Thx for the link to the TIDAL MQA catalog. I presume by audiophile he means recordings that had been made by well known audiophile studios like Reference Recordings, Blue Coast Music and the like. I presume those are the most unlikely to sign up for MQA for a few very good reasons:
1- They are smallish and don’t want to pay the royalties
2- If the MQA encoding requires them to send stuff someplace else to get encoded (which I understand is the case) then they would be reluctant to do that
3- Most of their customers have DAC investments most of which do not decode MQA
I personally don’t buy into the technical claims at all. My interest in MQA is solely on the fact that it might result in higher than redbook quality streaming and more careful mastering. I don’t think the better sound would come from MQA to be honest, what I like is the side effect so to speak.
MQA is really playing a pretty tight game here, I think the probability of them being a funny footnote in 10 yrs is quite high (>50% in my opinion). So they will have to straddle a negotiating stance that is less strict than their current one, in my opinion.
PS: Yes there’s 2L, but there’s hardly anything I would consider in their catalog were it not for MQA. I guess this is a smart move for them since I had no idea they existed prior to their MQA releases! 