Why is everyone so down on MQA?

@painter24

MQA was not really a solution for a problem that didn't exist; to my mind, it was a thinly veiled, cynical attempt to ring fence and monopolise the streaming market. It was never about giving the end user a superior listening experience.

MQA solves two problems:

(1) High bandwidth costs. A streaming provider has to either eat the significantly increased expenditures (~6.5x for 192/24 PCM/FLAC as compared to 44/16 PCM/FLAC), or to start charging customers significantly more and thus lose market share.

In places like US, Europe, South Korea, Japan, this may appear to be an insignificant concern, because streaming subscription is relatively inexpensive in comparison to average incomes. In some other countries, things are different. 

(2) Pirating. In countries such as China and India pirating of music is still a big concern. MQA mitigates this issue: without full MQA decoding a pirate will only get a diminished, lower-quality version of a master.

Also, I would not be surprised to learn that MQA uses watermarking, extending to decoded analog signal, which could enable tracing of pirated copies. That would explain stubborn refusal of MQA people to provide their encoding device for non-commercial testing. 

Tidal MQA sounds fine and I'm not sure how much unfolding is happening (Schiit Bifrost 2/64 multibit upgrade), but then my system sort of makes everything sound from fine to outstanding...and that's how it should be. 

I am a firm believer in letting the free market decide.... eventually those that have poor value propositions will just disappear !  It's capitalism at its best. 

I'm not so sure about that. A good example is the video tape format war. Betamax was the vastly superior format yet it lost of the inferior VHS. WFT? Maybe it was only superior with the PAL system and there was very little benefit with NTSC. Years ago I was informed it really stood for Never The Same Colour twice. LOL. NTSC was forced upon you and there was never an option of going with PAL.

 

MQA is confusing when it comes to the software and hardware needed to process the unfolds - 1st unfold, 2nd unfold, all-in-one unfold and then we have decoder, renderer, and full decoder. Curious if everyone is/had been using a full decoder to come to their conclusions about MQA? I had mixed results with MQA; some albums and tracks sounded really great, while others not so much. Personally, I find the technology a little fascinating, but still over my head.

OP: I know you haven’t stepped into streaming yet, but from your post hx it seems like you have a good handle on how it all works. The Node is what brought me back into music/audio. I think a good portion of us on this thread probably started out with the Node.