Anything that tames Neil Young’s whine is fine by me.
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What i really dislike about Tidal now is I cannot select 16/44 pcm or MQA version on stuff.
I would pick non MQA every time.
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He is a good story teller; that’s for sure.
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Ohhhhh that’s low @garye 
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Yes the Warner push will be followed by Universal soon no doubt restricting more choice of PCM against MQA
Only more reason to subscribe to Spotify when it goes lossless .
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Regardless of announcements this may be a while away
BTW, I like the name, Goodfellas, Undertones fan or a bit of both? 
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Hi guys,
This recent poll seems to confirm people are finding mqa disappointing
as 80% prefers Qobuz over Tidal even when Tidal has a slightly bigger catalogue.
Maybe Bob can make a new video explaining this.
It will all turn around in a landslide 
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As much as I’m with you on MQA, why make a video? The words “unrepresentative sample/statistically insignificant” pretty much cover it
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It was more like a retorical question. 
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Yesterday I found a 44.1 16 bit album to Norah Jones on Qobuz sounds superior to the 88KHZ 24 bit MQA. MQA is not only disappointing but a disaster.
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I have no axe to grind either way but isn’t quobuz
1/ cheaper
2/ more geared to jazz?
May have some sway on the outcome.
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I would subscribe to Qobuz over Tidal but they lack a lot of indie artists I listen to and their iOS apps are a disaster . Also their Mac app is a disaster.
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I believe you
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Well, no, lossless compression was used in audio transmission well before 2000. Gzipped PCM from CD rips were circulating in the late 80’s with computer nerds. But don’t get me wrong; MLP is a nice design and a unique entry, even if Bob Stuart didn’t invent lossless compression, or even lossless compression for audio. The problem was cramming 6 separate audio streams onto a DVD-Audio disc. Without compression, you could have only gotten 45 minutes of music on a one-sided DVD. So Stuart and company came up with a combination of well-known techniques – Huffman coding, RLE, media-aware predictive coding – and added a couple of nice twists, one of which is allowing multiple streams to share a single representation if they are both playing the same thing at the same time.
It’s a cool trick. Lossless compression is limited to about 50%, and since that’s the case, you might just as well use bzip2 or some other standard format. But if you are compressing multiple things, and they contain the same sequences, and you can cross-reference between them, you can in the lucky case achieve much higher performance, though in the worst case you don’t get much at all. This is the technique used in object RPC protocols, as well. I was doing this for protocols I worked on for the W3C back in the nineties.
And the MLP format is still used in Blu-Ray, I think.
The paper is 2004, but if you look at the list of references at the end, you can see that they were thinking about these techniques since at least the mid-90’s, if not earlier.
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Scanning through the MQA 2020/2021 now playing thread, it seems non supporters of MQA have respectfully left that thread alone.
In contrast I see the usual suspects actively committed and posting in any thread which questions MQA’s sound quality, performance or validity. Regularly these posters refer to un supportive MQA comments as close minded, and anti MQA rhetoric etc.
Surely I think we can all agree that music lovers should be able to choose their preferred music stream, even if it happens not to use MQA encoding?
I also think we could all agree that sound quality is subjective, and dependant on many varying factors… but… nonetheless there appears to be a few Roon MQA Evangelists, committed to pushing a pro MQA agenda, regardless of non supportive user and industry opposition.
At the end of the day, sound quality, reliability and music availability are probably the most important aspects for ‘most’ music streaming consumers.
With Spotify’s announcement of lossless streaming, I think Tidal might need to brace for a rude shock. I foresee many Tidal users looking to transition away from Tidal back to Spotify for an improved service/experience. But even more importantly, is the possibility of an MQA free stream, with incredible reliability and amazing song/artist selection.
Like many others here, I have always found direct SQ comparisons between MQA and Redbook streams to favour good old 44.1 16 bit recordings. I know many likeminded music lovers. No we are not close minded, yes we have tested many times over, and continually prefer Redbook.
As long as choice of stream exists (MQA/Non MQA)… I’ll move on no issues.
However, when MQA becomes the only choice available to stream, we clearly have a problem.
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This isn’t entirely true. I’m in the never MQA camp but lurk in the What MQA are we listening to thread just for the music. There was an anti-MQA cross post there briefly yesterday that was reported and removed.
I’d agree that the postings have become a bit silly, but despite my own negative MQA feelings, I’d say it’s possibly the anti MQA posters who most need to self-moderate some right now.
I’ll admit I’m a pretty frequent poster on here and I can be “robust” in my defence of points, quite probably straying into dogmatic and dull at times. Feel free to tell me to mind my own business/eat my own dog food and shut up.
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Yes and you might wonder why they started folding those as there isn’t even anything to fold.
They should have left those red books as is.
Posts that are negative are moved by moderators to other threads like this one.
Yes, and certainly because you cannot even see what quality you’re getting.
Every mqa is labeled “master”
- a bad sounding derived from redbook => “Master”
- a better sounding from 24/192 => “Master”
For some pleasing the eyes seems enough, for me it doesn’t.
Seeing a sample rate on the dac isn’t helpfull as you have 16/44 and 24/44s.
It’s actually when they started converting redbooks (Warner releases) I left the ship.
B.T.W. “Mqa-cd” are also crap (also 16 bit)
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Qobuz is cheaper if you choose to pay annually. When I looked into changing my streaming service a couple of years ago I found that Qobuz didn’t have a lot of the music I listen to but a lot more jazz which I listen to fairly frequently.
When I looked recently, things had improved dramatically and I made the switch from Tidal.
The gap seems to be narrowing at a fast pace!
FWIW I don’t like MQA as I see it as a money grab and Qobuz content sounds better to my ears, on my system, in my room.
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