Yeah, Qobuz is comingto Canada next month, we're making them work with a Quebec arm to make sure we have enough french content. MQA has scammed their clients, nobody can prove that Tidal even has a copy of any higher res file.
moto_man:
mqa claims they are redbook rate that uncompresses to 96 with your cpu, but you have to buy gear with their cheap chip in it for it to be able to uncompress to anything higher, which will still be a redbook sized stream they say they 'fold' even more. If it were possible to compress audio more, there would be a new file format with a codec, and people could compress and then fold their entire collections, even making 44.1 into something smaller. The more you listen to the tech talk, the more obviously it isn't true. There can only be fraudulent marketing supporting mqa. They are using mqa to avoid bandwidth costs, while charging double anyways, and the result is output that looks like upsampling instead of the original higher res according to measurement devices. Subscribers have been paying double for almost 10 years, and only been getting noisy upsampled results for it. Even if it worked and unfolded to 192 and beyond from the same 44.1 stream, it won't sound the same as a simple stream of the same samplerate. Many people don't seem to care to much about chip noise in their output, though. But it doesn't work, it creates noise, anyways. Since the mqa streams look like upsampling instead, Tidal can't prove that they even have an original copy of the mqa tracks, which is what the mqa name is designed to make it sound like they are even better at being. False marketing. Big ripoff technology. Next, they'll charge double again and tell you you have to go buy the files and play them yourself.
People with 10k dac's are not talking about buying the same one with the new cheap chip. They hate compression, even flac is not the original higher res stream, folding is upsampling. There's no reason your cpu couldn't do the unfolding if it worked, Actually they say it does do the first unfold to 96, then you need the cheap chip to make it to 192 with the same stream.
False claims. MQA is currently still playing on Tidal, and many people are paying double for it to sound noisier than unaltered redbook would been.