MQA is Vaporware

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50 minutes ago, randyhat said:

Godwin's law has finally been invoked.  Surprised it took this long.

 

I believe Godwin made a guest appearance a page or two back.

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9 minutes ago, Paul R said:

Tidal is not only charging more for MQA...

 

Tidal isn't charging more for MQA. They have two tiers - the low cost version includes "normal" and "high" mp3, and the HiFi tier includes "HiFi - Lossless audio" and "Master - The best audio experience".  Despite the fact that I have selected "HiFi" in the streaming audio quality settings, Tidal constantly tries to shove MQA content my way. In fact, it takes some effort to avoid MQA, which would suggest to me Tidal is being paid to promote it.

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26 minutes ago, mansr said:

It's called the MQuisition.

I certainly didn't expect that.

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10 hours ago, Jud said:

 

 

Thanks folks, but @mansr in particular and @Miska did all the heavy lifting.

Never in the field of consumer audio has so much been owed by so many to so few.

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7 minutes ago, wdw said:

 

Chris,

With all due respect, we're big boys and girls so the occasional FU has to be expected...Lee is the energizer bunny of "useful idiot" but this site may become quite dull if these guys are continually banned.  Lee's pathological need to extend and support MQA is certainly odd (why would a single soul spend so much time on such a marginal system?)  but this will become so one-sided a site if there is no one left to post and oppose the attendant hosts.....also, please tell me that Slapowitz is Brinkmann 2.0

wdw

 

It's been obvious for a long time that Lee was just winding everyone up. But after the mistake of claiming to hear an audible difference while attempting to prove the audibly lossless claim by saying "engineers" heard no difference, he was forced to take the sword and rip his guts with an FU to the owner of the thread. Really, there was no other way out.

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2 hours ago, Hugo9000 said:

I imagine there will be an unprecedented bidding war for my carefully chosen, Pre-MQA-Era, 3000 CD classical music collection upon my death.

 

😱😂

 

 

The reality is that my collection will end up in a landfill, I'm sure, as no one I know cares for this music haha!

 

Did I ever make it clear how much I appreciate your taste in music?

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Maybe no apocalypse yet, but there's definitely a red Tidal. Many new releases are now MQA only. I don't use the Tidal app for playback, and my DAC doesn't do MQA, so I am looking for CD-quality only. Tidal has quickly become very frustrating due to MQA. I hope whatever MQA Ltd is paying them makes up for lost subscriptions. Unfortunately, Qobuz isn't in Canada yet.

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3 minutes ago, firedog said:

I don’t have Tidal subscription anymore. Are you saying new releases are also not available in standard CD quality? In any case, can you give a few examples of releases  where no non MQA is available?

 

It used to be that when Tidal showed you only the MQA version of an album you search for the album by name and see both the MQA and standard versions. But the "Explore" feature is showing me a new Joshua Redman album named Come What May. No matter how I search, I can only ever find an MQA version of that. There are several others already, but Come What May is ominous enough.

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2 minutes ago, daverich4 said:

 

When @Firedog asked for some examples of the “many new releases” the response was exactly one.

In any event,

https://www.hdtracks.com/still-dreaming-feat-ron-miles-scott-colley-brian-blade?___store=default&nosto=nosto-page-search1

 

 

If you don't believe me, or if you think there is exactly one MQA-only album on Tidal, sign up for a trial account and check it out yourself.

 

I don't understand what you intended with the link unless you meant it as some kind of insult.

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5 minutes ago, daverich4 said:

I’m not sure how providing you with a link to the hi-Rez/non-MQA version of the album you were concerned about could be viewed as an insult but apparently you managed to do so. 

 

Please forgive my confusion. This is the album I mentioned:

 

This is the album you linked:

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9 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

I find that when they do have the Hi Res of something I am looking for its regular price is at or below HDTracks "sales price"and the others with their never ending sales and email coupon specials.  That, and most of the time they have the 16/44 as well which I sometimes get anyways depending upon the quality of the mastering, etc.

 

Their store accepts Canadian currency and they don't add local taxes, which saves me 13% in Ontario. I'll be sad if they disappear.

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1 hour ago, Rt66indierock said:

 

I’ll start one in October. Currently 7digital is on death watch.

 

I don't understand the schadenfreude. I am firmly in the anti-MQA camp, but in Canada 7digital is the only place I can consistently find redbook downloads and Tidal is the only lossless streaming service that actually works. I'll be sad to see either of them go.

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Looks like I won't be buying anything from 7digital after August 13:

Quote

Dear Customer, 

We are making improvements to the way you purchase music from the 7digital download store. From 14th August 2019 we will only accept purchases via PayPal, a widely-used and secure method of making payments. 

