I, for one, hear very noticeably higher distortion on MQA, far poorer transients and ambiance, smearing of the sound, and many other shortcomings of MQA. But if you like it, embrace it. I love having all systems available, and hope numerous ones succeed and prosper, so we can continue to listen to what WE like. Viva la music!
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I concur. I feel the same way.
Wow, just wow
Who do You think pays for the extra development hours(weeks, Months) that goes into developing DACs that have MQA implemented ?
Who do You think pays for the fees that manufacturers have to pay for each sold unit ?
Who do You think pays for the MQA processing of each album ?
Well it certainly ain’t Me. I will never ever support any company that tries to fool their customers by adding/selling any MQA (capable) product.
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Fortunately up 'till now these costs have been absorbed by those who provide my gear and music. No costs have been passed on. It nice to know that some manufacturers understand what their customers want.
Please continue to support whomever you desire. Just glad you and the other MQA haters have absolutely no impact as to whether MQA ultimately succeeds or fails.
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Mods have deleted a post that strayed into personal attack and responses. Please talk about the ideas, not the person.
It may sound ‘real’ to you but don’t forget these are processed sound done through MQA DSP. You may not be listening to actual recording. This may be your personal preference but you can’t say for certain that it can be applied for everyone.
There’s no take up for MQA and it is slowly fading away, like it or not, even Amazon music embraces lossless studio masters, the rest like Spotify and Apple Music may in the future follow the same path. There’s no complicated tie up, in both software and hardware implementation.
What ever happens, I am enjoying my music with a sound quality that’s sounds as close to having musicians in my room as I can imagine. The detail, the space and the urge to play just one more piece, tells me all I need to know. The shear joy of it all.
Meridian achieve this with or without MQA but MQA, in my experience, is a good step up.
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Don’t know if this was mentioned before. Interesting read
http://bobtalks.co.uk/blog/white-glove/white-glove-1-carl-nielsen-piano-music/
In this example the MQA guys have shown that it is indeed possible to take a fingerprint of recording equipment and correct its deficiencies after the fact. The technology does seem to do what it promises. Listening to ist now (on Qobuz, in MQA). Impressive.
I don’t believe this is what was done in the case of the thousands of MQA “remasters”. I assume for practical reasons they must surely just do cookie cutter encodings of regular highres remasters. White Glove would not be possible, as the recording chain is rarely as puristic as in the example above. So MQA does not have any fingeprint to improve the master with.
You can get the originals of those on Qobuz without the MQA “magic”.
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The white glove for Fairytales took nearly 2 years. They are investing in limited crown jewel masterings for obvious marketing reasons, but, albums like Van Halen’s are all just bulk encoding.
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It is nostalgic going back to basic; listening to unaudultrated PCM and DSD are shear of joy. These are pure masters which are intended to be heard from the studios right at your home.
I always thought that MQA has a chance of survival if one of the big players adopts it.
Now with Amazon moving to pure pcm HD, chances for MQA are rather diminishing.
I think Spotifiy and Apple have to follow Amazon Music sooner than later in offering HD music and be it just for marketing reasons.
It doesn’t look very bright for Tidal and MQA, being the only one in town offering a lossy HD format and asking a premium price.
I presume you meant tidal and mqa?
Yes, indeed. i meant Tidal.
Encoding PCM masters to MQA is not free and MQA Ltd charge considerable fee for it. Adopting pure PCM masters remove the so called ‘middle man’ which helps to keep overall cost down. Moreover, at the consumer end, DACs are more cheaper to make (no licensing fee) and have better compatibility across the board. Overall, this is healthy for the music industry. Thank goodness, it is now very obvious 
I have to say, after long back and forth, last week I made the switch from Tidal to Qobuz. To be fair, I did not really hear a difference between a “half-decoded through Roon only MQA” and the equivalent Hi-Res PCM from Qobuz and I tend to like to Tidal app a little better but I agree with the above points that a non-proprietary solution is better for everyone and therefore I want to support Qobuz in their efforts.
Sorry, I don’t believe it, and no one has reliably shown MQA does it. Bob will do everything he can to convince as many people as he can that MQA is perfect. He is the used car salesman of digital formats.
@Neil_Russell No one is saying MQA always does it. The link only claims that the deficiencies of the old Sony recorder were corrected (with major effort) after the fact in this one case of the Christian Eggen Recording (much like known distortions in a satellite’s camera are corrected after the photo is transmitted to earth).
This is an indication that MQA can do it if the circumstances are right (recording chain still accessible and its fingerprint measurable, puristic recording, money for major effort available). It does not say anything about the quality of the thousands of MQA “masters”, which are just cookie cutter encodings of the same masters you find on Qobuz.
It should also be noted that correcting recording deficiencies and encoding for transmission are two completely different parts of the MQA process.
The more the marketing babble is repeated doesn’t necessarily make it more true. I don’t doubt a round of remastering is done with the “white glove treatment” but beyond that nothing more then choosing the particular filter coefficients to make it sound the “best” when upsampling is about as magical as MQA is.
What in my post are you objecting to @DrTone ?
I have expressed my scepticism about the claims of MQA as a whole many times. It’s a technology primarily designed to reduce streaming bandwith, not to increase quality. The goal is to lose as little quality as possible. That it does quite well. There’s no way it can create a signal more accurate that the original PCM master, as the PCM master is the master we are starting with. Period.
Having said that I do find it at least interesting, that this technology enables (using a white glove treatment) to correct deficiencies of a recording chain after the fact. And the result in this case does sound good. Can’t compare it to the pre-correction version, but still.
You may have noted that there are only two white glove treatments on record, about one every two years. So you need not worry that this becomes widespread and turns MQA into a mass phenomenon. It will probably stay a niche limited to 2L and Tidal (until 2L finally notice it hurts their sales). Quite a closed niche too. You can’t even purchase the 24/48 MQA version of Fairytales. What you can buy from the Tidal Store is 16/44.1 MQA CD at a ridiculous 23 CHF (=23 USD). What a wasted opportunity. I just don’t get these MQA guys.
I guess the notion of fixing original ADC issues. There is really no way to prove MQA is fixing anything with regards to the original ADC after it’s pumped through the hamburger press encoding and then upsamples back to original rates. MQA sells itself on vague marketing terms.
As for the white glove treatment, it sounds just like regular remastering in the PCM domain to me.