If it wasn’t for those meddling kids MQA would have been fine. If it wasn’t them, I haven’t got a Scooby who it could have been 
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I think there’s a lot of resistance to 3rd party software/solutions by some folk. I certainly don’t want companies getting in between me and my music.
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Not a surprise. I think the last Firmware update for the Gen 1 streamers was hard enough,
Anyone wanting this at this point, is either on the newer platforms, has a workaround solution in place already or is happy with just CD quality.
Going to give Qobuz a spin to see how it compares to Tidal.
There were several who contributed.
Those who put it down, without understanding the unfolding process and listening & measuring to MQA files on systems without the 1st unfold. Or the 2nd & 3rd stages
Golden Sound aka Cameron Oakley and the YouTube he released
The ASR forum
Factions within the Record industry & Equipment makers, who either saw it as a threat or having to pay a competitor
Meridian & Bob Stewart themselves, who should have made the encoding/decoding technology Open source and found other ways of generating revenue from the research undertaken, E.g. either from a certification program or consultancy.
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MQA
Waiting for Naim to support hi-res now, Tidal switch occurred…
So you believe a geezer on youtube who said mqa was no good killed it? Seriously?
MQA died because people got greedy, was ever the way.
Oh and also it was pointless, spun through a web of BS and a majority of people saw that.
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^^^
This. Everything else is debatable but the fact that MQA was closed format and required licencing ultimately sent it where it was inevitably heading anyway.
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Do you ever read any of the AES papers published on the subject?
It was many factors and cuts for Tidal.
Will be interesting to see how the new streaming service that is going to use and offer MQA encoded content will market themselves.
Sounds like they’ve had the developer working on the vTuner replacement, which might require firmware changes across all devices back to gen1.
I guess Todal Max support will come eventually.
We no longer use the naim app for radio or Tidal so aren’t that fussed, although Tidal Connect for Max on NDX2 would be useful.
It’s ironic that we moved away from the 272 due to the need for workarounds, but find ourselves back in the same position with the NDX2.
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Hi, Like me provide you with a link to the Audio Engineering Society web-site and the published paper in question.
I am not sure what you are driving at, but if it helps I don’t care one iota about mqa.
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I’ve read a few of these publications - which are written by MQA Ltd. and affiliated authors - and I think they’re suspiciously diffuse; they contain a lot of very vague language and concepts for academic papers. And as is typical of the industry, are primarily intended as supporting documentation for patenting / establishing intellectual property rights.
Anecdotally, I wanted to like MQA, but it sounds consistently bad in my experience, and put me off Tidal until I head they were getting rid of it.
Interesting… this the first time I’ve read (or recall) this view. This is exactly how I heard it when I had Tidal & Qobuz side by side. I even doubted myself for a while given the fairly strong preference for Qobuz here. 
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You could try Tidal hi-res today with MconnectLite on your ‘controller’ - phone or tablet.
My experience as well I had a subscription to both for a month used Quboz for the first two weeks then swapped to Tidal and I was shocked by the difference so much better. I think the reason why Quboz sounds way does is because they use volume normalisation on the encoding, so this cannot be defeated
So you could say Quboz is not actually lossless because they’ve changed the wavefoam during encoding for normalisation of volume. Losing the original artists intent
So are you saying that ALL Qobuz streaming content has been digitally interfered with, and there is post processing to the files received from the Record label, to apply volume normalisation to the files before they are made available for streaming?
What other post processing is applied? Compression?
Shock and horror!! Are the digital purists aware of this?
Never had a Qobuz streaming account, just one to purchase material through. I was quite happy with Tidal and Tidal Masters using MQA.
What information is lost in this process? Shame it’s not a click option in the app.
I did a side by side comparison tidal vs qobuz years ago and Qobuz was the better sounding product. Pricing has been lower then TIDAL and have found no reason to switch.
When in doubt do a side by side listen and see what works best for you.
I can’t believe this discussion is still going after a year…
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Well Tidal has just changed direction and ripped out all their MQA encoded content and dumped many albums back at standard Redbook content from 24 bits versions. Back where we were 10 years ago.
Yes there has been a price reduction, but frankly I was happy to pay the higher price to have the Tidal Masters and the MQA encoded content.
So the alternative is Qobuz, which claims to be more audiophile friendly with more HiRes content, but now we hear that ALL their streaming content has been interfered with, with post processing.
I guess we need to compare Qobuz and Tidal, once high res Tidal is available in both the Naim App and Tidal Connect. Hopefully we’ll be able to do that sooner rather than later.
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