Streaming vs traditional

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

willemj, Do you choose your audio gear and music by the results of double blind tests or by listening?

Of course I listen as well. However, sighted listening tests are methodologically deeply problematic because there is potentially so much expectation bias. The blind test that I linked to suggests that there is little or on sonic difference between high resolution pcm and mqa. Even those who thought they could identify the differences could not. In fact, the same has also been argued for differences between red book and higher resolutions.
This sighted test bias problem is not uncommon, and is well documented in the methodological literature. As a personal anecdote, I once participated in a blind amplifier test by Peter Walker. I thought I could identify differences, but I was completely wrong: like everybody else, I was no better than random. It was a good lesson that I have not forgotten. For a recent demo video on comparing amplifiers: https://vimeo.com/137001237
So the good take home news of all such blind tests is that there are few if any sonic differences between properly designed electronics (that may exclude sonically tweaked audiophile stuff). These days even quite cheap gear can be sonically perfect. Those who claim otherwise are often commercially interested (cables make people millionaires), or as consumers suffer from expectation bias delusion. The real differences in audio are with speakers and room interaction. And here, of course, the differences are easily audible, even if measurements help identify issues. Professionals have known this for ages.
As for my music choices. Well, I choose music, not demo discs.

"The blind test that I linked to suggests that there is little or on sonic difference between high resolution pcm and MQA"

@willemj ~ The above assessment would be true if you’re comparing a audio file that has a higher sampling frequency and bit depth rate than CD - 16bit/44.1kHz.

Before we dismiss MQA, we need to understand why MQA success is important to many of us who cares for high resolution audio.

For many, including you, the CD quality streaming (Tidal, Quboz) is fine. MQA makes no such claims that each and every file is going to sound better than its CD counterparts. Technically they are supposed to sound better, but as we learned that’s not the case and there are many variables as to why (I won’t get into those here).

MQA is simply affording us an opportunity to stream high resolution files with a sampling frequency of 88.2kHz, 96kHz, 176.kHz or 192kHz at 24 bit depth rate. Whether they sound better than 16bit/44.1kHz that has been left up to the user to decide.

There is also debate going on the available MQA content but selection is growing steadily albeit not as fast as some of us had hoped for or like to see.

Personally, I don’t want to pay $15-$35 for each high resolution album downloads. With MQA success, it will force other giants like HDTracks to stream high resolution files which are currently available as pricey downloads only.

Of course, there are those with deep pockets that prefers to own their music than stream. For them, there are still plenty of choices to buy music.

In near future, I would like to see more choices with high resolution streaming so we can cherry pick our high resolution music provider and let them compete for our hard money.

High resolution streaming is here whether you like it or not.