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Is MQA in your Future?

[Mod Edit] The forum members who do a fair amount of MQA streaming through Tidal and are Audirvana users I highly recommend connecting to Tidal through Audirvana if you haven’t already. Before I streamed much it became obvious to me the Audirvarna was my preference for playing hi-Rez after trying most of the players, that may just be me but whatever, if you have a Mac give it a go. I’m not sure about PC’s, only use them at work.
 
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Like numerous previous innovations (including SACD at its genesis, I think) it appears to be another tool designed to control/restrict access to "first generation" quality material -- so that high quality reproductions of proprietary content cannot be made and shared without license from and/or royalties paid back to the owners of the content and/or its copyright.

In fairness, copyright holders deserve the protections afforded by copyright. The question is what is the appropriate balance between the "disease" and the "cure", I think.

I have no opinion, really, one way or another on MQA. It stirs up a lot of debate. It will shake out one way or the other.

Remember, e.g., DIVX (not DivX)? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
 
tubeyea said:
I’m pretty much done here except for private conversations but the forum members who do a fair amount of MQA streaming through Tidal and are Audirvana users I highly recommend connecting to Tidal through Audirvana if you haven’t already. .
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+1 on Audirvana.
 
But when introduced the SACDs were uncopyable. That was (as MicroSoft would say) a feature -- from Sony's perspective.
The whole high-resolution digitial landscape changed -- which isn't surprising, given that SACD was introduced in, what?, 1999 :) (date from Wikipedia -- I just know that it was a while ago).
 
Stereophile continues the MQA push in the latest edition. Another "As We See It" article by John Atkinson on why we need MQA.

-Dave
 
botrytis said:
My big issue, is MQA will not even come out and discuss in a group setting. They were supposed to have on at RMAF and MQA declined. AXPONA was supposed to have one and didn't. This hiding and only coming out when they are the only ones to talk, gives me pause. To me MQA is the REAL SNAKE OIL being sold to the audio world.
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You forgot "mic drop" after that one. ;) And, thank you!

My biggest issues were spelled out earlier. And I agree completely. Any time Stuart's or mqa's feet are held to the fire, they run and hide. Ever read their white papers on mqa? Putting it nicely, it's written in such a way that it baffles many of us in techno-jargon. Is there a tl;dr version? Written in a way that consumers can understand? Why all this hiding?

At any rate, yes, we know the audiophile press is jamming it down our throats. The manufacturers are adding it (likely for marketing reasons--the competition does it, so....). Yet is there this huge clamoring from the consumers who buy this hardware for mqa? NO!
 
IPADave said:
Stereophile continues the MQA push in the latest edition. Another "As We See It" article by John Atkinson on why we need MQA.
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Yeah, I just saw that in my news feed. I'm really getting sick of him cramming this down our throats.

Yep. Time to go leave yet another comment of my own there.
 
That same article in Stereophile comments on their actually doing measurements of MQA and that issue includes Part 1 of MQA Testing which focuses on the Time Domain performance claims.

It has graphs and numbers and all the 'sciencey' stuff people are clamoring for.

Me? I'm agnostic to the debate, will see how the measurements pan out before running to my shed for a pitch fork.
 
I'm intrigued that so many people feel offended that MQA exists. To me, options are a good thing. If you don't like the option and don't want to spend your money on it, cool. I guess you don't need to worry about it.

But there are some of us who decided that streaming our music is the way to go (there are many reasons for this that I won't go into here). But there used to be a sound quality penalty to do this. Now there's a sound quality benefit. Oh, and it doesn't cost any more money or inconvenience us in any way. For those of us in that situation, we win.

Now, if you have an expensive DAC that you love that isn't MQA certified and have a 10,000 album CD or vinyl collection, I agree that MQA isn't for you. And honestly, you're not missing out on that much. There are benefits to MQA, but they're not life-changing. So you don't win with MQA, but you don't lose either. Enjoy what you have and please don't lose sleep over what the rest of us do.

Life is good either way.
 
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At some point if mqa gains traction it could be that the "choice" of whether to have mqa or not will be taken away from us. It probably only takes a small amount of money to adapt a DAC to make it mqa ready, but there are royalties that each buyer of such DAC's will have to pay to Maridian.


Then there is the music itself. Currently only tidal subscribers for the most part are paying the royalties, but that also could change with new music downloads and perhaps CD copy as well. It could become so common place that it looks like Dolby or something, just a trademark on every piece of music to be "enjoyed" only by your MQA enabled DAC (or CD player) and then music becomes just a bit more expensive with another wallet to be lined..
 
A year or so ago I bought an Auralic streaming device that came with a one year subscription to Tidal. About that same time Tidal started adding titles with MQA coding. My Bryston DAC doesn't decode MQA, but if I listen to Tidal through my computer, I guess the Tidal software partially decodes the MQA, so I've also listened that way and I thought it sounded good. The bottom line is this: my next DAC will have the ability to decode MQA or I won't buy it. I was thinking about the Mytek Brooklyn, but so far I haven't bought anything new, as I may be relocating overseas in the near future.
 
Johnny 007 said:
A year or so ago I bought an Auralic streaming device that came with a one year subscription to Tidal. About that same time Tidal started adding titles with MQA coding. My Bryston DAC doesn't decode MQA, but if I listen to Tidal through my computer, I guess the Tidal software partially decodes the MQA, so I've also listened that way and I thought it sounded good. The bottom line is this: my next DAC will have the ability to decode MQA or I won't buy it. I was thinking about the Mytek Brooklyn, but so far I haven't bought anything new, as I may be relocating overseas in the near future.
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I just heard the Brooklyn today, and it’s a real dandy. I thoroughly enjoyed the music coming out of it. From iTunes to hi res, it sounded great.
 
Ds2000 said:
I just heard the Brooklyn today, and it’s a real dandy. I thoroughly enjoyed the music coming out of it. From iTunes to hi res, it sounded great.
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I just looked and the original Mytek Brooklyn has been discontinued, and now they're making something called the Brooklyn+. I assume it'll sound as good or better.
 
botrytis said:
You have to also buy new software
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Really? [Mod Edit] I haven’t spent an extra dime on software. I first utilized the Tidal site on a chrome browser, no charge, then I downloaded the Tidal app software, also no charge, then I updated my existing Audirvana Plus and use it as my Tidal MQA streaming method, also no charge.
 
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botrytis said:
That was the Mytek people were saying made regular high res files sound bad. So much so, they returned them. The only way you know MQA is being decoded is a little blue light on the DAC, that is it. The 'little black box' is what Meridian wants us to think it is.
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Wrong again. [Mod Edit] In conjunction with my MQA compatible dac and the Audirvana player I know when MQA is being decoded and the exact bit rate of theTidal masters track.
 
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[Mod Edit]

The little blue MQA light. It's just a flag that gets set in the file. How hard do you think it is to set that flag regardless of the source of the master. The master could be anything, once it goes through the MQA encoding the flag can be set.

-dave
 
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