Understanding MQA/tidal/ DA conversion

I have both TIdal and Quboz. They do not have the same albums so having both is worthwhile.

I did quite a bit of listening to MQA and don’t find it’s worthwhile, overall, but I like Tidal’s record collection. On my DAC there’s no way to use it with my preferred filter so I leave it off, but Roon does some of this.

As has been written elsewhere, while MQA may claim to be high resolution, it’s also lossy. See the Benchmark Media paper on it. In a world where 100mBit+ speeds is normal for audiophiles it makes MQA compression less important.

I'm also lucky enough to use Roon which will do 96/24 bit MQA decompression in software so I don't really think much about the whole process. 

As I mentioned in another thread, Roon just does the first of two MQA "unfolds". You need a MQA DAC for the second "unfold".

my constraint is we have a TIDAL family plan so we're all paying $30 a piece for the full year

I believe Qobuz now also offers a family plan that is worth looking into.  @erik_squires makes a valid point about the content difference, but it’s free to try Qobuz so why not?   That said, MQA must die!!!

After a lot of listening to modern DAC behavior, I've settled on 96 kHz/24 bit being good enough for my ears.  In particular, modern DAC's are just a lot better with lower rez music like Redbook (44.1kHz/16) and the only improvement I can hear with high resolution files is completely explained by the slope of the anti-aliasing filters at each higher resolution.

There may be some who still hold out for 384kHz/24 bit music, but for me I've not heard anything best 96/24 in a long time.

@erik_squires +1