MQA is Vaporware

[Rt66indierock]

43 minutes ago, Stereo said:

MQA is available in all of Tidal’s price tiers even the free one. If they stream the “masters” version it is mqa whether it is deciphered during playback or not. MQA would still get a cut of that stream I would think.

 

MQA Ltd only gets revenue when a file is decoded. Part of their problem is there aren't enough subscribers to decode MQA files. Only the Premium tier in Tidal and anybody who streams MQA concert files on nugs.net. A few hundred thousand in a market of almost 600 million subscribers to music streaming. 

[Rt66indierock]

Chis, here you are.

[Rt66indierock]

29 minutes ago, feelingears said:

In the meantime, just for fun, can we change the name of this thread to "Spotify HiFi is Vaporware" or "Sigh, Spotify HiFi, We Hardly Knew Ye"?

 

We can not change the name of this thread. Spotify has been looking for a market for lossles music for a long time and can't find it. Time for Spotify to admit the market has too many players already and say we pass. 

[Rt66indierock]

6 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Plus, it would be nice to see a company lead off with, "Company ABC was established to solve problem XYZ..." 

 

Even Theranos was created to solve a problem.

[Rt66indierock]

I won’t be at AXPONA to hear Ken Forsythe talk about MQA. It is my birthday and I be in southern Utah hiking. Here are three questions I’d like Ken Forsythe to answer.

 

1.       Why does the MQA Mastering process change the soundstage of recordings?

2.       When starting with an analog master tape why is noise reduction very good on some MQA Masters and nonexistent on others?

3.       How much does the MQA Pro Emulator George Massenburg uses cost and how do I get one?

 

Whoever is going have fun and stay safe.

[Rt66indierock]

On 4/19/2022 at 1:12 AM, RichardSF said:

I found that the music conglomerates also invest in Spotify. What a strange relationship, to invest in streaming services and strangle them with licensing fees at the same time.

 

Their losses grew significantly last year. I'm a bit skeptical that they'll suddenly be profitable within a few years 😊.

 

BTW, interesting topic but I don't see that it's relevant for this thread.

 

I bet the labels have a nice profit on their shares in Spotify. It should make up for their losses on MQA Ltd. 

 

I doubt music streaming will ever be profitable but if Apple, Amazon and Google don't care why not bleed the others dry?

[Rt66indierock]

Another sheep or shill moment on Noah Bronstein’s Wall of Sound blog. MQA – Other Perspectives on Steaming  and another new low for the audio press. My comment to him which is awaiting moderation.

 

Noah, I have to ask why write this now? Simple, MQA Ltd is trying to raise more funds to continue operating because they lack the revenue to continue without it. They need people to talk about it because after eight years, MQA still has no traction in the market. I have a saying about what you wrote and the timing. I’ll post it in my MQA is Vaporware thread (still getting 30,000 views a month after more than six years).

 

MQA after all the promotion by the audio press has a streaming market share of 00.05%.

 

Finally, you call your blog the Wall of Sound but guess what. MQA doesn’t do Pet Sounds or any other wall of sound recording well.

[Rt66indierock]

Not much reason to worry about what Amir thinks about MQA. In one his tirades about AS and our battle against MQA he is under the impression we are doing it because of other DAC manufactures. I haven’t said anything because his tirades are more evidence the supporters of MQA are one the wrong side of the bell curve of the audio scene. I see no reason to correct him now.

 

In any case subjective audiophiles might worry more about The Signal Chain: How do noise and distortion propagate through my system? The post written by DonH56 and comments by AnalogSteph may be more valuable than anything Amir writes over there.

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, botrytis said:

 

Measurements needs to be done scientifically and also explained HOW the measurements were done. Most measurements are based on science also. It is an issue when one cannot repeat the measurements, that is when things go into the weeds (like on ASR).

 

Where are people not repeating measurements? The Okto Stereo Dac as an example, Amir, John Atkinson and I all got the same measurements using an Audio Precision device. Should we all explain how we used the AP device everytime we mesure a piece of audio equipment? That would be a lot repetition for the length of time Amir and I used these tools, over thirty five years.

 

As for your objection to the Klippel robot for measuring speakers because the cost, well as I've said before if i was going to pay $25k for a pair of speakers I'd want them to be tested first. In my case Redrock Acoustics has over  twenty years experience designing, enginering testing speakers. They have a Klippel scanner and are only a days drive away. 

[Rt66indierock]

13 minutes ago, opus101 said:

 

And there'll still be an argument about what counts as 'proper'. Isn't that rather a subjective word?

 

( In the background I'm searching another forum for an example of the point I'm making, but so far not coming up with the post I remember. I'll keep searching )

 

You hit the problem with high resolution audio in a listening envirnment. The proper repeatable measurement is constantly argued or can't be repeated.

