Very well said @ William_Allbrook and agree. However, what seems to be CONTINUALLY side stepped, ignored and “who cares / me me me” mentality is its the business model and what the very possible implications are.
I want a choice to have hi-res, DSD, straight redbook etc… not this lossy, protected, single format (that if all the labels were to buy into that’s all one would have a choice of), have to buy new hardware (wtf), bulk process what all the ME’s have done without their approval, all to give a guy a financial cut based on what HE deems is the sound I should hear? Sorry, kinda of Chevy Chase rant
Why people cannot freaking grasp this is stunning. Its about choice, not “it sounds glorious, I don’t care about the repercussions”.
Will it come to this, I dunno, but the thought of that possibility is undesirable.
Read the bulk of it again, if you can’t get the gist of it sorry. OK, “unthinkable” is a bit much, I fixed it just for you. I’ll use a tongue n cheek emoji for the sensitive next time.
Sorry @Swisstrips it wasn’t the strength of feeling it was more the hint of contradiction. It simply made me wonder if anything unthinkable could be a thought. It’s been a long day and the quote made me chuckle is all. Your feelings very much mirror my own.
Yeah I get it, and not the best use of that description - totally my bad and can see individuals rolling their eyes.
It was a quick post and I’ll make sure to re-read my post before next time. Certainly not real world problems, so far from it. My perspective is from the art / craft of it, so I’m a bit passionate in that regard.
Help me out here. There are any number of scare stories about how MQA is bad for the industry, the customer, etc. but I don’t really understand it. I pay for Tidal and I get MQA for the same price as CD quality. I generally think MQA sounds better than CD quality so I normally listen to it first. So what are the dangers to me, others, and the industry?
MQA Corp. “turns on it’s DRM”. I’m not even sure what this means, but presumably all past purchases of MQA encoded music still play correctly. MQA streaming via, say, Tidal continues to work.
MQA Corp. raises its licensing price to equipment manufacturers. Equipment theoretically costs a tad more, but the license fee is such a small part of what audiophiles pay for equipment, it’s likely not a big deal. If they raise the price a lot, equipment manufacturers rebel and stop licensing MQA.
Tidal raises the price of its MQA subscription. I either feel like it’s worth the benefit and continue paying monthly or I don’t think it’s worth it and I fall back to CD quality. I’ve not lost any value for money already spent as I’m not buying music, I’m renting it monthly.
All music sold is in MQA format. This seems really unlikely. Most music sold today is in one of several formats and we still have CD quality and hi-res lossless available. It’s a niche market and will continue to be. I don’t see one format to rule them all, especially not MQA. (unless we all stare into the eye of Sauron, i.e. Bob S,)
Where is this idea that all music will be in MQA format and we’ll all have to buy new equipment, etc. coming from? It just seems so unlikely to me. There is a thriving (although niche) market in selling a variety of formats. I don’t mean to ignite another flame war. So just fill me in on what the “disaster” scenario is and why it’s anything more than a far-fetched possibility.
What are the goals of MQA? To continue hemeraging money so some Tidal subscribers can get it for free with their cd quality subscription?
What are the high res distribution goals of the labels? To continue to distribute the best quality to a niche market and having it just end up on pirate sites?
They labels have already $bought$ in both the sense you meant it (as a market strategy - one encoding to rule them all) and as actual investors. Can anyone recall the percentages? Going from memory, MQA Ltd. is about a 1/3 owned by the majors (going from memory).
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
1081
Second best post of all time on this forum.
Great post, deserved to be repeated. Some people may be threatened by “the sound.” I’m not. I don’t want end-to-end anything like this. I don’t care if it’s on Tidal. I just listened to an MQA Bowie album. Sounded fine to me. I still don’t want One Format to Rule Them All.
To what end? Why would this be about preying on the gullible?
I believe Auralic doesn’t reverse engineer but they did this by using SoX simulation. It doesn’t have the capability to detect MQA signals at all but rely on MQA tags in the file for identification.
Even though MQA filter may be slightly different from HQP ‘MQA filter’, they all belong to a class of non-linear filter and doesn’t delay all frequencies by the same amount to maximally preserve the waveshape.
A few people have asked about Community rules and moderation. This is my view, other mods may see things differently:
[Industry figure/Company X] is [pejorative Y]. Posts in this form will usually survive unless they are obscene, egregiously insulting or appear intended mainly to foment dissension.
[Group of users/people] are [Y]. Posts in this form are hostage to fortune. If they divert discussion or attract flags they are likely to be removed. They are more likely to survive if they are reasoned and advance debate, less likely if they are inflammatory distractions.
[User X] is [Y]. Posts in this form are likely to be removed as personal attacks.
I’ll share a use case I’m experiencing this week while away on travel. I’m staying at a hotel and subject to the convenient but awful wifi service that is typical of hotels. I queued some music on my laptop using Qobuz but the high-res version just won’t stream well given the limited bandwidth and is unusable. I load up the Tidal app and I have no issues streaming MQA versions of the same master. Both sound the same to me but MQA streams flawlessly while the high-res version stalls and skips every 5 seconds. I found the same behavior when using Roon on my laptop.
So, for this use case, MQA is infinitely better for me than even high-resolution PCM.
I was in a similar position before upgrading my weaksauce Australian NBN plan to more than the 20 Mbps reccomended by Qobuz for hi-def streaming. MQA worked fine when 96kHz was iffy and 128kHz unlistenable.
