With your dCS, your not listening to pure MQA - your listening to a hybrid. dCS is applying it’s own filtering scheme. Still, your point would apply in large part if you had a pure MQA DAC…
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Wrong! This hobby only exists due to the music.
Same DRM BS.
Again makes no sense. You want to point at something that isn’t here.
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Wrong! The hobby exists due to music, the means of the hobby is engineering, electronics, analogue, digital, software, etc. These things are not judged by radical subjectivism.
Again, radical subjectivism makes no sense in relation to digital software such as MQA. MQA is DRM, it begins and ends with a proprietary “end to end” scheme. Even MQA Ltd. admit this - it’s their main selling point…
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No wonder you don’t enjoy MQA. You are in the hobby for the wrong reasons.
You continue to rail against everything but what counts and that is the sound. Those of us who enjoy the option of listening to ~15,000 releases with SQ better in almost all cases than 16/44.1 will continue to do so. For us, the sky isn’t falling. The best part of it is many of us haven’t had to pay one nickel more to experience this option.
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Of course you have. There is no free lunch. You have paid in several ways, but the most important one is opportunity cost…
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It is unfortunate that marketing division made a serious mistake of saying it is better than the original masters (Lossless is one of their dubious claims). Ironically if they compared to MP3 and CD at that time, things would not had spiral out of control. They are over confident and many claims are not technically proven in a full prospective manner (they only claimed the advantages).
Just imagine they (desperately) have to incorporate decoding on Tidal app (both free in iOS and Android without any form of licensing to the phones manufacturers 
) and most phones just re-sampled to miserable 48kHz when using the built-in DACs. One has to go to an extent of hooking up an external DAC; in layman terms who actually does this in general public?
Tidal is the only one does this, not Qobuz, Spotify Apple Music and others. If this really sound so good to be true, why after more than 4 years, no big takers come onboard? This pretty sad and disappointing situation. This is niche market adoption and will continue to do so for a long long time until something better come along and replace it.
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Begs the question why the paranoia (ie is this just a boring campaign)
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https://www.mqa.co.uk/customer/news/post/dcs-launch
Bob Stuart seem to think, the dCS implementation of the MQA filter is close enough ….
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I’m sure it is. And I’m sure it sounds great! dCS kit is beautiful. Enjoy! 
Just remember on this thread, no matter how many times you say that MQA may sound good to you, there will be someone there to try and ‘shoot you down’. Some contributors on this thread have an ‘anti-MQA’ agenda. I would just advise you not to get into protracted discussions with them. It goes nowhere. I’ve now learnt to ignore naysayers, and just enjoy the discussion. Without them.
And just ENJOY the music, no matter which format you use!
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I guess that’s the point many here seem to have a hard time with.
There are albums, such as the one I mentioned, where the MQA version pales in comparison to the physical CD.
The difference is not subtle. Obviously different masters.
Interesting I should land in the pro MQA camp now.
Jokes aside. My position is that MQA is technologically impressive, managing to squeeze almost the same result out of a file a quarter of the size.
It definitely has its merits in streaming, where bandwidth is not free and abundant.
I usually prefer to listen to the uncompressed PCM, as it sounds more natural to me. There are a number of MQA files that simply sound as if they had overdone makeup on them and the PCM (dare I say) original sounds more natural to me.
Its all a question of degree though. The Jackson Browne stuff usually sounds better to my ears in MQA off Tidal than my PCM downloads, but I am quite sure that has nothing to do with MQA as a technology, but with the way the remastering for Tidal was done.
Lets all enjoy our music. I don’t really care which format it is delivered in.
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‘Here, bloody here!’ 
Actually, you got me thinking. What would be interesting (but probably the subject of a different thread) is sharing experiences about albums that do sound very different in the different formats.
Had I only ever listened to the MQA or SACD version of Shelby Lynne, I would have thought the album is so so. That master simply does not transport the emotionality of the recording well. The CD does so in spades and is a gem in my collection.
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It’s actually 60-70% of the size not 25%.
You are of course right, Doctor, I stand corrected, sorry
Kent Nagano - Alpensinfonie MQA/flac: 515MB = 67% of
Kent Nagano - Alpensinfonie 24/96/flac: 768MB
I forgot that MQA files don’t compress anymore when FLACed, as they are already compressed.
The size reduction is bigger when comparing 24/352.8kHz FLACs with their MQA counterparts, but then we start to open another can of worms ….
It’s the folded data that doesn’t compress as well compared to the lesser content in that frequency range in a regular 24/96 file.
Yes, 24/352.8 is irrelevant as MQA can’t deliver anything greater than 24/96.
Chose your words carefully, Doctor.
The MQA god will haunt your dreams and claim that the MQA container is filled with indispensable gold, as opposed to the regular file, which contains mainly discardable junk.
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MQA is like those products on the shelf that say “50% More!” 
Given the thread topic this shouldn’t be the biggest suprise in the world . I’d count myself in the against camp because of a strong personal and professional preference for open file formats. Even if the sound quality improvements were remarkable I’d be a tough sell unless something like this was available for MQA.
This is a great idea for a thread. I have some hi-res downloads that disappoint compared to the CD rips they were supposed to supersede. Seeing where people agree and disagree would be interesting and the thread might prove useful for anyone considering a purchase.
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I imagine the list will be rather long when it comes to disappointing hi-res downloads. That said, you can find long threads discussing just this on the Hoffman forums.
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The whole “mastering” question - the what, how, when, who of differing masterings - is covered in several places. Like @DrTone notes, Hoffman exists for this very reason.
Yes, MQA has obviously leveraged the ambiguity, in essence claiming for itself (or allowing others to) what are in fact mastering improvements (or not depending upon your taste).
Good point about this. MQA’s business model is obviously designed to prevent just such a thing (i.e. NDA’s, etc.)