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RE: Whatever happened to MQA? It's still here

Posted by Jeff Starr (A) on May 5, 2017 at 22:46:32

In Reply to: Whatever happened to MQA? posted by Jaundiced Ear on May 4, 2017 at 23:20:58:

Well it was never the bee's knees in the real world, it has changed it claims, a number of times.
First they had to know the ADC, and now they are doing batch conversions.

Tidal is adding more titles weekly, but their desktop site, is really poorly setup. They don't show every new Master in "What's New". They did add an "M" in a box so now you can actually find them.
They said you needed one of their approved DACs, but now you can do the first unfold in Tidal to 24/88 or 24/96. Which is a reasonable improvement over their 16/44 files.

There is a couple of things coming up, one good, and one in my opinion really bad.
Due to owners wanting MQA, PS Audio has figured out a way to install in their Bridge II. They refused to add to their Directstream DACs as it sounded worse, and because they are continually working on free upgrades, it wouldn't work. MQA would have to keep making their alterations. But as the Bridge is used mainly for streaming, and accessing computer music, they figured out a way to do it in the Bridge, before it goes through the actual DAC. And it will be all firmware based.
The bad news is that Chesky is planning on releasing MQA encoded CDs.

I still think we will see either a separate MQA box that will go in front of your DAC, or they will find a way to make it a fully software program that will do all the unfolds and any other processing necessary.

As long as Tidal does not raise their price for Masters, I have no complaints. Other than their player will sometimes not be able to transition from or to a Master, it will just stop playing. Also you can't add music to the play queue while playing, it will displace everything in there not listened to.
And for classical lovers they seem to be adding more music. Whether it is anything worthwhile, no idea.

I don't like their business model, or think we need a lossy compression codec, when most of us have the bandwidth to stream hi-rez music. If you can stream Netflix, you have the bandwidth to stream 24/192 or DSD.

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