I've been playing the Masters through an Audioquest Dragonfly DAC (so just using the Tidal app to "unfold" the files I guess rather than using a full MQA DAC) and the sound quality has really, really impressed me. It's clearly not a con and could well be a game changer for digital sound quality - wasn't expecting something so impressive.
Chris
Again, this tends to come down to what people think the words being used actually mean. People may well be misunderstanding or misled. Indeed, you can see in this thread and previous ones that people are interpreting what is going on in different ways. This seems to be inevitable given that the real details are buried under layers of 'secret sauce'. And that to really decide you'd need the *source material* to compare with what you're given, as well as more info on what is being done.
If someone wants a sideways look at this in detail I'd suggest looking at the pages I wrote on it a while ago
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/origami/ThereAndBack.html
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/bits/Stacking.html
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/cool/bitfreezing.html
But in summary the basic posers are:
1) This may be a case of "adding salt makes a boiled egg taste better". i.e. people may prefer the MQA version to a low rez version. But not because it is more faithful to the original. Maybe because it has some 'added' stuff that might *not* be an accurate representation of the *source* material. That's fine if you want a nice 'effect', but not what everyone would call 'fidelity'.
2) That *if* you can use something like bitfreezing to get the same low bitrates for streaming *without* such mysterious alterations to the actual musical waveforms. And do it with no 'secret sauce' or paying anyone royalty fees, why choose MQA? Unless of course, you're given no choice in the matter.
I am also rather doubtful about the real meaning of the term 'Authenticated'. How many recording studios have speaker systems that are phase and amplitude flat up to, say, > 90kHz? And how do dead or now-half-deaf musicians now judge on the quality of the mysterious ultlrasonic transients? And if this is all necessary, how do the domestic listeners hear the 'improvement' when the chances are their speakers and listening rooms *don;t* usually provide them with the required time alignment, etc?
It does seem more plausible to me that any audble change may be something like an EQ change or the addition of components *below* about 20 kHz due to the folded aliases.
But you can't tell unless you know the info they haven't given you.
So it may sound good, but...
