Mods have deleted a series of posts and parts of others that had degenerated into a personal debate. Please try not to talk about each other.
That wasn’t my point. But this repeated debate gets a little old, so I really just shouldn’t have been drawn back in. My bad.
I will just do what others do here, which is to repeat the same thing I’ve said before: if MQA becomes the only form in which music is released, we all lose.
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I don’t disagree.
But on the ‘flip side of the coin’, I think MQA could easily coexist with MP3, AAC, FLAC etc in the digital ‘evosystem’, and there’s no need for anyone to be vehemently ‘anti’ MQA IMO.
MQA has it’s ‘place’ IMO, and at the moment that’s with streaming in relatively low-bandwidth networks.
Like anything, time will tell.
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Agreed. As long as it stays in its place. Some are vehemently MQA for other reasons. I just do not like end-to-end proprietary systems. HDCP required me to replace a lot of perfectly good video gear. I don’t want to see that happen in audio.
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That’s the thing, you don’t have to replace any audio gear unless you really want MQA. Then you would need an MQA DAC.
The only way MQA can work is an end to end system. There will be plenty of MQA DACs and non MQA DACs available as well as hybrids so natural wastage will occur over time.
This happens with cars all the time. New models come along and only a very few are classics of the past.
I think we do need to be a bit cautious as to what the music industry is trying to achieve with MQA.
I am disappointed by the marketing claims made about it and all the hype that surrounded its release. The ‘studio sound’ claims are clearly nonsense as all the analogue kit and the interaction of the listening room have an exponentially bigger effect on the received sound at the listeners ears than the encoding of the digital sound file.
Because of this… I’ve been sceptical from the start.
(This isn’t the first time that wild marketing claims have been made about certain music formats and audio equipment though, and it won’t be the last! I remember headphones “designed for digital” in the 80’s!).
The fact that Tidal has started to deliver only MQA versions exposes a different issue. The issue has always been there, but this is just another reason to add to that issue.
What I’m trying to say here is we can’t rely on a streaming service to deliver us un-‘messed with’ music. And we can’t rely on them not messing with, or taking away that service all-together in the future. They already add and delete content as they see fit.
We’re only renting the service and they can mess with it at any time.
The only way to guarantee a quality of audio is to purchase it and store it at home.
Saying that, the service they currently offer is very useful and I make great use of it. For £20 a month I’m very happy with that service, however… for music I really cherish… I seek out a different delivery service… usually I buy the CD.
Now… what if MQA started becoming the only format available at some point in the future…? And what if they decide to encode even less bits until the quality is noticeably reduced unless you have MQA hardware…?
I don’t think this will happen…but… I think we need to keep an eye out…
I have to say though… that with my ‘modest’ £2000 system, I don’t really have an issue with the sound quality of MQA at the moment. Music producers have done far worse things over the last 20 years, for example, It’s certainly nowhere near as bad as the terrible mastering and re-mastering that went on over the last 20 years in the name of the loudness wars! I’m still seeking out early pressings of CDs of some artists which were ruined by re-masters! Re-masters that incidentally are the only versions on Tidal!!
I think we’re right to keep a cautious eye on things though and I think we’re scarred by DRM and MP3 and might be jumping the gun and fearing the worst.
To me… at the moment MQA sounds absolutely fine on my current system and, combined with Tidal, it’s a great utility to have for £20 a month.
If they mess with it and I can hear drop in quality, I will consider whether my £20 a month is best spent elsewhere.
I’ll keep buying CDs for as long as they’re available as well. With Ebay and cheap CDs and Tidal, we’ve never really had it so good TBH! 
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You won’t be alone there, so I don’t think there is any reason to lower quality and lose the unique selling point.
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Chris, I have enjoyed many of your posts. But please stop making the same basic statement that has already had its response given. If all music is distributed in MQA and I do not have MQA gear, then not only am I not getting the higher resolution, with undecoded MQA I am getting sub-redbook quality with a shorter word length (bits). It’s not just “OK I only have the CD,” undecoded MQA is adulterated content relative to redbook. It’s not the same.
