I’m hanging for Quboz, or Spotify lossless to be available in Oz.
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No Spotify in Australia or is that the lossless streaming you’re waiting for? I thought Spotify were everywhere.
I was referring to lossless
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I dont think Spotify lossless is anywhere out yet is it? It has only been announced.
Be patient, it looks like Qobuz already started their test in Oz and invites only for now.
I hate been patient, it takes too long…
Well, MQA recent news are far from disappointing me today:
Alibaba Officially Shuts Down Xiami Music App After 12 Years, the biggest proponent of MQA in China, and huge hope for Meridian.
The only way right now to get MQA in Chinese market is running Tidal over VPN.
Jack Dorsey acquired Tidal to bring performing artists under the Square umbrella, the last thing he cares about is batch converting existing music libraries into “authenticated” format. Authenticated in batch…if anyone is paying attention
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It seems that on every forum I’m on, the general idea seems to be for mqa to please go away. I remember a few years ago and I think the general audiophile crowd was much more supportive of it. Not anymore. Comments from forums like this, YouTube comments reddit and quora.
I remember Michael Fremer saying that now that he heard Mqa, he couldn’t buy a dac without it. Those comments were from a video in 2017 or 16. I wonder what he thinks today.
Perhaps the access media in audio still are behind it while the people have become apathetic to it.
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Have you got a link to those thoughts of Jack Dorsey?
I’m pretty sure Jack’s got that covered, but it’s not cheap, no matter how banal the thought 
If he has any sense of the market and his livelihood he has wiped the egg off his face and is ignoring it - or in our case as Roon users clicking “versions”, clicking the real PCM, clicking…clicking…clicking…
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I remember that, reading those articles, of which the most humiliating for the author and ignorant was http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/let-the-revolution-begin/ by Robert Harley, who obviously knows more about audio than most people but it was not about audio. He was comparing MQA to a Copernican model of solar system, and the general theory of relativity, I am not kidding. MQA has a component of technical invention, and from this point of view the merits of sound, filters etc could be a subject of enjoyable discussion.
But the main push was to make it the only format for music creation and distribution, which means the only format big labels would make their music available. And that failed, and yes, it is a good news, very good news.
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Hello Andre, tnx for this contribution! The analogy to cosmology is very interesting. That is the first time I heard about this comparison. To me MQA is rather trying to solve issues with General Relativity with Newton’s math. MQA was an ingenious compression solution for high res audio streaming to the problem ADSL bandwidth limitations 15 years ago . In the meantime the problem has disappeared and the solution is not needed any longer. In many countries you could stream DSD these days.
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Great analogy, is like the ether theory to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment and constant speed of light.
I was just wondering something else the other day: isn’t MQA infringing on FLAC open source-like licensing terms when it charges money for whatever required MQA “certification” while at the same time packaging their files in FLAC containers?
Not at all, there’s a common mis-conception that open source means free, and that’s not the case at all. Open source licensing is a genuinely complex issue, particularly compatibility between licenses, but the FLAC container is very permissively licensed.
FLAC is a free codec in the fullest sense. This page explicitly states all that you may do with the format and software.
The FLAC and Ogg FLAC formats themselves, and their specifications, are fully open to the public to be used for any purpose (the FLAC project reserves the right to set the FLAC specification and certify compliance). They are free for commercial or noncommercial use. That means that commercial developers may independently write FLAC or Ogg FLAC software which is compatible with the specifications for no charge and without restrictions of any kind. There are no licensing fees or royalties of any kind for use of the formats or their specifications, or for distributing, selling, or streaming media in the FLAC or Ogg FLAC formats.
I am a lawyer and am fully aware of the difference - I just thought that, as part of FLAC’s terms, they required NON-commercial use of such containers. But as you indicate above, that requirement does not exist. So my question may be disregarded.
When someone asks a simple question on the “mqa development” fb page …
he gets banned from it.
Apparently it’s too hard for mqa to admit that you are already paying for the first unfold
as software that “unfolds” has to pay $ to mqa.
You want more unfold? then you buy yourself an mqa dac and you pay more $ to mqa.
I don’t see any pcm where I have to pay for the full quality (and even better quality)
Mqa = rip off
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Can you explain compatibility issues between GPL and Apache licenses to me then? Serious question…
The answer may be found here: Apache License v2.0 and GPL Compatibility
I would tend to agree with the ASF’s understanding, as I do not think the mere linking of two pieces of software should/would create a derivative work under any copyright statutes.