Digital Drive

Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

RE: MQA

Posted by PAR on June 3, 2017 at 08:01:14:
I think that your doubts as to the actual purpose of MQA are the same as I expressed here or on PC Audio a few months ago.

In my more skeptical moments I too think " cash cow". However I think that what has happened is that whilst MQA was developing and marketing its big idea the world has moved on.

MQA was announced just under 3 years ago. However there must have been a long period of development in the years before to produce a workable product.

If we go back then , say, for six years, the technical environment for internet music services was quite different for many people. In Meridian's (i.e. MQA's) home environment of the UK many people still only had dial up internet services and even those with broadband had comparatively slow lines with capped data. In those days a system of squashing lots of data into a small space must have appeared very attractive.

Since then the provision of high speed data to homes in the developed world has improved significantly and techniques for more efficent use of bandwidth have also shown considerable gains. Thus what was a good idea 6 years ago now looks to have little purpose except, perhaps, for developing countries. Metaphorically, the tide seems to have gone out.

Irrespective of the number of MQA equipped bits of hardware announced recently, MQA's main problem seems to me to be the fact that it has almost no distribution channels. Tidal and a handful of boutique record lables providing MQA downloads do not make a succesful media platform.