Questions about MQA

[righthookmike]

Good afternoon, I was about to buy a toppings D90 and hesitated when I saw the price difference for MQA. I have a basic understanding of what MQA is but a $99 dragonfly is MQA enabled, why the steep price jump on the toppings? cant I just get the Tidal MQA software on my streaming computer? What am I missing here?
Mike

 

[righthookmike]

Check that. it initially said $1349 for d90 MQA. now says $849. $100 difference

 

[abdo123]

Topping D90 will go out of stock soon (if not already), so whatever you find will be e-bay scalper prices.

It's not MQA.

 

[raistlin65]

You don't need MQA to use Tidal. And it's highly unlikely that you would be able to hear a difference in a proper volume leveled, DBT. Learn more about why you might not want to bother with MQA

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/mqa-a-review-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/

 

[voodooless]

Why do you want the D90 anyway? It’s likely that you can get similar performance for less money.

 

[Patrick1958]

Good afternoon, I was about to buy a toppings D90 and hesitated when I saw the price difference for MQA. I have a basic understanding of what MQA is but a $99 dragonfly is MQA enabled, why the steep price jump on the toppings? cant I just get the Tidal MQA software on my streaming computer? What am I missing here?
Mike

The Dragonfly Red/Cobalt will only do first unfold, no upsampling to 192 of higher. Basicly if you use exclusive mode for Masters on tidal desktop player the first unfold is done by tidal. IMO the MQA in the dragonflies is useless.

 

[ezra_s]

I would not get obsessed with mqa. If there wasn't technology to play the music as original recorded and MQA brought that, I would care, but it seems to be a technology just to grab more money out of us consumers. I would go for everything without MQA... because it is not necessary.

 

[raistlin65]

I would not get obsessed with mqa. If there wasn't technology to play the music as original recorded and MQA brought that, I would care, but it seems to be a technology just to grab more money out of us consumers. I would go for everything without MQA... because it is not necessary.

Yep. Significant evidence points to MQA being a solution to a problem that doesn't exist just to make money from the licensing scheme.

 

[levimax]

I would not get obsessed with mqa. If there wasn't technology to play the music as original recorded and MQA brought that, I would care, but it seems to be a technology just to grab more money out of us consumers. I would go for everything without MQA... because it is not necessary.

+1 I switched from Tidal to Qobuz because of MQA. Sounds great, no MQA distractions and saves $5.00 a month.

 

[Tokyo_John]

Yep. Significant evidence points to MQA being a solution to a problem that doesn't exist just to make money from the licensing scheme.

No doubt it is a scheme to make more money in the new streaming universe, while protecting the original master recordings, and is endorsed by all of the big copyright-holding media companies in the world. It is easy to understand that they don't actually wish to give anyone access to the highest-res lossless master recordings, but at the same time they'd love to make money off the promise of delivering higher res audio over streaming.

For this reason, I suspect that MQA is deliberately polluted with artifacts, so that anyone using it to rip tracks will never be able to get back the original master quality recordings. If my suspicion were true, then the entire point of the MQA encoding design had the following priorities:
(1) The artifacts added by MQA folding/compression cannot be mathematically/algorithmically inverted/reversed. This means that MQA compression must be lossy by nature.
(2) The artifacts added by MQA folding/compression cannot be easily treated/stripped away by post-processing. This means that MQA compression must be sufficiently complex to make them difficult to filter/remove.
(3) The artifacts that are introduced by MQA folding/compression need to be subtle enough (to the ear) that it isn't a completely obvious sham. In other words, the artifacts should not be easily registered by reproduction equipment in combination with the human auditory system (this is probably where they genuinely used "neuroscience" to help).

Lossy, complex, subtle...those are the three elements of MQA. And based on what I've seen (and heard), they did manage to tick all of these boxes. And then once they had it in hand, they figured out how to commoditize and market MQA itself. If you ask me, this is an act of business genius.

Of course, they had to know that audiophile geeks would sniff them out...but they they can count on having a much bigger megaphone to drown out the complaints, and they will still make a fortune.

