MQA unfortunately pursuing (latterly peddling) a ‘solution’ to a problem that no longer existed as advances in broadband/cloud and cost effectiveness of HDD and SSD increasingly made the offering redundant. Happy enough with a ‘full fat’ .wav hi-res file or a (compressed) FLAC file from Qobuz for a number of years now, has never really made me desire to seek out the MQA offering and Tidal.
IMHO writing was on the wall at least five years ago - their financials bear this out.
MQA RIP.
But that assumes a particular pricing model and who knows how much MQA would have charged high end manufacturers if the technology were widely adopted? They would have had significant monopoly power and the consequent lack of market discipline was another factor that made me nervous.
Roger
Is that really true? I was already streaming plenty of 24-bit content before TIDAL added MQA.
Can’t be sold as a going concern as when I last looked the balance sheet had net liabilities of over £30m in the red! 
Half of that was owed to trade creditors. The financial backers gave until Q1/23 and with no further borrowing opportunities the directors had no choice but to put the company into administration. This information is in the public domain if you know where to look (quite easy) or are qualified (in my case) to join the dots….
Reading the latest published financial statements the creditor dividend will be pennies in the pound. IIRC at the end of 2021 the organisation was in the red by over £30m with half of that being net current liabilities. The only real ‘asset’ was probably the software/brand but even that may be worthless in today’s market (NB: this last sentence is my personal opinion and from reading the latest filed financial report).
Availability of 24 bit on Qobuz increased steadily, and my impression was that it proliferated around the time that Tidal began to roll out MQA. Of course I have no stats to prove anything, but my impression was that the two things coincided, more or less.
Ultimately I couldn’t really care less as long as there is a good 24 bit provider out there, and Qobuz seem to fit the bill at the moment.
Sorry, but I really I don’t think that coincided. I signed up for Qobuz as soon as it was available in the U.S., and have had it since. One of the reasons I liked it was they had 24 bit audio. Not for a whole lot, but some, escpially newer releases. I’m not sure I would have kept it for $25/mon for as long as I did if it was just 16-bit. After that I was able to sign up for TIDAL at very low cost in a promotion (like $5 for three months) and I used the two in tandem for a while. I wanted to compare catalogs and take my time to decide which I preferred. I have Roon, so that made it all very seamless.
MQA came after that, because when it arrived I cancelled TIDAL and stayed with Qobuz. I just don’t see a correlation, much less causation between TIDAL adopting MQA and Qobuz embracing 24-bit.
I’m really pretty confident in my memory of it.
I’ve Qobuz since 4/21/19. I had TIDAL from 1/23/19 for several months with a month overlap with Qobuz, and again from 12/16/19 for the 3-month promo, so I already had Qobuz for 8 months, with 24-bit audio. I’m not sure when TIDAL added MQA, but they didn’t have it until after I started using it.
Edit: I’m looking at my Roon catalog and see that I was adding a bunch of 24-bit albums from Qobuz from when I first signed up March/2019 (I forgot I had a free month before I first paid for it 4/21/19).
16 bit gives a possible 65,536 different levels, 24 bit gives nearer 16.7 million. The later will sound better at any sample rate, be it 44Khz, 48Khz, etc
DSD64, single rate equates to roughly 96Khz.
Last month I purchased a DAC that is capable of DSD512, if I had spent an extra £100 I could have got the SE version as opposed to the LE version, the latter supports MQA, I guess that what is already encoded in MQA will continue, just no new stuff? Who knows?
The sample rate of DSD512 is 22.579Mhz, 512 times that of a CD.
I think you are right whatever one may think of the technology. A big record company adopting MQA would mean placing their brand in the hands of MQA and the current situation does not invite that kind of trust.
There is also MLP from the same source that went nowhere (Meridian Lossless Packing, part of the DVD-A standard). The licensing/tool cost when we looked at it, for something very similar to FLAC, was very steep for a smaller specialist record company.
Good riddance to bad rubbish is my view! MQA was always a parasite within the industry with no demonstrable benefit over full fat lossless (indeed quite the reverse). Customers were being asked to pay a premium for music that sounds worse than unmolested wav or flac. Manufacturers, artists and streaming services were being asked to pay a premium to deliver it.
