That’s on heck of a patronising statement. You should have a look on the MQA Facebook forums and see how people are excited about MQA on mobiles and the like. There are many great MQA DACs out there and people are loving the quality. They are excited about music and exposing them to greater quality is really paying dividends. Quality they could not dream of affording or enjoying only a short while ago.
Those poor people, what on earth would they want good food for, they wouldn’t appreciate it anyway… Let them eat gruel
It depends how narrowly you want to define DRM, but an argument could be made that by effectively “hiding” content behind an MQA paywall that needs proprietary hardware to unlock fully, it’s already implemented.
Whether you think that 2nd ‘unfold’ or whatever bull they’ve termed it as has any value, is in the eye of the beholder. But they have done it, and by removing the Redbook sources, they have replaced them with lossy copies.
I paid Tidal to access lossless music. I am no longer getting lossless music.
Of course it is, but it’s a big one and offers a counter balance to what we read here… The gates of quality have been opened to young people like never before…
I don’t think that this is a patronising statement at all!
It certainly wasn’t meant in a pejorative way. If anything quite the reverse. The comment was rather meant to portray that most sensible people have other more important things as priorities as opposed to those of us who have a fascination with high quality audio replay (like you or I) and who probably have more money to spend than sense.
This is not meant as a criticism of you, because I too (along with many on this forum) probably fall into the category of more money than sense when it comes to putting together a hi-fi system.
Remember that I too am largely a fan of the sound of most MQA offerings on Tidal, so I have no axe to grind against MQA. I simply regret the fact that they appear to be removing significant amounts of non MQA material from its streaming service. This is obviously not a good move from the perspective of those who don’t enjoy the sound of MQA files as you or I do, and again I contend that the vast majority of Tidal subscribers probably couldn’t care less.
That means all Music is DRM limited as it is all behind some form of paywall. You buy a CD, you need a player to decode it. DSD, DXD, SACD etc all included.
You stream it, you need to subscribe or enjoy adverts. You also need equipment to enjoy it on.
Live music, you pay to go to a gig or pay for higher priced drinks at the bar.
Playing live yourself, you have to buy or make and instrument (it has to be bought made by someone even if it’s a gift to you)
Radio Broadcasts are not free… Adds, licence fee (in the UK ref BBC) and equipment again.
This whole DRM argument is a nonsense in my view.
I don’t have a problem in specific with DRM. It’s the labels right to protect their assets.
I have a problem with it being in a format that requires special new hardware. With this new hardware you don’t get the best quality the studios have to offer. You get forced to use one guys subjectively preferred upsampling filters to restore the source sample rate.
All this is done under a shroud of marketing terms and obfuscation.
Like you had to with CD, MP3, LP, SACD, DSD etc.
You have always had to buy the equipment to get the best from any format. Here the Hi Fi business thrives… For the love of God… Ethernet switches for the price of a second hand car
If you want what the studios have, buy the studios as we are as close as we are going to get and we have the best quality of recorded music available to enjoy in the history of recorded music.
My experience is like they are really in the room. The ghost in the machine is alive and well.
I can play it anywhere, and get the full resolution on any CD player.
Don’t own any of those.
This hasn’t got anything to do with DRM. If you think it does, you fundamentally don’t understand what DRM is. Things being “free” or otherwise, is not DRM.
For me, my concerns about DRM are if it were to be implemented as it was initially where it was very inconvenient for a person that legally owned the files. Often DRM would be tied to the specific distribution and even the player software so you couldn’t build a library and then choose which player to use. Also, some DRM was done so that you wouldn’t be able to play a file unless it was periodically certified through the player (via internet connection). Finally, some DRM would break if you even moved the file (say from your hard drive to a DAP). These inconveniences were frustrating and didn’t really prevent piracy while also likely reducing revenue.
These days streaming is the largest and still growing distribution method so the “old style” DRM probably won’t affect most people but it would people like us that want to have more flexibility and own copies of music that we can play without having to be tethered to a streaming provider.
Nothing has changed since Linn published this paper.
Tidal and MQA are still burning huge amounts of money.
Their operations are far from being profitable.
The plain fact is, we can argue back and forth here as much as we like and it will make no difference in the real world. People are loving MQA in numbers, new MQA material is being released apace and more an more manufacturers are supporting MQA with new equipment. All that is great news as far as I am concerned. Welcome to the future…
Not that is makes much difference in this discussion but isn’t the content on Tidal actually controlled by what the labels provide? So the decision to remove the cd versions was probably made by Warner Bros, not Tidal. Have we seen this happen with other labels?
What I have seen before that caused me to leave Tidal was the fact that labels were only providing MQA only versions for some new releases. In most cases the same label only provided single hires copy to Qobuz. So think from labels point of view it’s really about simplifying things and not sending over multiple versions.
Think the case with the Doors is it shows how the labels just batched out their files to MQA for encoding and then on to Tidal. If truly supposed to be about best available master, you wouldn’t see the cd quality ones. But they have millions of tracks, so how could it not be automated.
Can someone check CCR’s Green River album to see if multiple MQA albums are different rates?
So much recorded music is only in 16/44 16/48 format, especially during the early days of digital.
Bob Stuart spoke about this in a recent article.
Modern recordings do not need more than 24/48 with modern technology. A few listens will attest to this.
With recordings from tape we are much luckier as they sound great and a good high res transfer will sound amazing in MQA
Of course encoding is automated like anything else… That’s what you do, develop a system and the leverage it. All those chips in Hi Fi are made the same way. Process is not a bad thing.
