MQA is Vaporware

[James lee]

19 hours ago, firedog said:

I'm not sure it matters. For most people, Tidal Masters or hifi tier is the only source of MQA. It's still a tiny, tiny fraction of listeners.

My guess is that over time fewer manufacturers will support it, and if the owner of the tech isn't making much money, the number of new MQA encoded tracks will also decrease. Flac alternatives will be available alongside MQA ones at Tidal. 

 

Will the number of people paying for the hi-end Tidal tier and also playing MQA be worth it to Tidal?

 

Tidal will have to decide if continuing to support a separate format is wothwhile. It may end up deciding that it isn't. And even if it does continue, it will be to a niche format that most listeners know nothing about and don't care about. 

The only way I'd use Tidal again is if there was a setting "do not list mqa files in search or catalogue" and there would need to be proof all the messed up red book files were replaced back to un molested versions.

Then there is the "why trust your cheating ex" delema just because they come crawling back to you. I've moved on.

[Rt66indierock]

Dead certain, look at the restated 2016 and 2017 Statement of Cash Flows. They document the services contributed by the labels in exchange for their stock.

[botrytis]

Found at Elisive Disc at AXPONA.

[Allan F]

33 minutes ago, botrytis said:

Found at Elisive Disc at AXPONA

 

Damn those typos! Could you possibly mean Elusive Disc? 🙂

[JoeWhip]

I have the original CD that I bought back in the day. Sounds great.

[firedog]

9 hours ago, botrytis said:

Found at Elisive Disc at AXPONA.

You should buy it. It will be a collectors item soon when MQA goes away. You'll be able to sell it to PV or one of his friends for a hefty profit. 

[Confused]

15 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

Dead certain, look at the restated 2016 and 2017 Statement of Cash Flows. They document the services contributed by the labels in exchange for their stock.

 

It is also worth noting the figures for the share premium account. December 2017 this had increased to £21,753,250. In 2018 this figure crept up slightly to £22,307,250. After that, the money stopped.

 

[The Computer Audiophile]

20 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

Dead certain, look at the restated 2016 and 2017 Statement of Cash Flows. They document the services contributed by the labels in exchange for their stock.

Doesn’t that mean mQa paid the labels?

[firedog]

4 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Doesn’t that mean mQa paid the labels?

They gave them stock. It's on paper. No money changed hands. It's only really worth something to the labels if they sell it. Do you think anyone else would give them value for it or take it in trade for some service or as collateral? How much has it ever been worth...? I'll give you one guess.

[Jud]

6 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Doesn’t that mean mQa paid the labels?

 

1 hour ago, firedog said:

They gave them stock. It's on paper. No money changed hands. It's only really worth something to the labels if they sell it. Do you think anyone else would give them value for it or take it in trade for some service or as collateral? How much has it ever been worth...? I'll give you one guess.

 

It's the magic of stock Chris, it's not real money. Don't get any ideas! 🤣

[UkPhil]

Careful Mr Darko you might get banned by PV for using closed group pictures 😀

 

[Rt66indierock]

9 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Doesn’t that mean mQa paid the labels?

 

You can acquire stock by contributing cash, property, or services for stock.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

You can acquire stock by contributing cash, property, or services for stock.

My point is that the labels don’t have much into mQa. 

[firedog]

15 minutes ago, UkPhil said:

Careful Mr Darko you might get banned by PV for using closed group pictures 😀

 

Sure they won't stop supporting it.....for now. If it becomes a legacy format, all bets are off. 

[Josh Mound]

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but in the Reddit AMA, the Tidal CEO also said they aren’t planning to acquire MQA. This combined with the true hi-res announcement points to an eventual removal of MQA from Tidal.

I’ve also found it amusing that ASR has locked all threads about MQA’s troubles. 

[JoeWhip]

It is amazing that those claiming to be seeking truth, never are. Far from it, whether it be flat earthers, conspiracy theorists and MQA backers.

[FredericV]

3 minutes ago, JoshM said:

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but in the Reddit AMA, the Tidal CEO also said they aren’t planning to acquire MQA. This combined with the true hi-res announcement points to an eventual removal of MQA from Tidal.

