Simple MQA poll.

[Musicophile]

I haven’t seen anybody forcing me to buy or not to buy MQA, that’s why I voted neutral. That said, I’ve never seen any true end customer benefit of MQA, so Im very comfortable it will be gone in some years from now.

[Musicophile]

59 minutes ago, mansr said:

Their stated goal is for all music to be distributed in MQA format. No more high-res studio masters. No more CD quality. That's not a future I wish to see.

 

Don't get too comfortable. Complacency begets defeat.

I still stand by the simple fact that if you don’t offer a tangible customer benefit you will never succeed. That’s why I’m not concerned. 

[Musicophile]

4 hours ago, tmtomh said:

 

I will never understand why people continue to spout this oversimplified fantasy of consumer choice. The customer for MQA is the record industry, not the end-user, similarly to how the customer for Facebook is the advertiser, not the user.

Even putting that aside, MQA is marketed as lossy high-res custom-tuned for the needs of streaming music. That's an easy to understand, attractive sounding benefit to lots of consumers. The fact that MQA might sound modestly inferior to high-res PCM or DSD (and perhaps slightly inferior to redbook) on highly resolving systems will be irrelevant to the majority of streaming customers because their systems likely are not resolving enough to hear the difference - and also because if MQA does bring lots of new people and titles to the party, then there won't be a lot of people around who have the high-res PCM/DSD baseline to even compare to the MQA version sonically.

 

To put it more simply, just look at your own equipment, as listed in your profile here. You've got a $1000 outboard DAC, and your interconnects cost more than the entire playback systems of probably 90-95% of streaming customers. The entire point of this thread is that the average member here is very much not the average customer - people who value truly lossless music, and who can hear the difference between MQA and truly lossless formats, are in the minority and their interests will be irrelevant compared to the larger purchasing public.

So you're telling me I'm not an average customer. Guess what, with me having a Qobuz Sublime subscription AND purchasing highres files in parallel, I, like 95% of the readers here, am a total niche audience. Fully agree here. And I believe as long as we in our little niche are willing to fork out $15-25 per album, somebody will sell it to us in whatever format we audio nerds want. Why wouldn't they? Really?

 

But now, let's take that famous customer that doesn't care about SQ, which I agree probably makes about 98% of the consumer market. 

 

Let's really play this through.

 

Where do you see the industry player that has a strong incentive of using MQA?

 

Right now, the market is moving to streaming exclusively. This market is dominated by Spotify and increasingly Apple Music. Why would Apple or Spotify try to impose a proprietary file system for their streaming offer that they don't control, when their customer base is clearly happy with MP3/AAC streaming? I mean, Apple started with DRM files on the Itunes store but moved away from it after a while. 

 

So who else is out there who has the market power to impose a certain format? The record labels? That market is getting increasingly fractured as well, as more and more artists move to produce and release their own albums, or use smaller labels (what is the point of a big label these days if you're not Beyonce anyhow?). So again, I don't see a dominant player that could impose MQA here. 

 

Finally, the equipment manufacturers? Well there is nothing more fragmented than this market, so I don't see anybody even halfway powerful to impose this, when even half decent bluetooth audio codecs are still having a hard time imposing themselves. 

 

My advice: relax about this, in 10 years MQA will be the next SACD.

[Musicophile]

29 minutes ago, firedog said:

The alternative exists that MQA will become a streaming standard, and they will also offer downloads of "hi-res" MQA for sale at $15 per album, while simultaneously removing the actual hi-res from distribution. Why would they do that? Simple: to prevent distribution of actual master quality files, which is one of (perhaps the major) reason the labels are in favor of MQA - they've never been comfortable with the idea of the real "master quality" files being available for distribution and copying. One of the reasons many albums are not available in some form of hi-res, even 24/44.1.

The small classical labels might be an exception, but they are irrelevant in the big picture (although clearly not for you). 

How would you feel if in 2 years the only downloads available from ECM are so called 24/96 MQA versions of their albums? 

Sorry but please be specific, who is “they”? The labels are more fragmented than you might think. 

 

And sorry for MQA to become a streaming standard somebody needs to adopt it first. As said above both big streaming players really don’t have an incentive. 

[Musicophile]

25 minutes ago, firedog said:

the big three control about 90% of the market acc'd to Wikipedia. That doesn't sound like fragmentation to me. The fact that each big corporation owns multiple "labels" doesn't mean much in this context. 

 

Both big streaming players can only stream what they are provided with...

With all their combined strength it took a California tech company to build the platform and distribution system for the first 10-15 years of the new millennium, with the iPod and iTunes Store, and a Swedish start-up to develop the distribution system for the streaming age. 

 

Content companies have been notoriously bad at introducing new standards (remember Sony trying to back Betamax?), as their only strategy was to fight a losing battle against illegal downloads instead of focusing on something the customer actually wants (they are often terribly disconnected from their final audience).

 

Anyhow, we can only speculate now. I personally remain unconvinced that MQA will stick around long term.