Streaming vs traditional

The Bluesound Node 2 is a good way to dip your toe into the streaming waters ($500), There’s an Auralic mini at the same price. My experience with the Node 2 is that I love streaming but would like better sound quality.

Right now, Tidal streaming MQA is the only big (3,000+ albums and adding) hi-rez streaming operation going. There is a lot of opinion that MQA will just be another failed format, but it has 2 of the 3 major record labels on board and many hardware and software manufacturers.

Tidal also has millions of cd quality albums to stream and, as you probably know, a well done cd can sound better than a poorly done hi-rez recording.

There are probably a lot of albums out there that you would like to listen to once or twice but don’t really want to own, or would like to hear before you buy, and streaming gives you that option. We all buy albums based on reviews or word of mouth and wonder what those people who recommended them were thinking.

I think I read that HDtracks is planning an MQA streaming service also.

So you can give MQA a try now, wait a couple years to see how it pans out, or wait 5 or 10 years for the next hi-rez streaming format to try its luck.

Spotify is apparently planning to follow Qobuz and move up to 16/44, the cd red book standard. That is not high resolution by most people's standard, but it is enough for me. I am not convinced that anything more is actually audible (there are claims, but no conclusive evidence).

willemj is one of the doubters and there are many of them, but there are also many who have heard MQA and say it is an improvement. Some who have heard it are very excited about it. High-end audio is a subjective pursuit and hard scientific proof of better sound quality is not very common. Something is making high-end manufacturers like bel canto, Burmeister, Cary, Harman Kardon, Esoteric, Kef, Linn, Martin Logan and many more make their products MQA compatible and pay to do it. You can see the full list on the Tidal website. The Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are remastering some of their catalogs for MQA. I just don’t think that they would do that if they couldn’t hear a difference between cds and MQA.

There’s nothing wrong with cd quality in my opinion, though, and streaming gives you access to a lot of cd quality music.

So it’s your call. You can try MQA now (Tidal will give you a free 30 or 60 day trial to try their HIFi service, which includes MQA) or wait and see if enough people buy into it to make it successful. I expect that MQA will improve over time just as other digital audio is steadily doing.

For a blind test of MQA: http://archimago.blogspot.nl/2017/09/mqa-core-vs-hi-res-blind-test-part-ii.html