Since it is waste of space why we, audiophile stride for high resolution? I think 16/44.1 FLAC will play nicely to you?
You are right. It does. And none of the blind tests I attended could prove the benefit of higher resolutions for my ears.
My guess for an answer to the question âwhy we, audiophile stride for high resolutionâ is, that we search for something that brings back the magic we experience in our earlier years by hearing this particular album the first time.
But in this time it was the music and not the technologies what brings the magic.
In my youth I have some of the best hearing experiences from some tape decks and you will agree with me that this was not the best technology for music playback.
But itâs all about the music not the devices to playback.
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Hahaha! Spot on man! I totally agreed, it is music that brings out the magic not so much on the technology 
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Hoorah for some consensus here, it is all about the music. Somthing Bob Stuart stressed to me when I met him on a Meridian factory tour. I was being apologetic about not have the latest tech. Nope he didnât try to sell me anything but stressed âItâs all about the musicâ.
Being lucky enough to assist in hosting live music at the fabulous âLive at Little Rabbit Barnâ where we film and record all the shows for the artists (Examples are available on our YouTube channel) I can attest to this. I get to enjoy close up encounters with many and varied independant artists from across the world who stun me with their talents.
This live experience through our Mackie digital PA system run by professional sound engineers has been the greatest Hi Fi upgrade in my life.
This doesnât mean the search for the best delivery systems is not valid. I can tell you that most, if not all musicians are very fussy about their sound and how itâs heard. When they compliment us on our work we feel very pleased as we understand they donât compliment lightly.
So, bring on MQA but also get out to support live music.
Chris 
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âWhat Is Up With MQAâ
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Would the entire Warner back catalogue suffice ?
The entire Warner catalogue?
From what I can see he only released twelve albumsâŚ
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You sound like that is a good thing.
It is not!
How does âthe WHOLE back catalogueâ fits with the arguments that MQA is best quality because it is in involved in the whole production process beginning in the recording studio? That will they do with 50 year old bad sounding recordings there the master tapes are lost or in bad shape? Start an expensive restoration process for EVERY album?
The WHOLE back catalogue sounds like a simple batch conversion. The try to sell you the same old albums again, like with the CD and SACD and âŚ
And if itâs true a really stupid one.
And the next bubble is bursting.
@AE67 Do you honestly think that Warner are going to submit their Crown Jewel recordings to a fully automated process? Do you really think that this is a ârecentâ and quick activity?
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What if they have been preparing it for the last 3 years using detailed info about ALL the equipment used in the recording and mastering sessions and applying that to the MQA correction profiles.
Suggest you find the ignore setting and just wait for releases that do satisfy.
Yes⌠I do think it is a good thing.
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You should probably boast about that when it actually gets under way. Warner having âcommittedâ to it really means nothing until they actually do it.
Launching a new format, especially one that is touted as âend to endâ is a pretty darn hard thing to do. It is harder if you consider that itâs a locked format - ie it requires special hardware and the spec is not open source.
Compare this with SACD: This format was designed started by possibly the most important and powerful company in the media+tech world. It fizzled around for quite a while. Without the existence of DSD files, I venture it would be completely dead right now. Meridian does NOT have the muscle Sony has, so I wonder how this is going to play out. They are not making it any easier on them by not allowing decoding into a PCM stream to use in a regular DAC.
As for remastering⌠I see value in remastering old material for which master tapes exist. But this is a tedious process if you really want to follow the MQA paradigm, and frankly I donât see streaming services or end users paying for this. Fewer and fewer people are buying albums, and I certainly donât need another copy of most of the albums I own (ok maybe Kind Of Blue and a few others).
So I think MQA has a pretty darn steep road ahead of them. In my opinion, they should relax the decoding part of the equation.
I would say wishful thinking⌠In any case that would take them more than 3 years and Iâm pretty sure they donât even have all the information for everything they have. And in many cases, the final mix is combination of content from many different ADCs. Or for example like in the case Pink Floydâs The Endless River - even mixture of different original sampling rates.
Given that Iâve already got clear 44.1k upsamples sold as MQA hires with the blue light on, having something as MQA is not proof of anything.
I would say itâs a plain batch conversion of already existing content.
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This is interesting:
With these two combined, I have strong doubts that Warner would bother to spend lot of man years doing something for the sake of very small audiophile equipment subset capable of decoding it (for unknown time to the future).
Something would really need to be already proven in the market and have majority of the consumer mass-market behind it before they would even bother thinking about such investment. Doing batch conversion is much easier and cheaper, depending on how much they need to pay MQA per track for the conversion. (we need to remember that MQA collects money end-to-end, both from encoding and decoding)
Well if you know better, please enlighten the rest of us
That link just leads to the top of the article for me, but I agree with the first commenter.
No, maybe not for crown jewels. But speaking about âentire Warner back catalogueâ, you donât really believe they did a remastering for ALL recordings in their back catalog? No, in best case for a small portion.
And so the marketing blah about the whole warner back catalogue available as MQA is of no worth and you will end with a lot of expensive MQA releases with zero benefit to the previous releases. And good luck to find the crown jewels between all the garbage.
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Itâs not available is it?
MSB demonstrated one of their DACs with MQA. Was anyone on this forum there to hear it?
Roon and Auralic is no longer listed as [our-partners]
(http://www.mqa.co.uk/customer/our-partners).
I guessed software decoding in Roon is still a long long way to go⌠May or not happen 