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Tidal ditch MQA

I guess the next marketing angle will be to bring ‘high res‘ to cellphone networks. It will be a very long time before the UK infrastructure could cope with that, so there is still an argument for compression. I live ten miles from Manchester city centre and there are still pockets of 3g or worse on the journey in. A lot of the UK has horrific cellphone service.

PS The problem with MQA was always the locked proprietary system, the lies and grift. A more honest open source solution could have some use.
 
Tony L said:
I guess the next marketing angle will be to bring ‘high res‘ to cellphone networks. It will be a very long time before the UK infrastructure could cope with that, so there is still an argument for compression. I live ten miles from Manchester city centre and there are still pockets of 3g or worse on the journey in. A lot of the UK has horrific cellphone service.

PS The problem with MQA was always the locked proprietary system, the lies and grift. A more honest open source solution could have some use.
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The codecs like flac are supposed to be lossless so are still high res. I don't know enough about MQA to say whether it's lossless at 24/192 but I thought that was the point. What the compression rate is is another matter, there must be a mathematical limit to what compression rate can still be lossless (although every file will be different as I think it relies on not repeating the same chain of 1s and 0s but I could be completely wrong about that).
 
MQA wasn't lossless at the frequency extremes, but it was a stab at monetizing sound quality through licensing. Mastering SQ is key (always has been), decompression algorithms barely tickle the compute capabilities of devices to extract from FLAC files.

It strikes me as curious that spotify hifi (supremium) has started to rear its head at around the same time that MQA is in its final death spiral - even if Lenbrook has other plans.
 
lawrence001 said:
The codecs like flac are supposed to be lossless so are still high res. I don't know enough about MQA to say whether it's lossless at 24/192 but I thought that was the point. What the compression rate is is another matter, there must be a mathematical limit to what compression rate can still be lossless (although every file will be different as I think it relies on not repeating the same chain of 1s and 0s but I could be completely wrong about that).
Click to expand...

The thing that I found most telling about MQA is they wanted to encode it into 16/44.1 CD format, i.e. they felt there was enough space in that carrier format that they could hollow it out enough to get MQA “high res” and it still play back as a Red Book CD without people “noticing” that the CD was now obviously a lossy format.

I’ve never been able to test any of this, but no one has as the whole methodology was concealed from view and the claims made largely disproved. As time went on I shifted from not caring in the slightest to viewing the whole thing as a scam. There may have been some interesting technology there at one point, but the corporate behaviour was disgraceful. A format to actively avoid IMO. I hope it is purged from Tidal ASAP. I resent listening to a lossy format (which it clearly is without a decoder) on a platform where I’m paying for lossless.
 
I, for one, am happy to see MQA go. Hopefully they get rid of the old MQA-encoded files for normal lossless ones. When I first heard Tidal at the dealers, I could clearly hear it was degraded. It almost sounded fuzzy to me. Honestly, to my ears, it was more offensive than a high bit-rate MP3.


lawrence001 said:
The codecs like flac are supposed to be lossless so are still high res.
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It is mathematically lossless. One can decode the flac to a wav file and compare it with the original. Both files will be a binary match.



lAmBoY said:
MQA wasn't lossless at the frequency extremes
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It wasn't lossless, period.
 
One of the particular irritations of MQA was that you could actually achieve pretty similar levels of compression (assuming you really needed to get hi rez bit rate down) using a virtually lossless open source system either bit freezing down to the noise level in the recording or just converting to noise shaped 16/96 .
The particular joy however was watching a confederation of people with diametrically opposed views all agree that MQA was crap, and watching the penny drop with a lot of people that most hifi mags nowadays bring no critical thinking to bear.
 
I agree with Tony it was the grift that stuck in the craw.

Remember they were saying that every album was being remastered for the format? Just BS.
 
garyi said:
Remember they were saying that every album was being remastered for the format? Just BS.
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IIRC the claim was, laughably, that the file hadn’t been altered from creation to listener. Just patently false.

MQA certainly made a fool of a lot of people and can be taken as a lesson as to just how powerful marketing and cult group-think can be in this industry. Even highly respected reviewers such as John Atkinson (and I genuinely do respect him) bought into the hype. Thankfully I’ve never even heard it so I never had any opinion until after the scam was exposed. “Origami manipulations” my arse.

Respect to Neil Young who heard it, didn’t like it, and pulled his music once he realised they’d encoded it.

PS Wikipedia entry:

Master Quality Authenticated - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
The HiFi magazine praise for MQA was likely driven by an opportunity to sell new DACs, with reviews to be done. DACs have been "good enough" for many listeners for a long time now
 
Didn't Mike Fremer not also state that MQA was the only digital he heard that he actually liked? I wonder if the fuzzy compression agreed with his hearing somehow.
 
MQA has the capability to spray ultrasonics into your system, that could change the sound. That is before you factor in that nobody ever made two files available to compare with and without encoding, but the same mastering in the first place.
 
Just had this email from Tidal....

"On July 24, 2024, we’re replacing the music in TIDAL’s MQA catalog with FLAC versions. In addition to this change, we're removing all podcasts and music available in 360 Reality Audio. "
 
lAmBoY said:
Just had this email from Tidal....

"On July 24, 2024, we’re replacing the music in TIDAL’s MQA catalog with FLAC versions. In addition to this change, we're removing all podcasts and music available in 360 Reality Audio. "
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Woo hoo. Got the same.
 
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