The discussion has piqued my interest again. A couple of questions:
- Why create a new format like MQA if you're not intending to take over the world? I can't see that it would be worth bothering in that case.
- If it's all open and above board, what is the problem it is supposed to be solving? We know that anyone who doesn't care about sound quality would just as happily stream much smaller lossy formats, and the people who do care about sound quality would happily use a bit more bandwidth for an uncompressed file (and has been noted, audio streaming is becoming a trivial application for current and future internet speeds). It's as though MQA is intended for a consumer who doesn't exist.
Put those two things together, and it gives the impression of being a system that is intended not for the consumer, but for the supplier.
Every new audio format including international standards are created with intention of #1. Huge amount of effort goes into them and people/companies expect to get paid for their efforts.
Hardly any Audio/video standard is "above board." Indeed they are the exact opposite: a cartel of companies get together, create an international standard which has force of law in some countries, and then, after the format is published, get together and decide how much to charge everyone. Think MPEG. Think Blu-ray. Think AVC video codec. Think AAC. All open standards (sans blu-ray). All demanding royalties, and litigate like mad if you don't pay. See a case I was involved in a bit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcatel-Lucent_v._Microsoft_Corp.
"
Lucent Technologies Inc. v. Gateway Inc. 470
F.Supp.2d 1180 (S.D.Cal.,2007) is a
patent infringement case between
Alcatel-Lucent and
Microsoft litigated in the
United States District Court for the Southern District of California and appealed to the
United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Alcatel-Lucent was awarded $1.53 billion in a final verdict in August 2007 in the
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California in San Diego. "
1.53
billion dollars just for one bit of technology related to MP3.
Now, you say that the technology is not aimed at the consumer. Of course it is. High-resolution audio "is a thing." It puts a smile on many people's face when they get content at higher sample rate as the CD. So "demand" exists to some extent or there would be no adoption.
Companies like Google push in-house codecs with little value over other competitors/hence no consumer demand (think VP9) but that is Google, not MQA.
In summary, there is some demand from consumer point of view, and hence some adoption.
Problem is that MQA is too small of a company and has too little resources to get broad adoption of a new format. And because the format only solves a problem for a fraction of music listening world, it just has no chance of world dominance. Companies like Apple, and Amazon, simply have no interest in adopting it.
Major hardware companies like Sony, etc. also don't care yet about MQA. Once they do, they will go after them with patent litigation just the same before they are allowed to get anywhere big.
What all this boils down to is very, very modest adoption of the format with no damage to anyone.