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MQA: A Review of controversies, concerns, and cautions
- Thread starter mitchco
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AudioSceptic
Major Contributor
Just to mention that the name 'Audio Origami' has been in use by an actual manufacturer and repair specialist (Johnnie 7) for a few years, specialising in tonearms and associated accessories. The arms are often based on older ones such as the Syrinx PU3 and are highly thought of by some. <http://www.audioorigami.co.uk>
AudioSceptic
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Oh dear, oh dear...
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This is all yesterday’s news. I’m listening from a lossless audio stream right now. No “hi-res” branding in my audio chain. No “MQA.” No Tidal. No Meridian. No Sony. My audio streaming provider is charging me $7.99 a month. My source cost $35.
Next!
Next!
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CD quality internet radio. And it is FREE and MQA-free.
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Many is a relative term. From what I've seen of the subscriber figures it simply isn't true, unless many for you means only "more than three". When you take into account that the numbers of paid full on streaming subscribers in the US alone is well past 60 million, the number subscribing to CD quality and higher streams is tiny. As I noted, the total number of "hifi' subscribers at Tidal is in the low hundreds of thousands, from what's been reported. That's a very small part of their (not very large) base. It's a blip on the radar in the big picture.
Qobuz has a total number of subscribers less that 300,000 worldwide, from what was recently published. If you live in the audiophile world, you think Tidal and Qobuz are important. In the big world they aren't. Shoot, when Amazon HD was announced there were a lot of press articles talking about CD quality/hires streaming, and Qobuz' existence didn't even get mentioned in many of them (Tidal did get mentioned because it's owned by Jay-Z). When you see charts published of the streaming world market share, those two are barely visible, if at all, and often aren't even mentioned in write ups as players in the space.
Amazon likes to dominate markets, and is willing to lose money for a long time to do so. They also like to continually give reasons for people to join and stay joined to Amazon Prime, so apparently they see some long term/synergistic reasons to have the HD platform.
If Spotify saw Tidal and Qobuz as a serious threat, don't you think they'd have rolled out CD quality or hi-res before this? Their apps/UI are much better than both of those competitors, and support for Spotify is ubiquitous on all sorts of HW/SW; if they had a CD or hi-res stream I bet lots of audiophiles would jump over to them in a flash.
It's possible Amazon HD will change all that, but till now Spotify, Apple, and Google haven't seen any business reasons to get involved with either CD quality or hi-res. It just hasn't been seen as commercially worthwhile. In the big world there's little interest.
I predict that Amazon will buy at least one of the less cashed-up players to get instant market penetration. Isn't this the internet way?
Tidal had a big buy in from Sprint in 2017 of $200 million for 33% of the company, which gives them (at the time) a market value of $600 million and lots of cash. Sprint obviously has reasons other than Tidal's bottom line profit to have a tie in to Jay-Z and streaming.
Would someone else pay that amount for the company?
The streaming services generate lots of income, but aren't actually profitable as stand alone entities. They are supporting the record labels (who also are often part owners) quite well, however. Like many internet based businesses, their long term viability is questionable in their present economic model. They may be viable as user based data producers and as feeders of subscribers to bigger packages of services by the likes of Amazon, Google, and Apple.
$600 million is pocket-money for Amazon.
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PS Audio should sue for infringement their Noise Harvester converts noise to blue light:
https://www.amazon.com/PS-Audio-U-HARV-BLK-Noise-Harvester/dp/B003081XBE
They may make some decent product, but I cannot take this company seriously.
If they made a balanced version...
- Rich
Without speaking to your blurbs, I'm referring to people that are interested in high res audio. Looking across multiple audio forums, YouTube channels etc. Tidal and Qobuz come up a lot (much more than Spotify or the other services), so there's definitely an interest in high quality audio in that segment of the market that's interested it.
A big part of the change will come from people moving up the equipment curve, as so many people use Beats, AirPods, noise cancelling headphones etc. so there's no real benefit / interest of improving the source.
Irrelevant.
No company spends $600 million thinking they are throwing their money away. Only people who don't have lots of money think those that do behave that way.
Amazon would only buy Tidal if they thought it was worth what they were paying for it. And that figure might be way below - or above - $600 million. Just because Sprint valued it at that level in 2017 means nothing about what Amazon would value it at today.
There may be some sore feeling members...
That's true, but again, that market segment is tiny. Half a million people worldwide? It has zero impact in the larger picture. It can exist, but so far is a specialty market that's served by specialty providers. A niche within a niche. The real hi-res market has been around for at least a decade, with serious file buying/download services for available for a number of years already. At least since around 2007 or 2008, when HDTracks was started.
CD or hi-res streaming (Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz) has also been available for several years and gotten lots of publicity.
None of that has moved the needle in any serious way.
I think 5 - 11 years is a pretty good time frame for evaluating the market. It ain't there. Even most people with better headphones and reasonable systems aren't interested. Few people want to pay $15 or more for a hi-res album download and apparently there's a lot of price resistance to any streaming package that breaks the $10 a month mark, so they don't sell in significant numbers.
That may not make sense to you or me, but that appears to be the reality till now. Maybe the Amazon Prime offer of $12.99 for HD streaming will break that barrier in significant numbers. We will see.
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Eirikur
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This morning I revisited a review of MQA CDs by Techmoan on youtube, and interestingly he concludes that the MQA "unfolded" sound sounds much better than when just playing it as CD.
He draws the wrong conclusion in my opinion (MQA is better), where it is more likely that while the CD is compatible for normal playback, the sound itself is compromised unless you use MQA. This would also be in line with the illustrations in the patent.
He draws the wrong conclusion in my opinion (MQA is better), where it is more likely that while the CD is compatible for normal playback, the sound itself is compromised unless you use MQA. This would also be in line with the illustrations in the patent.
solderdude
Grand Contributor
PS Audio should sue for infringement their Noise Harvester converts noise to blue light:
View attachment 35198
https://www.amazon.com/PS-Audio-U-HARV-BLK-Noise-Harvester/dp/B003081XBE
They may make some decent product, but I cannot take this company seriously.
If they made a balanced version...
- Rich
PS Audio could perhaps better say:
The noise harvester uses HF crap on the mains to make a LED light up....
As a side effect some of the peaks may be lowered a bit.
Shenzhen audio sent me a none mqa track does similar
pc shows 44.1khz and dac shows 352.8 khz
So if a hires track is taken from a tape recording 40 years ago are people saying that's better as cant be same as original recording than new track that was recorded well and played on mqa
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The problem is, a lot of company people making high dollar decisions just aren't thinking straight. And subordinates are too afraid to say anything.
HP/Autonomy; Cisco/Pure Digital; Alcatel/Lucent; KMart/Sears. Look at the dollars MS threw away on failed acquisitions and crappy products under Ballmer. The only reason they were able to get away with it was that they had so much cash in the bank, it didn't matter. So they didn't care much about consequences. And then there were always end of year write downs. For these captains of industry and their sycophants it was simply "Forget it. It's history. Let's get on to the next fail." Sometimes I think these companies buy these things just to run them into the ground.
So maybe you are correct that they are thinking they are not throwing their money away. It's just that they are not thinking at all.
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