This MQA nonsense has affected millions of music consumers including me. I have a Naim NDX legacy streamer and so cannot easily access Qobuz for 24/192. I subscribe to Tidal but due to my non-MQA compatible streamer am limited to 16/44. If MQA didn’t exist Tidal would have been forced by market forces to launch 24/192 streaming without MQA and I and millions of others could have been enjoying streaming hi-res for years…
May it rot alongside all those responsible for it - the Linn article is bang on!
JonathanG
There was discussion about Tidal MQA Masters on the old forum in the months before it was superseded by this one in early 2019.
It’s all kinda moot now. I picked Qobuz, and it’s about 2/3 the cost of TIDAL with MQA. Even if TIDAL abandons MGA and changes to 24-bit FLAC I’m still getting a better deal with Qobuz.
Sure, but if it had been around for longer, say at the start of mass mp3/aac streaming in the early 00’s I think it would have been more common and. 10 years ago it would have been more prevalent… because as you say in 2013 bandwidth for many was expensive / not practical. But yes my point its value was more for an earlier era. I do also remember when it first appeared on Tidal and discussed on this forum, many punters questioned the viability of its licensing model…to encode and fully decode.
What do you mean by tidal mis handling? In MQA I was far as I am aware there was no end to end certification key chain and signing validation to prevent ‘man in the middle’ decode and re code as far as I am aware… if somebody wanted to do that.
Using a 1st gen Naim streamer, I think you’d have been out of luck here. It took Naim a great deal of effort, both before and after release, to get 16/44.1 streams from Tidal to work reliably. The main reason being the very small buffer which was never designed to cope with the higher latency of web streaming services. If it wasn’t for this problem, Naim may have decided to add Qobuz support but in reality you would almost certainly have to set it to 16/44.1 to have any chance of getting a reliable service.
I’m no fan of MQA either, but in this case they probably had a better chance of getting a 24 bit stream into a legacy Naim streamer than anyone who provided a regular lossless FLAC stream.
If you really want to improve sound quality of a 1st gen streamer I would use a proxy server. Then you’ll get better sound from Tidal, better reliability and 24 bit Qobuz support.
This is true (and this was specifically network windowing buffers, as opposed to audio buffers) … and was not specific to Tidal… it equally applied to any stream service provider using higher bit rate uncompressed PCM as opposed to compressed audio as used by Spotify which the first gen streamers were more ok with.
The later streamers resolved this by using a more performant network stack, with greater windowing buffers, as well as a significant audio buffer.
@Stevesky You mention their business model, and as most people here, you seem to indicate it’s “gains” are on the consumer end.
I have always wondered about this. Wouldn’t the real gain be on the provider end, i.e. Tidal. The storage they would need for hi-res etc, and the bandwidth. Both are cheap compared to a decade ago, but still with the size of their catalogues it would add up. Without your message, my guess would have been that their downfall was having only one such provider using them.
Because even Spotify, the (by far) largest provider is still a loss-making business. So in the long run either these businesses will need to start charging (much) more, find other ways to make their money, or cut costs. The last one being of benefit to the consumer, and where MQA could have played a role I think.
And since these companies are apparently all still “happy” to be loss making, wouldn’t it be a case of their technology coming too early instead of too late?
ChrisSU,
That’s very interesting Chris, given I can stream 24/192 from my local NAS I hadn’t really considered the increased buffer capacity required due to web latency. Thanks for that, I think one day I’m going to end up moving to NDX2 or its successor although it’s an expensive move for a fairly subtle sonic improvement so will have to wait until the Atmos upgrade and cartridge upgrades have been done!
JonathanG
With the benefit of hindsight I suspect Naim must regret having used such a small buffer in their streamers. They designed them before web streaming services were popular, and never allowed for this, although as you say, they are fine for 24/192 local streams which they were designed to support.
I mentioned the idea of using a proxy server precisely because it effectively turns a web stream into a local stream and handles it reliably.
Given that, and the fact that Qobuz offers bitperfect hi res and MQA doesn’t, it is hard to see Tidal’s MQA service as viable long term unless their MQA catalogue has a significant range simply not available hi res from Qobuz, so them spending more on taking MQA out of administration would seem unlikely.
As part of the administration, wouldn’t the IP in the tech (I assume just software) get sold off to the highest bidder to pay off the creditors? Does Tidal Masters rely completely on MQA? If so Tidal could just buy the IP and continue as they are now? Or would they be better off using other tech, the way Qobuz have?