If you use a device which has MQA, some of the cash you paid for it will have gone to MQA to cover the license cost the manufacturer must pay, regardless of whether or not you use MQA.
If you have a Tidal HiFi subscription you will have been subsidising MQA for having access to their material even if you didn’t play it, although I assume that is no longer the case now that Tidal have re-jigged their subscription tiers.
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But consumers had the choice not to subscribe to Tidal, didn’t they? Every software (or app) subscription has upstream and downstream elements in how the cost is used. I could make the argument that in the UK we pay more than in the US as most apps just swap the $ for £. But that’s global economics
@w33logic, I have somehow inadvertently quoted and attributed a comment made in a post by someone else to you. Through doing that I then observed and drew attention to a contradiction in what I thought were two opposing comments by you. I unreservedly apologise, both for that error and for its consequential annoyance or upset to you. I will delete my previous post.
I didn’t say or even imply MQA forces anything on consumers, but consumers who use anything that has MQA (TIDAL, hardware) helps pay the licensing fees, whether they take advantage of the MQA feature of the service/hardware or not. In the case of hardware, where consumers want hardware that has MQA, but for reasons otherwise – whether or not they use the feature – they pay for it. And it’s not like they can order the hardware in a variant without it.
Sure, consumers have the choice to not buy anything with MQA – it’s not mandatory taxation – but that’s besides the point. MQA couldn’t succeed in part because they couldn’t get enough consumers using it. TIDAL was never going to be enough, and someone like Apple would embrace something like MQA when it snows in hell. Even Apple is smart enough to stick with open standards.
No problem. We’ve all done similar. I’ll delete my reply as it’s no longer relevant
Not necessarily, for many it is the only lossless service available.
Exactly, except of course it wasn’t lossless.
I meant their regular lossless 16/44.1 subscription, as opposed to competitors who only offer lossy streams such as Spotify, Apple etc.
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MQA was a cynical land-grab, an attempt to monopolise ‘hi-res’ and then impose licencing across the digital music space.
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Thanks for sharing your listening experience of MQA.
One of my demo’s at my local Naim dealer was with a NDX2 fed by Tidal via Roon with a DIN/DIN cable into the 252 set up with a HiFi Rose 150B fed direct by Tidal Connect into the 252 set up at the same time with a RCA/DIN cable and switching between the two inputs.
The 150B sounded much better than the NDX2 and adding in the Moon 780D via Tidal Connect with the RCA/DIN cable also sounded better than the NDX2 via Roon and not just to my ears the dealer principle thought the same.
I would be interested to know what non-Naim DAC you used for your listening test as the quality of the equipment has a direct impact on the sound quality.
Thanks also for sharing your listening experience with MQA which is considerably different to my listening experience but it’s good for people to hear as many listening experiences as possible so they can form a better opinion and it’s appreciated that you made the effort to listen for yourself.
I would be very interested to know what streamer/dacs you used in your listening sessions as my experience is that the better the quality the equipment the better the sound quality e.g. going from a NAD C658, to HiFi Rose 150B, to Lumin P1 to Moon 780D, although the 780D was way too expensive for me and the performance difference over the Lumin P1 was not really that much better, maybe because the technology in the 780D was that much older than the P1, hence I bought a P1.
MQA is dead meat… Finally! 
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It might have been, but academic now as MQA is effectively dead… N.B. Quite a number of people have shared their listening impressions of MQA over several years in various threads on this forum. Whilst there have been a handful of people who liked it and seemed enthusiastic, I gained the impression that the numbers who tried it and either heard no benefit or found the sound quality to be worse compared to unprocessed hi res far outweighed those who found MQA beneficial. The systems people used would have varied in their quality level, but you’d have to trawl through all the data to see whether there was any correlation.
All this talk about whether MQA was better, worse or same. Honestly, I couldn’t care less if MQA was vastly superior. I was 100% against it for the simple reason that it’s a proprietary, closed system, with the motivation to profit by collecting license fees. It started at the production and reproduction end, but if it had achieved enough critical market mass to be ubiquitous they surely would have expanded licensing fees to end users.
I could foresee people losing the ability to stream music with their hardware refusing to respond because they hadn’t paid current their hardware license fees. Anyone who thinks I’m nuts underestimates corporate greed. Anyone remember Circuit City’s DIVX DVDs?
Open standards for the win. FLAC, ALAC, WAV, etc.
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I’ve read most of the threads on the forum on MQA and have not found people sharing their detailed listening experience of MQA and the equipment they listened on to demonstrate that it was a fair and comparable test, your experience on the forum threads may be different and that is fair enough.
Having read through those MQA threads it was very apparent that the vast majority of people on the forum were against MQA, so I knew that standing up for MQA by sharing my positive experience with it, I was only going to cop a load of flak and that I would be fighting a loosing battle, but I felt that in the interests of fairness it was the right thing to do.
I have had a very positive experience listening to MQA over the last 4 years or so and have really enjoyed listening to the music, which at the end of the day is the only thing that matters.
I agree with you that MQA is on the way out and probably in the not too distant future Tidal will fully drop it in favour of Hi-Res FLAC, which is no issue to me because my two streamer/dac’s are fully Hi-Res FLAC compatible so I don’t have to go and buy any new hardware and many other people will be able to listen to Hi-Res from Tidal 
.
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Many, if not most, people have system details in their profile so wouldn’t normally mention in a post.
Yes, and most people don’t have fully enabled MQA streamer/dac’s in their profile, hence seeking further information on a fair and comparable MQA listening test.
Many would have been doing first unfold, for which they can feed into Naim DAC or digital (DAC) input of a streamer, and compared that with 24/96 standard hi res flac. I don’t know how many people tried an MQA licensed DAC - though I’m sure that would have been mentioned - which in any case would give a different presentation to whatever DAC people were familiar with and liked, mostly Naim in this forum.
Thanks for taking the time to reply and provide further information, shame others don’t do the same.
The only experience I have with only doing the first unfold and sending that to a non-MQA enabled DAC was Tidal via Roon using a bare NDX2 into a 252/300DR system but that did not sound as good as either a HiFi Rose 150B or Moon 780D using Tidal Connect in a direct comparison and the Naim dealer principle who was very keen to sell me an NDX2 agreed that the sound was not as good using the NDX2.
Maybe because of just the first unfold, or maybe because it was via Roon (which people on here have said does not sound as good as native Qobuz or Tidal) or maybe a combination of both, who knows the reason why but it was not as good as native Tidal using fully enabled MQA streamer/dacs.
My view is that only by using fully enabled MQA streamer/dacs are you going to get the best sound quality from MQA.
I think that using Roon or good quality music software on personal computers to partially unfold MQA and then send it to a non-MQA Dac is not going to give you the best that MQA can give sound quality wise.
A few posts on here refer to MQA as being bad technology… and focus only one aspect, the bandwidth reduction. I disagree, I think it was an innovative technology that was perhaps badly marketed and questionable commercial implementation/licensing model, but in my opinion was more effective than psychoacoustic compressors like mp3 and AAC.
It also allowed a degree of control in the audio streaming chain to stop re compression (with out full decode and full encode) … and as we know regular cloud streamers can modify the audio in the chain to meet their LUFS standard if the master doesn’t comply with resultant loss of fidelity.
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