Huge release of Tidal MQA Masters

MQA is not just one thing.

  • Compression. It is hi-res compressed into small size by some clever (or not, depending on view) methods, and it is still not lossless. The contention here is that it comes a bit late when most people have more than enough data even mobile to stream hi-res audio uncompressed, so why take the lossy penalty and other possible problems by the data folding? Many phone plans (at least here in Germany) don’t even count audio data from the streaming services against the data limit

  • Requirement for hardware licensing to get full decompression. The contention is “DRM by another name” and “extortion” of licensing fees by the MQA owners for providing no real value. (Edit: Might come with exposing proprietary info of hifi companies regarding their DACs, not sure if true)

  • Authentication. Like bailyhill wrote above. IMHO this is pretty neat

  • Correction for known AD converter behaviors, etc., of stuff that was used in the production, also as bailyhill wrote. This is IMHO the most interesting part about MQA. However it comes with political baggage like exposing your AD-C implementation to the MQA owners. I don’t know exactly how real this problem is, but some say that it is

  • Certainly one should feel uncomfortable with giving the MQA owners complete control over the digital distribution in case MQA takes off and stomps everything else into the ground, as MQA is entirely proprietary

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Thank you for claryfying.

dCS have taken another approach - which I subscribe to having bought a TIDAL subscription and a Bartok - so they recognise some market for MQA but wrote their own implementation, their core (preference?) is DSD and DXD (PCM) but you can decide on a per track basis when playing TIDAL content, which I like … perhaps if (when?) MQA takes hold Naim will take a similar approach

I have never seen anyone keeping a log of which ADC was used on what track during tracking. Recordings today are made in many locations and increasingly software instruments (no ADC) are being used.

Covid, lower recording budgets have increased this. Next year 5G will make fast internet available at most locations and the pro-version of Apple Silicon will give a long-awaited step-up in CPU/DSP-power making this MQA-claim even more impossible.

During Covid I’ve worked with ProTools and Avid Cloud Collaboration over mobile LTE internet (150-200mbps). We are very far from the days the MQA-people are looking back to.

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Slightly off topic, but Roon’s forum is also running Discourse, so when you click on the link it looks as though you’re in another room on this forum.

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Interesting article from Bob Steward on this subject

Yes, I have both forums open as tabs, but have the formats still differently to differentiate them.

I have some custom styles running in my regular browser (Firefox), which get applied to all Discourse forums. Switching to Chrome, I see that the styling is a little different on Roon.

Thanks, yes, I did wonder how feasible and applicable it is on a large scale, but also my post was intended as a short summary not a complete discussion of a topic about which many pages were already written and so I omitted this. Nevertheless, a huge amount of historic music was digitized from masters and in the 2008 Universal fire (link - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html) we lost many of the originals, so this MQA exercise may not be totally for nothing. According to MQA, surprisingly good records exist in major studios, if I remember correctly

Perhaps it’s time to stand up and be counted then if Naim really might put the spade work into enabling MQA
I use tidal and I want it !!! (Please)

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Ok, I have a stupid question maybe someone can answer…
Afaik there is no native MQA recording…that means an available music recording (on tape?) has to be put through the “MQA” process- right?
But if that’s true- why the hell can’t you pimp up the origin record in a better flac or wac or whatever instead putting it in a properitary format? If you have to touch a record-master file anyway, you can do it proper right away then.

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What do I need to get going with this UPnP Bridge thing for my 272?

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You can, but not that small. That’s the thing with it being more than one thing and not all of these things being equally valuable, and it is where the DRM part comes in

ok, than I’m out…MQA is not for me…I’m stick with open formats and live happy with flac and wav and dsd…runs with full flavor and it’s not DRM s.t…I’ve gone through apples DRM music files…no thanks again.

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However being so compressed isn’t the benefit it once was: Storage is now cheaper than ever, with high def available to download not in a lossy or proprietary format, while the likes of Qobuz offers hi res for online streaming, likewise not lossy and not in a proprietary format. The additional compression of MQA is only a benefit to people in fringe areas or with a metered internet connection charged by the amount of data.

Yes, this is what I was saying in this post about it being different things that are not all equally valuable, a reference to the longer post a bit further up

File size for HiRes formats is only element of the MQA process.

See http://bobtalks.co.uk/blog/provenance/provenance-and-containers/ for more details

My post was responding specifically to a reference to the size aspect.

The SonoreUPnP Bridge needs hardware to run on, either a Sonore microRendu, ultraRendu etc.
Small Green Computer offers a dedicated device at a few hundred bucks.
It can also run on their server products, that run the Roon Core, if you want the Bridge packaged up.

If you wish to use the open source LMStoUPNP product, then you need a Linux type device to run this on.
There is also a Windows based product out there, but this would require have a Windows platform running when looking to make playback.

But then isn’t DSD also a proprietary format introduced by Sony and Philips?

Don’t you need a player with DSD hardware capability to play DSD files? At least you can play MQA files without proprietary hardware, even if they don’t sound quite as good as if you have the full MQA unfold. You can’t do this with DSD.