Not a variable process.
edit: I realized I did not answer - “neither” is the answer.
This interminable chain of inane absurdities only reinforces my very poor opinion of obsessive audiophiles. Spend more time listening to your wonderful, life affirming music collections and less time ranting about technical ephemera!!! Today MQA, tomorrow what else will you find to distract you???
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People like to argue. It’s a blood sport. Doesn’t mean anything.
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I would have thought even the most hardened audiophile would now have come to the point of being unable to absorb any more MQA claptrap.
It’s only significant distribution is through Tidal and I would have thought that Qobuz USA has resulted in a net loss of Tidal HD subscribers.
I had a look (15 seconds) at the “What is MQA?” blog and didn’t understand a word of it. Am I meant to read that stuff and decide to sell my expensive non-MQA audio system and buy an MQA one?
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Blood Sport (the movie) means everything…
Funny the next post is by Steven Segal 
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No, you’re not. Your expensive DAC is fine and with Roon doing a first unfold on MQA, it will sound great. You don’t need to do anything but enjoy the music. Also you can still enjoy what you enjoy now. So you have no losses, only gains if you want to try MQA. First unfold over CD is a no brainier IMHO.
If you look at the front page of the MQA website, the first thing is says is:
After capturing the performance, MQA folds the file to make it small enough to stream. We call this ‘Music Origami’.
My Qobuz Sublime+ subscription has been providing me a stream of music up to 24/192 resolution since 18 May 2017. In other words, in about a week the MQA folding will have been redundant for about 2 years. So of course I’m going to move from my huge available catalogue of high resolution classical and jazz on Qobuz to a much smaller catalogue of reprocessed lossy filled that I have to buy new hardware to get the full benefit of, whatever that is.
The basic thought I had about MQA when it was first released was that in the early 1980’s people moved from LP to CD because is was so demonstrably better. 99% of customers could work this out for themselves by listening, it needed no one to tell them and only cheap hifi was needed. Some luddites still thought LP was better. All objective testing of MQA has not found any improvement over standard PCM and one excuse is that you need a more expensive audio system.
MQA is only interesting as a vain exercise to create something to license that quickly became redundant and has turned into a slow motion £20million car crash.
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Steven_Segal. You were convincing me about MQA until you started throwing in bigotry about vinyl. For me, that undermined your argument
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I have a record player and listen to vinyl. It has its merits. Just before CD came out Teldec (Telefunken-Decca) were doing superb DMM pressings and I have many of them. However, in a straight fight CD and digital wins hands down. Classical music lovers, who arguably are more discerning of sound quality, dropped vinyl far faster than popular music, it was simply so much better, and there has been no classical vinyl recovery. CD was aimed very much at classical, the main marketing promoter was Herbert von Karajan.
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Incidentally, I record some of my best vinyl in 24/192 using the Devialet usb output and play it back from my Roon server. It sounds just like the vinyl. My view is that the vinyl sound derives from the phono playback chain (vinyl, cartridge, phono pre-amplification) and is effectively independent of the main amplification and whether A/D and D/A takes place. So I enjoy the vinyl sound played back from a digital copy via Roon.
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That’s the way Linn process analogue feeds from their phono inputs on their range of DSM’s/Urika phono stages. It’s digitised at 24/192 at the earliest possible opportunity, before being passed to the D/A & pre-amp stages etc.
I haven’t heard it, but understand it works well.
Indeed, that is the basis of their Exakt technology. All done in the digital domain, and people still buy LP12’s and play them that way. My first streaming system was Linn about 10 years ago. They really are excellent units. Do it that way and you can apply DSP to all sources, not just digital, for speaker correction, room correction etc. Is very much the trend. If I was to say analogue signals are for Luddites I’d probably get complaints.
p.s. and why waste processing power doing Origami? I was rubbish at that.
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Martin_Kelly. That’s exactly what I do in my system. I found that removing the analogue preamp from the chain by digitalising the output from the phono stage after upgrading my Klimax DSM a few years back made an improvement to the sound quality from vinyl. There was an even bigger improvement when I replaced the analogue crossovers with Exaktboxes a year later. I haven’t as yet bought a Urika II digital phono stage, but I have heard one and it is better again.
Steven_Segal. I have compared vinyl records with the equivalent digital version on many occasions and have found that the LP often sounds better than the equivalent ripped CD. Of course, results will depend on the equipment used, but the big variable is the respective mastering of the LP and CD. I don’t believe that even classical music lovers with their more discerning ears can definitively say that one format always produces better sound quality than the other.
These arguments between proponents of one format (or genre) or another are totally futile. All that matters is that we enjoy music.It is certainly out of order calling someone holding a different opinion a Luddite.
As far as MQA is concerned, I am going to reserve judgement until I’ve heard it. In the meantime, I am sceptical of the benefits and suspicious that it will be to our detriment as consumers.
Poor, persecuted, misunderstood vinyl 
That sums it up. The other 1% have spent real $money$ on it, or like MQA’s particular added distortion, or have some other reason for supporting it.
Looks like Napster itself is not into it and the deal is just selling the license to other platforms. In another word, they are desperately in need of $$$ to keep afloat?
I wish I had all this information from contacts inside the various board rooms and over breakfast with the movers and shakers. Or, is it just speculation? Hmmm
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I read Stuart’s blog and learned a lot.
Tidal Masters sound better - to me - than the CD (Redbook) versions. Some sound a lot better. When I close my eyes and do a blind test, they still sound better. I dont have access to a large number of Hi-Res files to do a meaningful comparison to MQA, but with MQA available via Tidal, I doubt I will be making that investment.
My point is that I’ve had access to a (relatively) large number of MQA Masters on Tidal and have concluded it’s a reasonably good deal.
I pay Qobuz an extra $5/month for Hi-Res.
I expect Tidal to raise rates eventually, perhaps even charge a premium for MQA. I will probably subscribe to it. But so far, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to listen to MQA Masters, at zero cost.
I really like the ability to download MQA Masters to my iPhone so I can listen on my headphone rig at work.
I salute Stuart for giving me this chance to enjoy hi-res for free as he pursues his nefarious quest for global music domination. 
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If you close both eyes, isn’t it actually a double blind test then? …
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