Those people who like Tidal and MQA will see this announcement favorably. Those that don’t like Tidal and MQA don’t actually need to respond. There is no need to bash MQA in every single thread that is about MQA.
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I think you are missing the forrest for the trees. The salient point is that the A and the blue MQA light is supposed to mean you have an unmodified “blessed” file. Since there are countless examples (I could pooint you to many more) of people who have made the blue lightl light after modifying a MQA file, this core premise of MQA has been proven false.
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Yes, and now they are even better via MQA. I have listened to a good few recently and not found them wanting.
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That’s the first I have heard of it. If you want to jailbreak the code, that’s fine. Not legal, but fine. If I stream from Tidal I know the source is good. If your intension is to pass off the Music as genuine MQA, that’s fraud and the police should be involved.
Just adding a blue light won’t make it sound better.
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What’s your point? Why does it matter where in the 24 bit word the metadata bits are positioned? If they were placed at the 22nd bit or anywhere else for that matter, you could still strip the 2 lower bits and have a functional light. The remainder of the encryption is difficult to hack - as your AS hacker friends attested. You can also modify any data stream, e.g. 192 k/24b, AAC, or DSD and destroy or substitute the content. No one is actively doing that to our collective knowledge, and it’s unclear why anyone would.
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DSP can truncate word length. Transport protocols and input/output interfaces can truncate word length. Plenty of black boxes are “actively doing that” with or without our knowledge.
But MQA offers a reassuring little blue light – that actually provides little reassurance of unaltered authenticity. No matter, because MQA in truth is a lot more about psychological influence, a lot less about audio engineering.
AJ
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A truncation like what you’re talking about will unequivocally end MQA decoding. An MQA capable DAC will show it as PCM, not as MQA. I’ve seen various examples, though not one where anyone intentionally sheared off the low byte. Sorry about your final sentence, but MQA is a very substantial bit of audio engineering.
By the way, as far as DSP truncating the word length, the reason why MQA tries to keep the system closed with testing and approval required for DACs is to try to prevent a lot of additional random processing. Part of their rationale is that they’ve seen DACs with strange internal processing that compromises quality, and their algorithm aims to keep a clean transparent pathway.
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No wonder every other track on TIDAL now shows up in MQA… 
No complaints…
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And in your last sentence, you apparently do not understand that I made a comparison. Call it a proportion, if you will.
MQA and high end audio in general have jumped the shark and become far less about providing fidelity. Fidelity basically became a non issue years ago. Now, MQA and the high end are largely about selling philosophies. Often, specious philosophies that invent problems first in order to invent solutions to those so called problems. But old male audiophiles clinging to belief systems developed during a past golden age around 1980-2010 and old male audio journalists playing out the string are buying and/or selling those philosophies hook, line, and sinker. Because they fear missing out. Because they desire to stave off justified obsolescence of their hobby/industry.
In other words, psychology.
AJ
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AJ,
Offered perhaps as a coda to your comment - those of us who are audio engineers couldn’t see things more oppositely. In fact there is a great deal of desire to work for fidelity, especially to reverse the loss in fidelity in the industry due to adoption of low bit rate codecs, loudness wars, trends to convenience over quality, and similar. It’s an uphill battle and I’m happy to have seen the MQA people convince the labels to find and use the best available source. That enhances more accountable provenance.
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You write as if MQA has solved the provenance issue. And yet so many Loudness War remasters have gotten the MQA treatment. How are those sources the “best available”?
And as a self reported audio engineer, what is your connection to MQA? Because you post almost exclusively in MQA threads. Your provenance matters, too.
AJ
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You haven’t seen my other posts then. I’m not associated with MQA. However I’ve posted here only recently, and about MQA specifically because there are so many wrong and negative ideas about it; it would be nice to see some legitimate defense of a strong effort toward quality.
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Yes, a lot of negative ideas about MQA, many of which are not wrong because they are provable facts. Whether positive or negative, however, is a matter of opinion.
You seem to hold a lot of animosity toward the ComputerAudiophile “hackers” who posted digital forensic analysis and reverse engineering of MQA encoding and hardware. That comes across as envy of their ability and knowledge, or you have an interest in MQA to protect. I really do not know why you should be against that level of transparency. Pulling back the curtain to reveal the wizard, to show what MQA is and is not has been illuminating information for all.
AJ
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Moderators have removed posts about other posters. Please talk about the topic title and audio not each other.
It’s a bug - you can search the term in google.
There is no hardware or software that is bug free.
Did they reverse engineered the MQA encoding???
Are you really sure about that??
I don’t think so. The only way to reverse engineer it is to have the MQA encoder.
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Reverse engineered the MQA minimum phase digital filter impulse responses.
AJ
I just spent an afternoon comparing Tidal MQA songs to Qobuz Hires songs with my Non-MQA DAC (Denafrips Ares II) and Roon oversampling. Stopped my Tidal Subscription and moved to Qobuz. I also tried the full MQA un-folding with my Node 2i. Still preferred Qobuz Flac songs.
I am using Roon from multiple end points and it would be also unpractical to get MQA capable devices everywhere. I find it unfortunate the Tidal is moving to this lossy format in their Master “hires” offering.
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I’ve only had Tidal for a little over a year, but did Tidal ever have high resolution other than MQA? I have a little over 1000 albums in Tidal and they are all either MQA or CD quality. Isn’t this just a huge increase to their MQA offering? I don’t think we’re losing anything.
Never ceases to amaze me that people are comparing “SQ” of Tidal, MQA, Qobuz, whatever, when applying all sorts of Roon and non-Roon oversampling, DSP, blah blah.
Honestly, SMFH.