the sound quality of MQA, better or worse. That is not my concern. We do not need a proprietary format that isn’t full quality without gear replacement. We just do not.
The fact that there is some software decode available is beside the point. That works on limited devices. Fine, let it exist. But I do not want it to replace other formats, which is clearly what the record labels are thinking with this.
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My extensive comparisons on a great system, MQA is inferior to anything 44.1/ 16 Redbook or higher. I have not found any musical selections where this is not true. Some people also prefer obviously color Ed sounding speakers.
True. But per it’s creator, MQA is a lossy format. Show a low res picture on an 8K TV, ot’s Still low res.
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Whatever…
IMHO, every MQA file is inferior to a 44.1/16 file from the same master. 44.1/16 has less distortion, and better attack/delay. There is not one area where MQA is as good, except in the hype fed by those looking to make money off MQA.
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In every interview I have read of Bob Stewart, he freely acknowledges that MQA is a lossy format.
Plus, you can not do your tests listening to both on Tidal. First, they may not be from the same master. Second, Tidal has been optimized, from what I have read, for MQA.
Freely is a stretch there - if you pull enough teeth, he’ll say something about it being “audibly lossless” despite “loosing a bit or two or maybe less than a bit here or there hey look a pink flying elephant”, and if I’m not mistaken, that came after Måns Rullgård, Miska and others shone a light on it…
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He also says that no musical information is lost…
Well then, let’s MQA a file a few tens of thousands of times, and see if no musical information is lost, then compare that with what’d happen if we did it using a lossless codec.
Ohwait…
I’d like people to play me the audio MQA loses, see if I can sing along… hmmm
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I’d like to be able to tell the difference between flac lossless and 320Kbps MP3 but I can’t in a blind test… either my kit is not showing the differences or my hearing is not up to the job - probably a bit of both 
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Chris, you’re missing my point entirely.
“audibly lossless” = high bitrate lossy algo =/= lossless.
The litmus test of losslessness isn’t what you can hear, it’s reversibility, sometimes over multiple encodings (an easy way to see that is gzipped tif vs jpeg - ultra-high quality JPEG is “perceptually lossless”, but factually lossy, just as .mp3 and… MQA are). MQA certainly has qualities, but losslessness is not one of them.
Moderators have deleted a post that was likely to inflame the debate with personal attacks on people holding a particular view and posts referring to that post.
Please keep the debate about the ideas and not each other.
No, he has never said no information is lost. He says that although the format is lossy, the losses are not detrctable. That is a comment that is unsupportable, as most people have not been tested to see if they can detect the losses or not. From all the comments here, and elsewhere, I would say roughly 50% of the commenters say they most definitely CAN here the loss of onfprmation. Bob Stewart’s push of MQA sounding as good as lossless is as valid a Amar Bose’s position that his Bose 901 was one of the best sounding speakers there was.
Roon Tidal MQA never turned on any little blue lights on my Lepai amp. I have tried different cables. Nothing works. My friends don’t come over any more. I need the little blue light.
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I remember an epic party not long after I graduated high school (this must have been 1988 or so), with some 901’s blasting us to kingdom-drunk-come.
Somehow, I doubt MQA is ever going to be remembered as fondly by kids these days 
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That made me smile.
In my case, in 1988, it was in college right after my enlistment in the Army. I recall a similar episode with Bose 901s and a bunch of drunk college kids rocking out to The Scorpions (or something equally ridiculous).
It really is about the music and not the gear or the file format.
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