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.