TIDAL will need to adjust pricing. At least in the U.S. TIDAL HiFi Plus is $20/month. I pay just a little more than half that for Qobuz ($130/yr).
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Anyone using Roon ARC to get HiRes support on a mobile device over the GSM data network?
Sounds great with an external DAC with MQA support, which has been added in the latest release with MUSE.
Also allows for FR equalisation for the headphones used, to optimize the mobile listening experience. The 1st unfold is now undertaken in the mobile based app and MQA signalling if used with a dongle DAC.
Playback of MQA material sounds just as good as regular PCM HiRes formats, as it does with the 1st unfold in the Roon Core on the home system with an NDS.
Better SQ than the native Tidal app, plus you have access to your entire local library.
The predicted ‘doom and gloom’ didn’t happen because MQA went into administration beforehand, thank goodness.
By all means state the counter arguments to those in the Linn white paper, but simply calling the writer ‘biased’ adds nothing useful to the debate.
But as you say it’s moot now.
Roger
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MQA was a bad technology solution to answer a question that was not being asked and did not need solving. It is now dead, everyone is better for that…
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I’ve never fully understood the vitriol aimed at MQA. Was it a bad idea? A money grab? Snake oil? Who knows, but it’s hardly unique even if it was all of those things. It was an economic attempt to make money out of a concept.
Folks here have paid a chunk of cash for devices that plug in to an unused socket and claim to reduce noise. Do they work? No idea, but the evidence is unclear for and against. They’re also an economic attempt to make money out of a perceived (or real) issue.
MQA was easy enough to ignore and never looked like becoming an industry standard that forced companies like Naim to pay for licensing. There are similarities with HDCD and SACD to me. That’s not a direct comparison with those technologies but they have economic similarities to an extent. The developers of those technologies weren’t pilloried as the spawn of Satan from my recollection.
Saying that “everyone is better for that” is rather extreme. My life is not in any way different now than it was before.
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I agree, HDCD, SACD and DVD-A and in the movie world Dolby and DTS all trying to make money out of their digital audio technologies, probably like Sony and Phillips with CD, so I also see similarities with MQA.
The patent system and licensing system allows clever people and companies who invent things to maximise their economic benefit from their inventions and I support that approach.
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I think you are both forgetting that people wanted to stream hi res from Tidal, especially as Qobuz wasn’t as widely available and us more tricky to use on legacy streamers, but all Tidal could give them was CD quality or a lossy format that needed additional hardware to make the best of.
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SACD gave a real opportunity for true hi res before downloading/streaming of hi res became mainstram hifi. Dolby & DTS truly added to the movie experience, at least that is what I felt.
MQA might have been much the same, enabling hi res online streaming in days of limited bandwidth, but unlike SACD was too late to the market and so doomed to failure. (On the other hand its additional marketing claim to the effect that it enabled the true master sound seemed to me to be fundamentally flawed.)
David, I’m not forgetting how Tidal focussed on MQA as the sole provider of hi res (whether the unfolding provided true hi res or not is a different discussion). I’m just looking at how angry the very existence of MQA seems to have made some people 
Very good thoughts, thank you 
I’m not forgetting anything.
HDCD, SACD and DVD-A all needed compatible hardware, like MQA, you were either prepared to buy the equipment to use the technology or you chose not to buy the hardware, nobody was forcing you to buy anything, it was a simple choice you either wanted the technology or you did not.
Many people in the past have bought equipment that was not compatible with new technologies that’s just life, progress and advancements in technology.
People on this forum also go on about the academic argument that MQA is lossy and get really fixated on it, but it does not matter as the most important thing is the ultimate sound quality that MQA delivers on a fully compatible MQA streamer/dac and that sound quality in my experience is very good compared to Hi-Res FLAC when directly comparing Tidal and Qobuz.
In a fair test there will not be very many people who could tell the difference in a blind test between MQA and Hi-Res FLAC and probably any marginal difference that people with exceptional hearing may detect is probably the difference in mastering of the source material and not the technologies that are delivering it.
I will be very keen to compare MQA against Hi-Res FLAC streamed by Tidal, but I’m not really expecting that one will be significantly better than the other or that I can hear any difference at all.
If that’s the case what’s the point of MQA? Other than make money for MQA Ltd, of course.
Roger
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It was to enable near lossless streaming over restricted bsndwidths.
Not an issue anymore really.
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Thanks for asking and as I’ve posted in many threads before I have done detailed demo’s on three fully MQA compatible streamer/dacs a NAD C658, Lumin P1 and Moon 780D feeding into high quality amps and speakers i.e. 252/SCDR/300DR into Focal Scala Utopia’s or Chord Ultima 6 into Wilson Audio Sasha Dawe’s at two different dealers.
We’ve listened to the same tracks streamed on Tidal and Qobuz toggling between MQA and Hi-Res FLAC on the same streamer/dacs and neither me nor the dealer principles and their sales guys could reliably pick the difference and these were not pure blind tests so we could check what was what.
I’ve done the same at home using the Lumin P1 with family members and friends and still no reliable picking of any difference between Tidal MQA and Qobuz Hi-Res.
On many threads before I’ve encouraged MQA critics on this forum to go and listen for themselves, but funnily enough nobody has bothered themselves to make the effort to do it and report back their findings.
Based on these tests my view is you would need exceptional hearing to pick the difference and that difference may be the source master material and not the supplying technologies.
Maybe if your really interested you could go and listen for yourself and report back your findings, that would be really great?
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Exactly, and that’s the point I was making, but some posters on here seem to feel that rude ad hominem comments are a way of arguing. I won’t play that game.
Roger
If I can’t tell the difference between MQA and hi-res flac, I can’t be bothered investing in extra hardware to fully unfold MQA, simple as that really.
For me the deciding factor was that I just didn’t like the sound of MQA. I tried it on a Naim NDX2 using Roon to do the first unfold, and on a non-Naim DAC that had full MQA support. To my ears there was an unnatural, harsh, electronic edge to the sound. It was quite a subtle difference, but I generally ended up preferring the regular 16/44.1 version when comparing Tidal. 24 bit on Qobuz is a further small improvement on most material.
The fact that we have seen dishonesty from MQA is a bit irritating too, but I might have been able to turn a blind eye to that if I could detect any advantage.
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The thing is, though, none of us as end users paid MQA. We pay Tidal, or Qobuz, or Spotify etc for streamed music. Most of us will also have Prime or Netflix and so on.
MQA set out to make money by licensing a product. Hardly an original or unethical concept. Maybe it was too late. Maybe it was a lie. I’ve never tried even the first unfold so I have no idea. My point is that the vitriol is aimed at a company that never took money from end users. It’s akin (in the simple environment of my mind at least) to attacking DTS for their 5.1 offering when your system was only capable of decoding Dolby HD. .
It genuinely confuses me.
How do you know they didn’t take consumers’ money? TIDAL is rather more expensive than Qobuz. Can you say for sure that it’s not because TIDAL had to recover MQA licensing fees? If TIDAL paid them it had to be passed on somehow. That would be the consumers subsidizing the licensing costs of MQA. I pay a little more than half of what TIDAL costs for the my Qobuz subscription.
Same thing for hardware. The MQA licensing costs are likely built into the retail price of compliant hardware. If OEMs are paying for MQA, then that has to be passed on somehow.
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MQA is not a charity, it is, or rather, was a profit-maximising organisation and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
They’d have made their money from licensing/certification at various stages of the chain from recording to listening and that money will have had to come from somewhere. Most likely end users (more costly downloads and equipment) or perhaps artists, most of whom are already suffering from miserly earnings from streaming.
Roger