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RE: MQA DEMO (long)

Posted by Isaak J. Garvey (P) on May 25, 2016 at 19:14:52

In Reply to: RE: MQA DEMO (long) posted by Tony Lauck on May 25, 2016 at 18:56:35:

Jason Stoddard, Schiit Audio:


"If you're to believe (most of) the press, MQA is the greatest thing since sliced bread, an amazing new format that promises an even-more-crystal-clear-window-on-the-artist's-intent. It fixes everything that's wrong with digital! It's a watershed moment for audiophiles!

The implication: everyone needs to get on board, posthaste! All DACs need to support it! Everyone should be gearing up for the revolution!

But wait. Didn't we hear this, not too long ago? Kinda sounds like DSD, right? Because thousands of DSD titles were just around the corner (I mean, hey, DSD was a Sony thing, and they had, what, how many recordings they could release in DSD?) But 3+ years into the DSD revolution, all we have are a handful of recordings. Inquiries about DSD have dropped to nil on our side of the fence. Stick a fork in it, it's done. Call it the last format of the File Era.

Now we're barreling straight into the Streaming Era…and MQA is hailed as the answer to shoving high-res audio down a 16/44.1-sized stream, heralding the musical revolution for all devoted audiophiles.

Hence the definition of insanity. Here we go again.

"Well, but, MQA is totally different from DSD, and SACD, and HDCD, and all the other formats that wanted you to re-buy all of your stuff, because it doesn't have a "D" in it at all, and it makes high-res streamable," some might say. "That means you just gotta subscribe to Tidal, which (has promised to have at some unspecified time) MQA."

Oh, okay. So you don't have to re-buy it. You just have to subscribe to it. Yeah, in a way, this makes sense for the streaming era.

But even the assertion that MQA is the "easiest" new format to acquire has a lot of questions wrapped around it:

When will Tidal offer MQA?
How much will MQA cost? Still $20 a month? Or something else?
How much of Tidal will be MQA? Just a small percentage, or all of it? A lot of the heavy breathing has orbited around the idea of "all of it."
How much are you going to spend on an MQA-enabled DAC? Should this be factored into the reaquisition cost? Hint: of course.

But wait! Now we hear that Warner Music has signed up with MQA. Oh my goodness, the vaults are gonna open wide! Surely this is a sign!

Well, no. This means there are even more questions:

How many titles will Warner Music release in the next year or so? Thousands, or a dozen? Remember, DSD was a Sony thing (as in, they paid NO royalties on it), and they had big vaults, and very little happened on the DSD front.
Will Warner Music be OK with Tidal streaming their MQA stuff on their all-you-can-eat menu?
Will the releases be remastered, and therefore not directly comparable to the old titles?

Remember, an LOI (letter of intent) doesn't cost much. Reissuing a big library…when it might be available on streaming…hmm…

So, to me, it still looks like insanity. Because isn't this what they're saying?

"Hey, just turn over the entire industry to us, and we'll make it all good."

A little extreme? Consider that MQA wants:

Licensing fees from the recording industry
Licensing fees from the digital audio product manufacturers
Hardware access into the DAC or player of your choice (because no software player)
Subscription fees from every listener via Tidal, and/or
re-buying a bunch of stuff re-released by the recording industry

If this isn't turning over the whole industry, I don't know what is.

And, you know what? Turning over the whole industry to accomplish a worthy goal might not be so bad. But it seems that MQA's technical side generates more questions for each one that is answered (hat tip to Michael Lavorgna of Audiostream.) And, well, the measurements don't seem to be very, well, high res:

http://archimago.blogspot.com/2016/01/measurements-mqa-master-quality.html

And that's the big change in formats. Instead of everyone asking "when're you gonna support DSD," it's changed to "when're you gonna support MQA?" With the same level of hyperventilating and implied-"I ain't gonna buy unless you absolutely guarantee you'll support this format, even though there ain't really no content for it yet."

Well, excuse us if we (again) sit on our hands.

Let's wait a bit, and see how this shakes out. If the entire Tidal library is MQA'd (at a reasonable price) within a year, and if Warner releases a few hundred good titles on MQA, then, hmm, maybe it's going somewhere. And you guys can dig up this chapter from last year and say, "ha, you were wrong!"

But if it's 3% of Tidal's library at $40 per month and Warner has 7 great titles out within a year, then yeah, we'll continue…

… to best support the 99.9% of music out there in 16/44.1 PCM."

• http://www.head-fi.org/t/701900/schiit-happened-the-story-of   (Open in New Window)

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