 

 

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7digital's Canadian site is still online, but they haven't updated their "featured album" (or any of the albums listed on the main page, as far as I can recall) for perhaps a couple of months.

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44 minutes ago, KeenObserver said:

You can believe that MQA Provenance is the real thing.  After all, MQA is a lossless, deblurring, time correcting system that has been honest and forthright from day one about what it does!

 

How about that.  Did I do that with a straight face?

 

And there is NO DRM!

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1 hour ago, Ishmael Slapowitz said:

What ever happened to 7digital shutting down? I just checked and they still have current releases in hires, also still no MQA.

 

Unfortunately, almost all the new releases on Prostudiomasters are available as MQA downloads. And in some cases, the MQA version is significantly more expensive than the 96/24 FLAC

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38 minutes ago, crenca said:

 

To add to what @yahooboystates, you can set your app to 'hi-fi' but upon an update to Tidal's software (somewhat frequent), Tidal resets this option to 'master'.  

 

In other words, Tidal and MQA are too incestuous for the consumer to avoid MQA when using their service.

 

The updates stopped doing this a while ago. It was frustrating while it happened. As Qobuz is not available in Canada, and I don't use the Tidal app (I use BubbleUPnP to send to JRiver) and my DAC doesn't do MQA, I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb.

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Just now, Cebolla said:

 

That's arguably worse for anyone wanting to avoid the MQA tracks,because BubbleUPnP cannot distinguish which tracks have been sourced from the MQA version of an album or the true CD version. It's why BubbleUPnP presents you with what appears to be two of the same album on the TIDAL album views.

 

It's not ideal, but as I said, Tidal is the only game in town here so I stopped worrying about it. I do use the Tidal site to add favourites, and when I do that I know if an album is MQA. A while ago Tidal used to show both versions, so I could select the non-MQA album, but thanks to some kind of BS, Tidal now only shows the MQA copy when it exists. I have noted, with some satisfaction, that recently the number of new releases with the dreaded M icon has dropped drastically.

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7 hours ago, Rt66indierock said:

Trusting your ears is a good way to be fooled.

 

The post was intended as a humorous response to Crenca's statement just above. I found the 1954 RCA sampler album in my father's collection, and the dated expression "high fidelity" made me think of it. But as long as you're going to make a point, trusting your ears is a good way to avoid being fooled by the BS put forward by the audiophile press in support of MQA. When I was a young man I got talked into buying an expensive pair of "directional" interconnects for the turntable to preamp. After a move I realized I had been using them installed in the wrong direction for a while and had failed to hear a difference. I never again got fooled into buying another audiophile voodoo tweak.

 

I think there is a distinction that needs to be made between "High End" and "High Fidelity".  The former is the luxury market (encompassing the consumer & the suppliers) and the latter is what guys like esldude,

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7 hours ago, FredericV said:

The compression benefit of MQA in a world which no longer needs MP3, and which does not have an actual channel and storage capacity issue, does not need a proprietary crypto DRM audio solution with 17/96 of internal resolution + upsampling and fake resolution indication, when the bandwdith for the real thing is here

 

MQA is already taking steps to address this. I bought a 2.5GB download from 7digital two days ago and the transfer took 3 hours 8 minutes.

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5 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

The cool thing about purchasing downloads is you only have to download it once and go through the pain once. With MQA you have to go through the pain every time when streaming. 

 

I bought the download because Tidal streaming was screwing up, as happens from time to time. My joke was that MQA must have a deal with 7digital to hobble download speeds. That not may be the real reason, but downloads from 7digital have been really slow for a while now.

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2 hours ago, 992Sam said:

and yet 50% of my streaming music source is Tidal (the other 50% Qobuz) ... and they're married to MQA.. so it would appear we are going to be forced to use this format (at least for now)... lots of recordings aren't available as both MQA and 24bit uncompressed...  at least I've not found many that are available as both.

Most MQA albums on Tidal are also available in standard format. Tidal just hides them, perhaps due to some licensing deal with MQA. If you search, usually you can find the non-MQA version. I refuse to add MQA anything to my Tidal favourites.

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A while ago I went through my album "favourites" on Tidal and made sure I didn't have any MQA material. If I couldn't replace an MQA album with the redbook version I removed it from my collection. I've just taken another look and my favourites list now contains quite a few MQA albums. That's it, Tidal subscription ends today.

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16 minutes ago, JoeWhip said:

Sorry Mr. Veth, but listening to a world class orchestra live in person is orders of magnitude better than the best audio system I have ever heard. Gee, does eating a picture of a pizza taste better than the real thing too? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

On keener observation, I think the attempted joke KO'd a few people. He's quoting "Veter Peth", who doesn't really exist.