Digital Drive

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RE: Gasp! More Jaws Dropping over MQA in Los Angeles!

Posted by Charles Hansen on June 12, 2017 at 15:38:58:
Thanks for the very clear and detailed explanation.

Your listening experiences match up very well with my own. To be more specific, if you have a great recording it will sound better on pretty much every system regardless of the delivery format. Furthermore when one has a great sounding D/A converter that the bit depth and sampling rate become less important. (In other words, I would rather listen to a 44/16 file through great DAC than a 192/24 file through a mediocre DAC.)

>> I think Tidal at least for now is not charging more for MQA because they are hoping to attract new subscribers <<

That would seem to be a reasonable view. It is unclear how many new subscribers MQA is creating for Tidal. Whether or not they are successful in attracting new subscribers it would seem to be only a matter of time before they will need to raise their rates to cover the increased costs of supporting MQA.

To the best of my knowledge there are two ways that Tidal could benefit financially from offering MQA. The first is any subsidies that MQA may be providing Tidal, which if true is likely to have a time limit. The second is that currently Tidal needs to store both FLAC and ALAC files to support both Android/Windows and Mac/iOS customers. The Tidal software app includes a FLAC decoder so that MQA files only need to be stored in one format. That could be advantageous if MQA virtually completely displaces tradition CD resolution files as their storage costs would be halved. But the same is also true if Apple supports FLAC in the future - iOS 11 is supposed to do so, due this fall.

As always, solely my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer or hearing aid specialist.