[Rt66indierock]

3 hours ago, Brahan Seer said:

After one day of the Munich show, I have seen MQA. 

 

Doesn't matter there are not enough people who can decode an MQA file for the company to survive.

[Rt66indierock]

3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

I was told today that mQa reps are lurking around. Haven’t seen any exhibitors promoting it. 
 

Met with @GoldenOne today. What a nice guy. 

 

Have you seen any exhibitors demoing Atmos? That would be sign people have moved on.

[Rt66indierock]

7 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Interesting... In Asia where are they getting mQa encoded content? Is it TIDAL (or other site) streaming or are we still talking about MQA-CDs?

 

 

Must be MQA CDs since Tidal is only available in Hong Kong and Singapore.  The total number of people who can stream MQA is so small it is hard to compute.

[Rt66indierock]

4 hours ago, GoldenOne said:

I'm genuinely surprised MQA is still operating.
Their latest accounts show a £4,340,856 loss for 2020, and £4,176,743 for 2019.

How can they keep on operating when things are looking like that with no clear route to an improvement?
Who on earth is still financially backing this?

It has been 20 years since Bob showed an operating profit. Meridian’s 2002 company report.  The 2021 cash receipts and disbursements were on the 2020 company reports as well.
 

I was wating until Bob lost a 100 million dollars this century before I ask the question. Now that he has wouldn’t the UK high audio industry be better off if he had chosen another field in 1999?

[Rt66indierock]

20 hours ago, loop7 said:

 

Maybe this has been covered in the thread but how would MQA potentially end?

 

Would a service such as TIDAL auto downgrade their HiFi Plus customers to a different plan?

 

Would pro-MQA journalists write about the golden era of sound quality that MQA offered?

 

Would another "innovation" be introduced to replace MQA?

 

Would MQA become open source / community maintained?

 

Would there potentially be a fire sale where another company purchased MQA's IP and re-branded it as the next big thing?

 

MQA will end when investors realize that the market for premium priced streaming services is too small for them recoup their investment and the timing of the write off doesn’t impact their overall financial results.

 

Tidal’s HiFi Plus plan will still have Atmos and Sony 360 and they could adopt actual high-resolution music like Apple and Amazon have. But they will struggle with the price point.

 

Pro MQA audio writers will write about the opportunity missed by the demise of MQA for no other reason than they don’t have a new format promote.

 

According to Michael Ritter of Berkeley Audio Design there are no new digital formats on the horizon.

 

There is no reason for a MQA to be maintained because it was designed to control distribution of music something the open-source community opposes. I don’t see any reason why someone would want the MQA IP. From a user point of view MQA is filters that the market has rejected and DSP. Not much value in that.

[Rt66indierock]

15 hours ago, Currawong said:

Isn't TIDAL now owned by Stripe?  They are fairly screwed now they've lost their Redbook originals on a lot of music. 

 

I speculate what may be sustaining MQA is that it's a big deal in Asia still. 

 

Probably the best thing that can be done now is to suppose Qobuz.  I heard rumours of their getting a "Qobuz Connect" happening, which, if so, will make them more appealing to a lot of manufacturers.

 

Tidal is owned by Block Inc. formerly Square Inc.  Tidal Music is in trouble because they can't grow their subcribers numbers as fast as the streaming market is expanding. Block Inc's earnings call for the second quarter should be worth listening to.  I was looking at MQA Ltd's financial statements yesterday and unless it became a big deal in 2022, MQA has never been a big deal anywhere except the minds of people who write about audio. I wish Qobuz the best of luck but I have doubts they can grow their customer base enough.

[Rt66indierock]

On 7/6/2022 at 2:34 PM, The Computer Audiophile said:

Pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if there was a contractual obligation to enable mQa unfolding by default. It doesn't make sense to unfold mQa for everyone, when they could just query the DAC and enable it when needed. Plus, Roon pays a fee per unfold. 

 

I can see how Ken Forsythe might have slipped a requirement in during the negotiations to use a software decoder.  I can also see a situation where nobody really noticed the decoder was enabled by default. When they had to write some big checks for decoding MQA files they noticed and corrected the oversight.

 

Roon users must be a significant percentage of Tidal’s HiFi tiers. Not exactly good news for Block Inc. or MQA Ltd.

[Rt66indierock]

1 hour ago, Archimago said:

 

Yup, I think that's in general THE overall strategy:

 

- Get audiophile magazines to write good things knowing that they're under the influence, have limited ability to evaluate objectively, and have been biased for decades.

- Get audiophiles to talk & desire it because the "old-skool" audiophiles follow the herd, led by magazine "high priests" (Atkinson, Harley, Fremer, etc.), right? ;-) Throw in "icons" like Bob Stuart from the Industry and those audiophiles will all get excited!

