Talking about Audiophiles, I have friends who go to so much quality live music that it puts me to shame and they don’t own a stick of Hi Fi equipment. Cd’s from gigs get played in the car. They are Audiophiles IMHO.
You know… I go to many live events, and it is not always a great listening experience. At times, I prefer what I get at home.
PS: The premium alcohol at home vs a crappy sauv blanc certainly helps!
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That’s the problem and why I put ‘Quality’ in the text. It’s always a great disappointment when the sound is bad. Personally I am lucky to be involved in hosting live music and great artists and sound is our thing. It does spoil us for what we do go and see live now, but when they get it right (like the recent Gretchen Peters gig at Union Chaple Islington) there is little to touch it.
Getting good live sound is becoming a hot topic these days and there is no real excuse.
This article from my friend Jay Stapley is very interesting from a musician and producers point of view.
A friend of mine went to a pretty exclusive The xx concert at the Armory in NYC with ~50 people per show (I still hate him for that). After he told me that he much preferred their sound at my place! Ha! I still hate him for that.
Lol, you can’t win…
Pretty smart… but don’t go twisting this around.
Everybody knows what the talk is about…
Well, that’s about it for right now.
Joel - I think reasonable that I (lifetime susbscriber here) would need to pay which extra which should at the least recover costs incurred on new software and R&D development - MQA is patented delivery solution for audio and I have no issues from them expecting licensing fees to recover costs and create an additional revenue stream
The issue is I suspect is that not all Roon clients would commit to pay extra for the MQA solution - I hope there business model where we can pay like a “add-on” fee for additional features, however this maybe problematic as it may not be sufficiently economic for both you and MQA in terms of numbers of users paying.
How much would I pay? I would be happy to pay a figure that is equal to paying for a new MQA enabled DAC or more if I can play it via Devialet (happy not to have MQA in my musical fidelity DAC in the other room). But I do respect that it has to be commercially viable business model for both ROON and MQA and I think the economics maybe better with passage of time with customer demand - TIDAL streaming has been an excellent boost for MQA branding in the broad sense. I am waiting to see how the market unfolds before I make my spend in this area, suffice to say I think it is best hi fidelity solution which incorporates streaming which is absolutely brilliant in my opinion (muck like watching 4K content on Netflix as opposed to blu ray player) - I rarely listen to my large SACD / DVD-A collection and can’t wait to listen to this on TIDAL.
Unfortunately not many Roon users are willing to fork out additional fee just to playback decoded MQA, a thread was setup recently to collect the responses and was later closed - what a dismayed…
As a Tidal HiFi subscriber, Tidal Master is bundled together, that’s the reason I’m asking for it otherwise I really don’t care about MQA in the first place.
i must have missed that thread, have been travelling plenty of late - that is a real shame as we cannot expect either the Roon and MQA to roll this out for gratis, they are commercial enterprise who are entitled to recoup costs and make money - I hope MQA is commercially successful which in time may allow for them to consider a business model for their licensing fee which is viable for Roon. Also we should not forget that the Roon team has added so many new features which has usurped their labour hours and they have not charged us additional fees - that is very generous of them - my view is that lifetime subscriber should not expect new features for a “lifetime” as our subscription was for a base level Roon package - ultimately for us subscribers if we want to see development and innovation here someone has to pay. Well looks like I will be spending on a MQA ready hardware solution!
Well, I guessed that’s their ultimate goal… buy a MQA DAC. Sorry, I don’t buy into it (format) as I already own a good DAC.
I’m curious to what drives you to this point. I’m not making judgement here, just curious as to market conditions that get you to this point.
- Are you in the market for a new DAC and MQA is just a no-brainer feature to require?
- Are you in a financial situation where the new DAC is a minor purchase, so why not?
- Are you in need of being able to decode MQA where you are sure you will get a SQ bump on certain media you already have identified?
- Something else?
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Maybe one of the reasons that MQA requires fee from every ROON users, not only the Revenue will be growing with ROON user growth, also increase the headcount of installed base via MQA technology come with every ROON software, that’s very favorable for further MQA marketing , no matter you like it or not, or use it or not, the choice is not up to the User, that’s very clear for now.
Not to answer for the Roon team, but @danny posted elsewhere that the add-on fee is no longer under consideration: Are you willing to pay for full MQA decoding in Roon?
Then I’m afraid I vote for no MQA in Roon. I care more about Roon’s susteinability that Bob Stuart’s.
MQA will fail if it doesn’t moderate it’s ambitions. Noone needs MQA.
Can you define need?
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I don’t think anyone has to define need, it is self evident. Want? Different story, sure. But need, clearly no.
Funny you say that, because the same argument that no one needs it can be applied to a lot of things.
For instance, high res in general, high end hifi and most things related to hifi.
So unless you define need in this context, it has no valuable meaning.
What I mean is I don’t see any of the technical claims as truly valid, including the streaming bandwidth claim. From a quality standpoint, there’s no need for MQA. From a bandwidth standpoint, a 18bit/96KHz file would have effectively identical quality and about the same bandwidth.
But I should add: if MQA has the side effect of, on average getting better quality streaming, then lets go for it. But there’s NOTHING, in my opinion, that grants the licensing charges.
What I would really like Roon to consider is the pseudo-MQA unfolding that Auralic is using. I don’t know if that is open source or not.
Thanks for clarifying. 