DSD has only recently begun to assume room temperature. All that remains is for the inevitable stench to clear, leaving a small fraction of all released music in its wake. Now is announced MQA, an even more tenuous proposition, not because it not only requires a repurchase or redundant restream of music you already have, but it is Meridian Audio proprietary, therefore requiring the user to indirectly pay license fees. Oh, and a minor tech anomaly: just like MP3 and Bluetooth Audio, it is lossy! Yup. What a deal.
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That's the rub: there is not enough money in the consumer audio market to support two different mainstream media formats or configurations. Never has been. Again, see the questions. The entry level end, from where our users bubble up, care about one thing: bang for the buck. It all begins with 2-3 buck ds dac chips which deliver quite a bit for for cheap in phones, etc. At all levels from the bottom to the top, that which delivers the most for the buck in the current format mentioned above wins. The outliers such as HDCD and MQA, even if sonically superior, have always lost.
I basically agree with what you say above, but wanted to comment on a couple of aspects of it:
Lossy:
Yes, MQA is lossy. But then so is just about all the music we listen to, if you want to be fairly strict about the definition of "lossy." To eliminate marketing-speak, I like to use the definition that if you can't get from the result back to the original by a mathematical operation, the result is lossy.
Filtering is necessary for digital audio, at least if you don't want your music with a helping of massive distortion. Nearly all the filters used in analog to digital conversion at the recording end, and in digital to analog conversion at the listening end, are lossy under the definition above (with an important exception I'll get to). Yes, MQA, mp3, etc., are considered lossy "formats," but all that means is the lossy
bitstream resulting from the filtering has been saved as a
file. When a RedBook or hi res file is running through your DAC's filters, that bitstream is also lossy in comparison to the file that came off your disc or drive or player, it just hasn't been re-saved to a file. (Again, there's an important exception I'll get to in a moment.) So the important distinction to me isn't between lossy and non-lossy, it's the
quality of the filtering. It's not the mere fact that something's lost which can't be regained, it's
what is lost. In the case of mp3 and Bluetooth, those losses are unacceptable to my ears, but I'd say the very same about bad DAC filtering.
OK, the important exception: If I understand correctly, closed form filters like those in the Schiit multibit DACs are mathematically reversible to the original file, and thus are not lossy. Huzzah, right? Well - just IMHO, this is good for marketing, but in terms of listening quality not especially meaningful. My guess is that one could easily make a bad sounding closed form filter. So it's not in the non-lossy nature of such filters where the magic (if any there be) lies. It's in the optimizing of the filters to produce as little as possible of the unavoidable distortions that are the result of filtering - aliasing, ringing, and potentially phase artifacts. I've listened to the Yggy and the BiMBy and liked them a lot, so at least to my ears Mike's done a very nice job with the filters.
Even if you've got one of the Schiit multibit DACs, the same problem exists on the ADC (recording) end as at the DAC end: just about all ADCs use lossy filters to produce RedBook or hi res. So even the "non-lossy" formats are in fact files that resulted from lossy filtering. (Once again, I assume Mike's ADC filtering that was used by Mobile Fidelity was an exception; but once again, IMO it's not the non-lossy nature of the filtering but its optimization to minimize distortions that I think is really important.)
Thus the fact that MQA is indeed a lossy format doesn't matter to me, any more than the fact that 99% of my recordings were made with lossy filters, or that most of the software filtering I use with my DAC is lossy. (There is software available with closed form filters, and I've used them on occasion.) What would matter to me is how accurate it is - what's lost, what distortions are added. I haven't heard it, so I can't comment on that.
Outliers:
Saying tech outliers have always lost, even if sonically superior, struck me as more than a little ironic coming from someone who makes multibit DACs built around non-audio DAC chips because they are sonically superior.
I hope you disprove your own statement that such outliers always lose.
