Was this linked already? It’s from 2016 about the it initial announcement of Warner Bros MQA
Here’s an interesting piece from it.
Sometimes even a CD rip might indeed be used as a master, but that only happens when it’s the best recording available. Let’s say a label has gone out of business and the master recordings have been lost, but the artist still wants her music converted to MQA. More relevant to the Warner project is when early digital master tapes are unusable, or when the proprietary machine they were recorded on is beyond repair.
CD-quality masters? That’s hardly high-resolution.
Sure, but it’s about the music, right? Stuart indicates that MQA is not about high resolution in the usual sense; it’s about authenticity. “As far as we’re concerned, anything from a cylinder forward is legitimate as long as it’s the definitive statement about a recording,” Stuart told me. “If a recording is important enough, and all there is is a 78, that’s where we start. . . We’re really concerned about producing the definitive thing,” not the thing with the highest bit depth or sampling rate.