I asked them to support 16 bit PCM in their firmware (currently only 24 and 32 bits are supported). They told me their processor (xu208) is not powerful enough to handle 16bit playback. I told them that's not a reasonable explanation at all --- with computer science background I'm pretty confident that if a processor is able to handle 24 and 32 bits playback, handling 16 bits should be trivial. But somehow the conversation turns into a discussion that they are investigating adoption of faster interface processor (such as xu216) because they need more power to handle MQA support. So when upgrading to xu216 they are likely to support 16bit PCM playback.
They told me many users sent emails to them asking if a firmware update could support MQA when D50 was released. Strangely in recent months no one ever contacted them about MQA at all. But they believe many people may want MQA. I told them most of their customers come from this forum. The same time amir released his D50 measurement, there's another heated thread going on discussing about MQA. So many users may accidentally drop them an inquiry email, just out of their curiosity. But unless someone makes a wide reached enough poll, there's no evidence that most people need this technology.
They continued the discussion, mentioning all their major competitors are all working on MQA support, which make them nervous. They are afraid of losing advantage if they don't support MQA.
Hi-Res (such as DSD, or 96/24) music are useless as playback format (IMHO). But I am not against them. Thanks to its wide adoption in hifi community, now we have DACs of much higher quality. Today's DACs use 32bit floating point calculation, and have much higher internal upsampling rate. Those improvements greatly reduces noise. So even if you are not playing Hi-Res music at all, you still get these improvements in many scenarios --- for instance, you can set your DAC in very low volume, and still have CD linearity intact, thanks to the super low noise floor modern DACs offer. Those things were very hard to do a few years ago.
Hi-Res makes money flow into companies with engineering excellence. But MQA is not that kind of technology. It's not an open standard. Nor is it an improvement over the past technology. Rather, it's a new way to collect taxes from various parts of music industry. Other than that, its license term limits the user ability to transcode the music they purchase to other formats and play in non-MQA capable devices. You no longer owns your music. You own files whose playability are determined by a private company. DAC makers rush to support MQA not because it makes their product objectively sounds better, but because they are afraid of losing advantage to their competitors. It will become a disaster for the entire music industry if MQA goes mainstream. All customers lose.
MQA requires a licensing fee from device maker for each device that supports MQA. That adds extra cost to each device I purchase even I'm super against it. So I won't purchase DACs from manufacturers that supports MQA. Likewise, I will not purchase DACs from manufacturers who intend to support it --- I don't want their revenue, my hard earned money, being used to promote an evil technology that turns against me.
