I’ve to disagree DSP is Roon’s limitation when it comes to MQA, all these can be bypass when decoding back MQA. Audirvana and Tidal apps are two good examples. My guess is MQA is giving priority on hardware licensing for now.
we dont want to bypass them, we dont want to disable them at all.
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Good to hear that Danny!
And many of us just don’t care about them. (DSP that is)
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We design for what we think will make a good product, even if that means you have to wait.
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Yes, I’m sure this is the contentious point. MQA WILL have to cede or die in my opinion.
Exactly. If I were using room correction and it gets disabled with an MQA file, it would be for me a deal breaker.
MQA not allowing for DSP is the stupidest fecking thing… Brain dead.
Also I will add that MQA is creating a lot of bad blood for their unwavering stance regarding licensing. I for one will not purchase an MQA file until I know for a fact that both the tech is flexible and the copyright holders are not lunatics. So far neither is proven to be the case.
I’ve discovered that in my listening room, playing a cd derived file downconverted to mp3 128kbps with room correction applied is far more involving than the same track in MQA played from Tidal’s desktop - obviously without room correction.
I occasionally listen to MQA on headphones and love it, but the benefits of room correction far outweigh that of a “pure” MQA track.
100% agreed. This is a deal breaker for us too.
No one said they did not allow anything. We have not been denied anything at all. It’s slow going as @James_I guessed correctly, but everything is on the table still.
licensing is their only mechanism to make money… would you deny them that? they’ve made it clear they aren’t doing this for free.
chill out man, you wouldn’t call them that to their faces, let’s not devolve here.
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Guess, MQA implementation inside Roon is going to take a while, may be longer than expected. Until there’s an official announcement, I don’t hope for anything for now.
Let enjoy the music with a beer, ‘Without Music, Life Would Be A Mistake’ - Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Yeah sorry I get a little carried away about this.
COMPLETELY agree people should make money off of their work. I for one am an advocate of rebuying high quality software - Audirvana being one example - because I think developers get too little money for the continuous support and upgrades they provide. I’m also a fan of the subscription model (although I am a lifetime Roon user).
MQA has many venues to make money, from licensing the encoding to record labels to decoding - hardware and software. My impression so far is that they are trying to squeeze every drop possible out of licensing, and they have the right to do this, in principle. However, it could also result in MQA never really becoming mainstream. There’s a balance to be had there. That is my point.
Additionally, I think it is deceiptful for them to insist it is about the quality of the music rather than the size of the licensing revenue. That kind of double face drives me mad.
And one more point: If studios start releasing material in MQA only, their right to hold people hostage to their licensing becomes more questionable.
miguelito, where have you ever heard or read the marketing strap line “because it makes us filthy rich!”
We all know love is a great reason to do something, as is genuine altruism but at the end of the day MQA has to strike a balance between cash and longevity in order to satisfy their investors. That is the same for any business, even our Roon ‘buddies’. They are there to pay the mortgage, as are we. And if it leads to a yacht in the Carribbean then great for them!
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And for the record, I have listened to MQA quite a bit, and overall I have found that MQA recordings do provide, on average, better sound quality. This is not always the case. Some examples of where it is better are most of the Joni Mitchel re-releases. Some crappy recordings that I love will remain just as crappy though - Morrissey’s Viva Hate being one example (1).
I am not an MQA denier, on the contrary. I listened to MQA at Meridian in March 2015 for the first time. Impressive. The differences were so stark in what they played for us that I deem it to be the result of remastering more than anything MQA. But I don’t care! If the MQA logo is a guarantee of max possible quality, then so be it! I’m fine with that.
I want to be able to play MQA on my iPhone. I want to get home and play MQA on Roon. I want simplicity and universality. I will not switch to the Android platform just because MQA has struck a deal with them and not with Apple.
So I will reiterate what I said: If the licensing aspect of MQA does not get simpler, it will simply die a slow death. What a bore!
(1) Also begs the question of the provenance. The vinyl version of Viva Hate sounds so much more lush and involving than any of the digital versions I have (MQA or otherwise).
Get it! MQA has a lot of licensing venues, from record companies to streaming, etc.
My point is very simple: I’d rather collect 1% licensing on a market of 10bn USD than 10% licensing on a dwindling market of 100mm USD!!!
Can we stay focused on Roon supporting MQA rather than MQA Limited’s business model (there are other more general MQA topics for that).
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If this happens and I can still not play MQA (with RC etc) easily in Roon I’ll simply not buy the locked in music
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You can already play MQA. Just not at the highest resolution.
You mean the un-decoded ‘compatible’ file?
Correct, you can still play the 24bit file (44KHz or 48KHz) but studies by technical people on CA have showed that those files are slightly inferior to a redbook file.
There is also some work to backward engineer the first unfold - most notably Auralic has done this already. I don’t know whether the quality of this is comparably to MQA Co’s unfold binaries on Tidal or Audirvana.