If Tidal customers really cared about sound quality, they would wait for the lossless hi-res tier (or jump to Qobuz), instead of sending messages like these:


 

[GoldenOne]

On 4/13/2023 at 7:34 PM, botrytis said:

Now I wonder if the DAC, that were upgraded to mqa by reprogramming will be converted back now?

It'll depend on the DAC as to whether this will happen and whether it will be of any benefit.

There's two main categories of product that incorporated MQA, full decoders and renderers.

Renderers:

These were products that performed the '2nd/3rd unfold' but needed the player software to do the first. In truth, these actually did no clever processing whatsoever and were in fact just a fixed upsampling filter design. This was why many products were able to have this MQA renderer feature added via a firmware update. They just needed the XMOS chip to run a particular filter (and arguably quite a bad one, worse than what most DACs were already using), and possibly add the blue light thing. Other than that, there was actually nothing special at all.
The issue was that these products also sometimes had issues with gapless playback due to the way MQA content is detected and how the device would switch to/from the MQA filter to the inbuilt DAC filter, and so MQA pushed manufacturers to use this MQA renderer filter for ALL content to prevent this, no matter whether it was MQA or not.

That's bad, and it meant that products such as the Topping D90 MQA would always use the same crappy MQA filter no matter what filter you actually selected. HOPEFULLY these products will either be reverted back or at least have an optional non-MQA firmware available. Though if they don't already, they probably won't in future, so this is unfortunately just something owners will have to continue to put up with. Shame on the product designers who actually incorporated this though despite the problems they damn well would have known about.

Not all products had that issue though, and some would use normal filters for normal PCM and only swap to the MQA filter for MQA content. In which case there isn't any need to revert back as there's no impact to the user when listening to non-MQA content, there's just the licensing fee included in the price of the product which they won't get back anyway.

 

Full Decoders: 

These were products that could do the 'first unfold' of MQA. And this did have some adaptive processing so could not be retroactively added to most products. It needed a higher end XMOS chip to run, and so as well as the MQA licensing fee, there is also the extra cost of the more expensive XMOS chip that without MQA would not have been needed or beneficial.
Again users won't get these fees back, though some did have the same issue where they would be forced to always use the MQA filter no matter what the user selected, so hopefully a firmware might be released to fix this.

This even applied to some DAPs, I actually had a conversation with a bit of a disgruntled engineer from a large and well known DAP manufacturer who provided info showing that they were forced to have some of their products do this despite the engineer's pushback. Marketing wins I guess.....
 

 

[Rt66indierock]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

My point is that the labels don’t have much into mQa. 

 

I consider $9.4 million to be significant. And the auditor BDO signed off on it.

[The Computer Audiophile]

1 minute ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

I consider $9.4 million to be significant. And the auditor BDO signed off on it.

No money changed hands. They created a big number in services. 

[Rt66indierock]

11 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

No money changed hands. They created a big number in services. 

 

It probably costs a few bucks to prepare music files for MQA Processing. And labels had to pay for the costs of the people providing the services.

[Jud]

2 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

I consider $9.4 million to be significant. And the auditor BDO signed off on it.

 

Always costs less to the company to provide the services than the number that gets invoiced, to account for overhead and profit. Let's say around $6 million just spitballing. The last house a label CEO bought was very likely worth more.

[Confused]

7 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

No money changed hands. They created a big number in services. 

 

 

Just taking publicly available information from Companies house:

 

 

2015 MQA Share premium account:

 

 

2020 MQA Share premium account:

 

 

 

From the notes:

 

These are the top shareholders:

 

 

So money was changing hands somewhere. Although I do not think this explicitly confirms how much was from the labels to MQA.

[Rt66indierock]

12 hours ago, Jud said:

 

Always costs less to the company to provide the services than the number that gets invoiced, to account for overhead and profit. Let's say around $6 million just spitballing. The last house a label CEO bought was very likely worth more.

 

Jud what do think the basis of say Warner Music's MQA stock is? Mark up the invoice and report that as income is what you are suggesting. Otherwise the debits and credits don't match. 

[The Computer Audiophile]

2 minutes ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

Jud what do think the basis of say Warner Music's MQA stock is? Mark up the invoice and report that as income is what you are suggesting. Otherwise the debits and credits don't match. 

A way over-simplication of a public company’s accounting practices and creativity to get the books to look as favorable as possible.