Plus, MQA can update the firmware on the DACs and take it down quality-wise from there. On the command of the record companies. I could end up with MP3 quality.
Yeah but they don’t get to require that you just buy their proprietary gasoline.
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Why ever would they drop quality? I cannot see any reason to do this. It’s not MP3.
MQA would say that undecoded MQA is better than CD quality but I appreciate people don’t agree.
Also CD quality and High Res along with MP3 will be around for a very long time, if not forever. All the music ever made to date is available as CD quality music. There is a glut of pre owned CDs to buy right now.
I am pleased you enjoy some of my posts, I cannot remember everything I have posted and so reply in the moment to what is being said. A lot of these things have also been said before, many times by various people.
How many MQA titles on Tidal used MQA encoding in the mastering process?
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OK, so let’s just use that as a baseline instead of undecoded MQA is at or better than Redbook. Leave it as subjective. That way we can avoid having to redo this debate in the next thread someone creates. 
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All of them.
That’s why MQA is an end-to-end system.
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Was MQA around when the Crosby Stills and Nash album was recorded and mastered?
As I understand it, the MQA file/master in this specific case would derive from the ‘master’ PCM files that the record company holds. The MQA process apparently accounts for any specifics relevant to the ADC used to convert an analogue master into a digital/PCM one, and the MQA files effectively derive from the PCM master.
That’s my understanding at least.
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Excellent post, Dan.
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I agree. Very nicely put 
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You can get the first unfold in Roon even if you don’t have MQA gear. So you’re getting up to 88.4 or 96Khz sampling information if it’s present in the file.
Regarding reduced bit-depth (word length) of the core file, a 16bit file can resolve 96dB of dynamic range! No commercially released music has ever come close to that, so losing some of the least significant bits can be in-audible, it’s only the excessively quiet information that’s lost (The noise), which is well well below the level of the program material.
For example… If you throw away the 3 least-significant bits and encode your audio as a 13-bit signal, you can encode a dynamic range of 78dB, this is more than enough for the most dynamic of commercial recordings.
Considering the background noise in a good listening room is already 30dB or so, a recording making use of the maximum dynamic range you could store on a 13bit recording would give you a peak loudness of 108dB if you could turn it up loud enough!!! This is plenty!!
So… when we’re talking about reduced bit-depth of the core recording, we’re not talking about the audible masking used in lossy data compression that was used in MP3s, where reasonably high levels of program material were removed, because it was deemed that the human ear/brain couldn’t discern them from other similar frequency, but slightly louder sound which was present in the recording at the same point in time.
No… we’re talking about removing information in the recording that is 78-96 dB lower than the peak program level. This is an entirely different thing.
Now… for what I’ve read of Archimago’s report above, they are currently preserving the core recording in a 13-bit depth encode, which gives us 78dB dynamic range as I said… if, however they decide to fiddle with it in the future, they could reduce it to 12-bit (72dB dynamic range), 11-bit (66dB), 10bit (60dB)… anyway… you get the picture… I’m sure we’d start really hearing the effects if they did.
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In this article it states: ‘The dynamic range of music as normally perceived in a concert hall does not exceed 80 dB’.
In which case, MQA is offering more than enough ‘bits’ to accurately ‘describe’ sound.
And anyway, no 24-bit files that I know of/am aware of use the full 140db range. Your stereo system would be incapable of reproducing such a range anyway.
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Here’s a fun thing you can do in Roon. Go into Track view and using the down-arrow on the right, switch on the Dynamic Range Column.
Now you can sort your music according to Dynamic Range.
Out of my 6540 locally stored tracks, the most dynamic track has a range of just 27LU!
It’s Berlioz-Te Deum.
Pink Floyd - The Post War dream comes in at number 6 with 24LU!
Edit… these are expressed in Loudness Units, not dB… I need to read up on LU to see how it relates
This opinion is not shared by myself and others, and not even MQA Ltd. itself. MP3, AAC, FLAC are not comparable to MQA because their legal basis is different - they are not in themselves trying to create a closed DRM digital ecosystem.
MQA is a different animal. It begins and ends with DRM…