Yea, you just committed a mortal sin and will burn in hell for eternity.
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Lenbrooke acquires MQA
- Thread starter Mulder
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Galliardist
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Given the previous owners and investors in MQA, I’d expect they found a way to keep any tax benefits for themselves unless they derive more benefit from the sale - but that sale won’t be gaining them much and Lenbrook seem to have only bought the assets, not the business.
So I can’t see this as the reason.
mhardy6647
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The cool guys all listen to three-channel anyway. Always have.
My main takeaway from those pictures is that apparently smoking isn’t as bad for you as I thought
mhardy6647
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Galliardist
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I see Archi's taken the words right out of my mouth! LOL
"Seriously guys & gals, I hope this is the last time we need to talk about the MQA encoder/codec. Let it die."
I'm gonna enjoy watching the way Stereophile and TAS find to eat their words.
They were both way overboard on the snake-oil scam from day 1.
Lenbrook Acquires MQA
Note: This is a developing story. Updates will be posted as they unfold. Lenbrook Corp, the privately owned Canadian enterprise whose holdings include NAD electronics, PSB speakers, and Bluesound (the maker of the BluOS music operating software system) has acquired the assets of MQA, Ltd...
www.stereophile.com
They are all still all-in on MQA as of today. How often do Stereophile publish a news story on the day the news breaks? Outside of show launches, pretty much never, but here it is.
Much of the reporting elsewhere in audiophile-land has used the word “rescue”. Too much of that for each site to have chosen the word independently. There's always another push.
There are a lot of people who don't want to let it die.
Given the last seven years, I wonder why. I mean, do we really need "special filters to compensate" for, what, 75% of the DACs measured on this site? Has anyone shown that MQA actually is perceptually better, in public? Why have the company and its supporters only ever met challenges to the format by insulting their critics? When has anybody outside of a couple of dissident forums and a few independent researchers ever asked the right questions?
I mean, journals like Stereophile have resources that we don't. The flawed investigation that GoldenSound gave us should have been done by a hardbitten jounalist who could in turn have recruited an actual expert in perceptual codecs. Even if these journals are in bed with parts of the industry, they should choose their friendships with a bit more care, and be prepared to represent their readers to the industry just once in a while.
Instead, we once had this, which at least I guess was more honest in a way:
MQA again
MQA has once again floated to the surface of the perfectionist-audio pondnot belly-up as some have hoped but forced there by relentless pursuit by anti-MQA predators posing as impartial jellyfish.
www.stereophile.com
The bit of that article that actually got me was this:
Please, Mr Austin. Something's actually inaudible? That's a rare admission from you. Your journalists report hearing changes from far smaller differences in signal than that, every single month.
Yea, advertising income.
IMO, Jim Austin was the worst thing that ever happened to Stereophile
unexperienced
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Radio Paradise in BluOS did not stop broadcasting in MQA for a minute, while everyone was burying it. I was still wondering why MQA ordered to live for a long time, and the radio was broadcast in MQA and is being broadcast. Probably not many people gathered here know that there are exclusively 4 streams of this radio in MQA quality in BluOS. I listen to this radio and when an interesting composition was playing, I always went to the artist's page from BluOS itself directly or in Tidal or in Qobuz, and always the quality of MQA in the radio coincided with the quality in Tidal MQA. As you all know, in Tidal there were discs of the same artist both in CD quality and in MQA quality, and for example, solely from my auditory assessments, I never listened to anything in CD quality if I had the opportunity to listen to the same thing in MQA quality. My equipment has always had a sufficient level to understand that I am not interested in listening to a CD after I tried MQA. Returning to Radio Paradise, I have only one question, where do they still get MQA for BluOS. It looks like MQA has not disappeared anywhere, and the renaming of MQA to MAX specifically in Tidal is nothing more than a change of signage...maybe temporarily. The King is dead, long live the King! )))
I assume that they can now embed content broadcasting in MQA in an exclusive form into their BluOS. I.e. MQA will cannot be listened to without having equipment with built-in BluOS. But no matter how the haters are howling now, for me by ear, the difference is obvious. I think that MQA fans will never listen to just a CD having the opportunity to listen to MQA.
I assume that they can now embed content broadcasting in MQA in an exclusive form into their BluOS. I.e. MQA will cannot be listened to without having equipment with built-in BluOS. But no matter how the haters are howling now, for me by ear, the difference is obvious. I think that MQA fans will never listen to just a CD having the opportunity to listen to MQA.
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Given this news, that is hardly surprising:
Tidal is removing all of MQA, it’s not just a name change.
If there is MQA, there is also a high resolution version… so why even bother?
unexperienced
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Great! Thanks to the guys from Lenbrook that they were able to make from lifeless CD listenable content. In general, Lenbrook are well done, they use technologies from the professional sector in their small columns in the form of biamping and the use of DSP processing. ))
Galliardist
Major Contributor
In fact Tidal is not "removing" MQA files from its database yet. What it is doing is not advertising the MQA files on its web and computer clients as it or customers add a FLAC equivalent. I've not yet seen the provenance of the FLAC files examined, but for files newly added it appears that the same files are being advertised as on Qobuz (showing that uploaders are deciding what arrives, at a guess). I don't know if Tidal or the companies it employs to manage uploads to the system have kept non-MQA versions of previously uploaded files. The rate of change suggests that that is the case though.
They can swap back to MQA if they decide. I'm guessing that part of the reason they are dumping MQA, though, at least in part because of the Blue Spike lawsuit. That DRM thing appears to be baked into every single MQA file and therefore MQA got a lot more expensive to have around. Just to go back to MQA, they will have to change the file format, and if the DRM item is needed to trigger MQA into working on devices, they are in for a lot of work or some additional expense just to get MQA legal.
I've not found the terms of the settlement of that lawsuit online, but I can see Universal et al wanting to play safe re MQA in the future.
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boxerfan88
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Technically correct. CD is not a living thing. Therefore it is lifeless.
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I had an interesting email conversation with Bill Goldsmith shortly after RP started offering MQA streams and, to boil it down, he told me RP encodes their own files and only at 16/44.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me most of the Lenbrook components tested on here barely have a high enough SINAD for perfect 16/44 let alone the MQA they decode. You have to go way up the line into the Masters stuff for high enough performance. I find that hilarious.
Zensō
Major Contributor
As opposed to MQA which still has a pulse?Technically correct. CD is not a living thing. Therefore it is lifeless.
Galliardist
Major Contributor
Thread 'NAD D3045 Review (Integrated Amplifier)'
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/nad-d3045-review-integrated-amplifier.33172/
Thread 'NAD C268 Power Amplifier Review'
https://audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/nad-c268-power-amplifier-review.14287/
So most but not all. The power amps with Hypex and Purifi modules do fine, so I linked to one here.
Bluesound products don’t do too well (the more expensive silver Node might get a pass if reviewed here) but I have the impression that most BluOS users use tbe digital outputs to other DACs
It seems MQA doesn’t use 16 bits anyway, so why worry?
