MQA ? Pono? What's better than the CD?

For the bazillionth + 1 time: MQA has no DRM. There is no management of rights. Only authentication of data.

And they can rave all they want to. I've been very pleased with a number of DAC's over the past 3-5 years. MQA is a barely noticeable change to my ears.

Best,

E

The MQA topic has been (and is being) discussed ad nauseam in other (adjacent) threads, but my personal takeaway is the extent someone is impressed (or not) with the difference MQA makes in SQ completely depends on the quality of the digital components they own. The higher the quality of their gear, the lesser they hear a difference. The absence of very high end MQA capable DACs is making the comparisons a bit unbalanced, in my opinion. To my ears, playing MQA content from Tidal through my medium quality but MQA capabe DAC - Bluesound Node2, sounds much better than non-MQA CD quality content.

the difficult issue is that most higher bit rate or bit depth releases have (or may have) used different masterings than an original CD release

so, you really never know if you are listening to the re-mastering or the putative better than CD stream or package

may not matter at the consumer level unless you are thinking of buying a spendy new piece of hardware

the thing to do may be to find where something has been downsampled to CD levels and run thru a good double blind test regime

or just forget about it and upgrade your speakers, or spend a few months dicking around with room treatments...

MQA - nonsense to get everybody to buy a new dac...  It will die before it starts.

MQA works with existing DAC - there is just no benefit. If enough source material becomes available supporting DACs will become available.