Why do manufacturers support MQA?

[wklie (Peter Lie)]

@Yoda

I talked to many vendors of HighEnd DACs and asked why they offer MQA support. Almost everywhere the answer was: because many of our customers use TIDAL and to hear their “master files” in “best” quality, according to them, MQA is necessary to encode. So the demand is not directly on MQA, but on TIDAL.

I can confirm that Lumin supported MQA because of plenty customers asking for that since Tidal gave “free” access of MQA music to HiFi subscribers.

We have to support whatever format Tidal / Qobuz / Spotify supports, whatever they choose. We didn’t and still don’t support OGG, but we will have to add OGG support for the latest Spotify SDK changes in the near future. Hypothetically if Qobuz chooses to support an arbitrary proprietary new $$$ format that everyone hates, we will have to support it too.

We still get enquiries about MQA from potential customers considering our products these days.