MQA Deep Dive - I published music on tidal to test MQA

[amirm]

@amirm That's like... his opinion. I don't believe in paying more and getting less, some may but not me, at least.

A decoded MQA is not less than a CD. It is more.

 

[mansr]

Let them have Austria Tidal. How bad could it be?

 

[gatucho]

So give me an example of any music you purchased yourself that came in MQA instead of CD. Not "here is a CD in Japan." But any music you personally purchased. Is there anyone in this thread with such an experience?

It has been years since these dire predictions been made. Where is the exitance proof?

I been streaming supposedly CD quality music from Tidal, now I'm learnt that some of if was in reality folded MQA. IDK is that qualifies as "purchased" but I certainly paid money for it.

 

[amirm]

The open source community created FLAC. We should adopt that.
All the studios should adopt that.

Record labels (studios are movies ), don't care about formats anymore. With physical media, they produced their own (CD, DVD, etc.). With digital distribution, they just hand out the digital bits and let the distributor decide what to do with it.

That aside, Flac has been adopted as the universal format for a lot of music distribution. But it is not the same as what MQA has done. Or there would have been no adoption of MQA.

 

[levimax]

We've been assured that this will NEVER happen!

OK?

By who?

 

[amirm]

I been streaming supposedly CD quality music from Tidal, now I'm learnt that some of if was in reality folded MQA. IDK is that qualifies as "purchased" but I certainly paid money for it.

Using what? Tidal player or Roon? If so, both of them decode MQA in software and give you higher technical quality than CD. How did you get cheated?

 

[RichB]

As to MQA itself, it has an argument: it creates a single file that can be both "CD quality" and "high-res." And do so in a way that the file itself is in the open, i.e. PCM. This has some appeal as it did for Tidal. If this is not a real solution, then it won't get more adoption. If it is, then they will and that is that. The open source community needs to create its own alternative if it thinks this solution has legs. If it doesn't then go about your business and don't waste energy on arguments like this.

I am not sure how this one file thing works for streaming , MP3 320, Redbook 44.1/15, and Hi-Res, 96/24 (for example).
Let's leave Tidal out for now.

Which MQA format offsets all these from one file.
It is possible that MQA could offer it with one-less file but, this again, points out the difficulty aligning the marking "single-file" with the real-world.
When you take the single-file feature to Amazon, they might wonder you understand their requirements at all.

- Rich

 

[KeenObserver]

So give me an example of any music you purchased yourself that came in MQA instead of CD. Not "here is a CD in Japan." But any music you personally purchased. Is there anyone in this thread with such an experience?

It has been years since these dire predictions been made. Where is the exitance proof?

MQA has lost somewhere in the area of thirty million pounds since its inception. The logical move would be to give up and move on. They have not.
They have reason to believe that they will be in for a major payday in the future. What prompts this reasoning?

 

[levimax]

So give me an example of any music you purchased yourself that came in MQA instead of CD. Not "here is a CD in Japan." But any music you personally purchased. Is there anyone in this thread with such an experience?

It has been years since these dire predictions been made. Where is the exitance proof?

So far you are correct but Mr. Dorsey is a proven monopoly builder and is now in the game. I hope you are correct but I think the stars are aligning for MQA.

 

[amirm]

1) I'm sure that, at least now, these CD quality flacs being in reality MQAs are not "mistakes"

Your confidence in that matter is neither here, nor there. You don't have real information. Or any idea of such trend.

2) 44khz16bit MQA are NEITHER CD quality not high-res. And for me that's the main point.

No. The main point is that where MQA is heavily distributed is in Tidal and its App and Roon both decode it to "better than CD" technical specs.

3) a solution being the best or "real" is not really historically correlates with it's success

That's correct. So you really have no basis to predict that MQA is going to die or succeed. Such prediction requires deep knowledge of the industry which you all completely lack. Your consumer instincts, fear of Armageddon, etc. has no place in such discussions. Get me a quote from major record label executive saying they are about to force MQA on the entire industry and then we can talk. Until then it is absurd to make arguments based on one's lay intuition.

 

[Cahudson42]

Unfortunately, I don't have the patience to go thru 1700 posts.. But my view is - if 3 of the 16 bits of a 44.1/16 Flac have been usurped by MQA, and these 3 bits render as noise on non-MQA enabled systems, then the Flac has been adulterated and I want no part of it. I should have the choice to accept the adulteration, or not. Not be forced to take it.

Is the 3-bit usurpation correct?

 

[Raindog123]

Let them have Austria Tidal. How bad could it be?

..and half Poland a few titles on Qobuz, tor starters.

 

[amirm]

MQA has lost somewhere in the area of thirty million pounds since its inception. The logical move would be to give up and move on. They have not.
They have reason to believe that they will be in for a major payday in the future. What prompts this reasoning?

They will think that until the day the bank closes their doors. The best argument you all have for your fear of MQA is what you stated above: they are losing money and that ultimately will shut them down if they don't turn it around. Or turn it around enough to do an IPO.

The fund availability for such a specialized business plan is miniscule. It is not like you can walk in front of a VC or investment banker and say, "oh, check out these high res files." They will say they are not even using CD streaming let alone care about high-res.

So bask in the confidence that there is much higher chance of MQA going out of business than it succeeding. I give them 2 out of 10 odds of making it.

 

[Raindog123]

How did you get cheated?

...because I bough Lightning DS for/with Auralic. Do I now need to pay - what is it, $500, $700/life? - for Roon?


@amirm With this MQA, please either check your facts, or stay out of it (as you proclaimed earlier). Your position of “does not affect me, so what’s all this buzz about?” does not rub many of us right way.

 

[AdamG]

Are we really equating MQA’s possible growth to what Germany and Hitler did to Austria and Poland? I can’t be reading this correct….

 

[PierreV]

So let's dispense with arguments such technology costing a lot, being proprietary, folks trying to take over the world, etc. Those are constants. It is Dolby's mission for example to tax every bit of audio distributed for video. And they have been quite successful at it.

Did you know that Dolby competed with MPEG audio for surround and beat the latter for standardization in DVD? They used their political power with studios to do that. MPEG-2 was picked for video but not for audio.

I'll take your word for it. The way I remember it was that Dolby Digital had a 5.1 solution when MPEG-2 was still only available for stereo. However, they may have been other issues at play that altered my memories because of the diverging standards PAL/SECAM and NTSC back then.

 

[amirm]

So far you are correct but Mr. Dorsey is a proven monopoly builder and is now in the game.

Dorsey did not invest in MQA. He invested in Tidal. Tidal could get rid of MQA overnight and switch to Flac high-res streaming the moment MQA tries to milk them for royalties. Indeed they are life and death for MQA. It would be incredibly foolish for MQA to make demands from them given the clear alternative they have.

 

[mansr]

So bask in the confidence that there is much higher chance of MQA going out of business than it succeeding. I give them 2 out of 10 odds of making it.

I hope you're right, but why should we afford them even a small chance of ruining audio?

 

[Raindog123]

Are we really equating MQA’s possible growth to what Germany and Hitler did to Austria and Poland? I can’t be reading this correct….

Please do not start politics, as it’s forbidden. But from “first a foot in the door and then we’ll take the world“ point of view - absolutely!

 

[ebslo]

A decoded MQA is not less than a CD. It is more.

Can you please clarify if this claim applies to both 24-bit and 16-bit MQA encoding?