Tks
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Unless you have better data than me, I observed countless audiophiles react to MQA since inception. For starters, they got completely lost as to what it was and what it did. And the fact that it came from Meridian which hardly any high-end user buys, was a second negative. Their reaction only changed when they played the content and whether it was due to different masters, true benefit of high-res and false conclusions, many changed their mind and adopted it.
Messaging from MQA has always been poor and not to their benefit. Things like "authentication" and such is not something people associate with goodness. Nor "origami," etc.
While Bob Stuart and crew had history in creating a new format in the form of MLP for DVD-Audio, they licensed the technology to Dolby who is the master of marketing the format. So they clearly made a lot of mistakes him in how they have rolled out MQA. And continue to do so to their own detriments. As such, I don't consider anything they have done on marketing front to have been an asset.
And oh, the standard for audiophiles is the live presentation of music, not what the mastering engineer heard. We value the mastering because we attempt to be faithful to a recording. That is not how high-end audiophiles think.
Just wanted to address quickly, that the statement in bold isn't true. Anyone I've talked to MQA about, was mostly concerned with that authentication claim, not simply whether MQA "sounds good". I also being of the same volition. I'd much rather them being able to deliver on their authentication claims (which they can't and have demonstrated they actually don't even if they could seeing as how Golden's content was published without any information of the provenance of his music), instead of them delivering on claims of "better sound". I can EQ and get better sound on my own. What I can't do, is get access to supposed master tapes which MQA claimed they could.
I honestly believe the claims about authentication they have made are far more powerful from a novel perspective, than the ever-lasting claim every company always tries to make about "better sound" from their product. I believe this to such a degree, that even if the sound was worse, but they could still deliver on their claims of provenance (about access to master files that they now bring to consumers, though it would have to be unmolested which the MQA encoder is incapable of doing due to being lossy technically, but alas, transparent audibly to me for the few MQA albums I have) it would still be a greater achievement than if they were ever actually able to deliver on the "better sound" claims to begin with.
I've not met a single person who thinks the claim's MQA's made about authentication are "bad", if indeed they were actually capable of delivering on it as advertised. The only reason it's not considered within the realm of "goodness" as you say - is because they simply can't deliver on something of that caliber. So if you mean it's not something people associate with goodness due to the claim being impossible to deliver on, then I agree. But if you're saying people don't really think it's a good selling point if they were able to actually deliver on it. That's simply a false claim.