manpowre
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2016
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You mean that the music industry is conspiring to sell us the music that we already have, again, in a cynical money-grabbing ploy?
I will take MQA seriously when someone - anyone - can differentiate a red book (16/44) playback and an MQA playback, in a credible blind test, on the same gear. I think I will be waiting a long time for that one.
MQA was made to solve a problem; to deliver high resolution recordings in a smaller stream format. I mean we could always do a zip container on a 250mb FLAC file, but its not streamable like through Tidal as the whole file have to get there before unpacking can happen. So MQA protocol allows bits and pieces to be streamed, keep an audio lock on both channels in sync and its compressed, so high res recordings are streamed in same size as a 16 bit 48khz recording uncompressed, which is about 20-25mb per normal song 3-4min long.
For Tidal, who have to rent server space around and bandwith to deal with the demand for users who stream FLAC files, its businesswise logical that they look for a compressed format to serve a better level of high res as they do with FLAC files but same streaming cost to bandwith vendors. As for todays FLAC file streaming in Tidal, its 16/48, while switching to MQA, software decoding is 24/96/88, and those who have DACs supporting HW decode can get 24/192.
What I DONT like about the MQA is the Hardware unlock part for 24/192. Its kindof a DRM, it can only be played to that level on qualified equipment. If you buy something you should be able to use it with every unit you have as long as you own the rights to play back the material.
Until MQA gives vendors an option to truly be able to compare 24/96 vs 24/192 same recording, and software decoding to highest level, DAC vendors shouldnt fall for it and implement MQA ! Holding back will force MQA at some point to do full software decoding at some point instead of putting it into the hardware for the full unlock !