I recall the early days of Napster, when the industry was extremely conservative as well as way behind the curve...entirely reactive rather than proactive. With MQA, they are showing that they have changed quite a lot.

 

[mansr]

The Dragonfly Red/Cobalt will only do first unfold, no upsampling to 192 of higher. Basicly if you use exclusive mode for Masters on tidal desktop player the first unfold is done by tidal. IMO the MQA in the dragonflies is useless.

It's the other way around. The Dragonfly DACs do only the upsampling step, something else having performed the "core" decoding.

Anyone curious about MQA would do well to read this: https://www.linn.co.uk/blog/mqa-is-bad-for-music

 

[orchardaudio]

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/mqa-a-review-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/

Great article.

 

[Jimbob54]

It's the other way around. The Dragonfly DACs do only the upsampling step, something else having performed the "core" decoding.

Anyone curious about MQA would do well to read this: https://www.linn.co.uk/blog/mqa-is-bad-for-music

They've moved/ removed it!

Let the conspiracy theorists run wild on that.

 

[RayDunzl]

They've moved/ removed it!

Don't know if it is the same text, the link is different:

https://www.linn.co.uk/us/blog/mqa-is-bad-for-music-heres-why

 

[Jimbob54]

Don't know if it is the same text, the link is different:

https://www.linn.co.uk/us/blog/mqa-is-bad-for-music-heres-why

Stand down everybody- they havent got to Linn......yet. Looks like a bit of housekeeping on the Linn blog.

 

[majingotan]

Stand down everybody- they havent got to Linn......yet. Looks like a bit of housekeeping on the Linn blog.

They released their own custom discrete R2R DAC due to AKM fire (they used to use the AKM4497 chip in the Klimax streamer units prior) further cementing their lack of support for MQA (of course Linn, just like Chord and Schiit (both MScaler and Yggdrasil have very steep brickwall linear phase filter per JA of Stereophile), believes that their oversampling filters in the FPGA/Sharc DSP is superior to that of MQA (MQA's oversampling filter is terribly slow roll off anyways))

 

[Christ0]

You don't need MQA to use Tidal. And it's highly unlikely that you would be able to hear a difference in a proper volume leveled, DBT. Learn more about why you might not want to bother with MQA

https://audiophilestyle.com/ca/reviews/mqa-a-review-of-controversies-concerns-and-cautions-r701/

I listened to MQA tracks on Tidal, with Audirvana as core renderer, and a Dragonfly for the second unfolding of the “Audio Origami”. Comparing MQA tracks to ‘regular‘ Tidal tracks is difficult because they can be from different masters.
The MQA tracks sounded OK, but I prefer listening to Qobuz which sounds ‘livelier’ to me.

It could also be that my equipment is just not good enough for reproducing that “Studio Sound”. :-O

 

[luft262]

Here are the basics:

As far as lossy music compression codecs go at a given bandwidth MQA, especially with an MQA enabled DAC will probably sound closer to lossless than other formats, such as MP3, AAC, and OPUS. However, FLAC is lossless and therefore "better" but will take up more bandwidth.

MQA is also "authenticated" by the publisher, for whatever that's worth. If MQA was derived from a superior master that might give it another edge, but all of MQA's advantages are very variable dependant. If you use a non-MQA DAC and the master audio file was the same as the one used in the file you're comparing it to there may be no advantage to MQA. Furthermore, FLAC or CD would be superior, since they're lossless.

If you want the best from a technical stand point go FLAC or CD. If you want the next best go MQA with a compatible DAC. In all honesty most people can't tell the difference between AAC/MP3 at 320, or even 256kbs or better and lossless. I can't and I have decent equipment and fairly young ears. If you use Tidal a lot buy the MQA version of the Topping D90 to get the most out of it, otherwise it probably doesn't matter much.

Personally, I don't like MQA, but if I were buying a Topping DAC I'd get the MQA version just to have it available/future proof.

 

[orchardaudio]

More fuel for the fire.... http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/highresaudio-to-stop-offering-mqa/

 

[dc655321]

More fuel for the fire.... http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/highresaudio-to-stop-offering-mqa/

FYI that's from 2017.