- For good measure, get some would-be "influencers" on board - Peter Veth? Danny Kaey? Testimonials from some music makers and engineers (Bob Ludwig)?

- Advertising push of course - "Music will never be the same again", "Take me there - to the original performance". Cross fingers that nobody questions anything when you plaster the slogans and in those BS interviews.

- Slip it into streaming services, get software companies and DAC manufacturers on board. Eventually the company grabs a piece of the streaming revenue, software companies like Roon pay out, hardware licensee pays out (even ESS implementing in their DAC chips by 2018 - shameful). Most importantly, control how the decoding is implemented in proprietary software/DAC firmware.

- Eventually everyone uses it, takes it for granted. Make money, implement control around "authentication" when it's time to roll out MQA 2.0 = SUCCESS!

 

I still think behind the scenes the big selling point to the music industry and rights holders was the promise of control. If MQA became universal, then one day, the control over eventually more powerful rights management was the ultimate goal. Already in the example of TIDAL, presumably no longer having rights to the un-molested 16/44.1 lossless CD version for their HiFi (non +) stream, is an example of potential impact on what we as consumers may or may not have access to eventually. 

 

With each of these steps, the bottom line is that "audiophile" companies like MQA thought that hobbyists are stupid lemmings who would allow all this to "slip under the radar". IMO, the most egregious sinners are the "mainstream" audiophile press and the old "high priests" who acted IMO not as journalists, who looked out for the interests of the audiophile community, but complicit as salesmen for what amounts to a useless scam from the perspective of consumers desiring value and better quality sound.

 

I forgive ESS because they told me they implemented MQA because of LG. Nobody could have foreseen they would exit the cellphone market too much loss of face. Tidal Music was a train wreck that can now finally pay its bills thanks to Jack Dorsey wanting to hang out with music stars. Buy they don’t have enough subscribers to matter. Many manufacturers told me at T.H.E.Show in 2016 that Bob Stuart was unsuccessful but DO NOT QUOTE ME!   I checked then went back and told them I’ll never quote you; the real information is worse than you can imagine. I have a spreadsheet with 29 years Meridian Auto financial information. Meridian’s average loss was over 800,000 Pounds a year. I’d love hear how Bob raised the money necessary to keep MQA Ltd and Meridian Audio afloat.

[Rt66indierock]

17 hours ago, GregWormald said:

I suspect it was easy. For example: Tell investors that MQA will be as ubiquitous and useful as credit/debit cards, and as cards do with banks, will skim off a small percentage of EVERY music-related transaction world-wide.

 

Greed can make people blind to reality.

 

That explains the $67 million of cash, services and IP contributed to MQA Ltd. But I’m still scratching my head over the $71 million contribution to Meridian Audio from 1993 to 2017.

[Rt66indierock]

11 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Nice to see this option in Roon as well. 

 

 

Sounds like nobody can force people to listen to MQA. That pull down menu makes it a choice maybe even with an MQA enabled DAC. Optional now on Tidal Music and nugs.net.

[Rt66indierock]

19 hours ago, bambadoo said:

The greatest shill of them all posted an old article (again and again and again...) today

 

 

 

 

 

With hindsight we can say this 2016 article was wishful thinking. The best line of the article is: “The key to getting this right is the content, because once there’s a flow of content, it has its own momentum.”

 

Where do be have a flow of content today?

[Rt66indierock]

Please carry on.

[Rt66indierock]

2 hours ago, Archimago said:

 

Obviously companies/advertisers will claim all kinds of things like that mQa is superior to lossless; we clearly have good reason to be both skeptical and critical of a company that's willing to market BS like this.

 

I wonder though, are there people who are so uneducated as to actually believe this nonsense still? Or are most of these fanboys just magazine reviewers (and silly YouTube apologists like Has Beekhuyzen) and mQa shills like Peter Veth putting stuff out there to get attention and creating the impression of demand/desire for the dog crap?

 

They are called the audiophile press. Biggest suckers since the people who bought tax shelters.

 

In any case all the shilling isn't working, the recording and msatering engineers never bought in. They dind't  like hearing about Bob Stuart's achilles heel.

[Rt66indierock]

2 minutes ago, Samuel T Cogley said:

Suckers or shills?  Can't be both.  🙂

 

In my world, public accounting a tax shelter promoter is both. And they can also work for CPA firms.

[Rt66indierock]

Folks have you forgotten HD Tracks wanted to create an MQA streaming service in 2016? Fortunately, 7 Digital could not execute the project and HD Tracks sued them for not performing and being first to market. So, it doesn’t surprise me they started offering MQA downloads. It may have been part of their confidential settlement in late 2021 with 7 Digital.

 

You never heard me say boycott. But count me in.