The best part about MQA bankruptcy..


Is going to be that we will see many fewer discussions on Audiogon about it! 🤣

Now we can all focus on hating on ASR and professional reviewers.

 

https://www.whathifi.com/news/mqa-is-going-into-administration

erik_squires

Chapter 11 or 13 are not good, and some people will lose their livelihood. Not an adapter of MQA but I think there is a market and options are good. 

I feel for the folks that lose their job and lost their investments.  Some here are very narrow minded and self-centered.

Bankruptcy is never good. Maybe PE will bail them out. 

It probably took a lot of work for the person who thought of the idea to get people to listen to the same stream, but with an unfolding chip they bought new gear for, to make gear readouts say 96 and who knows how high up they'll support with it.

I was really angry at TAS for going whole hog on MQA.  I remember Steven Stone saying that everyone now had an obsolete DAC.  Canceled my subscription and never renewed.

  Still…I continue mourning the slow death of SACD, and the stillborn DVD-A.  BluRay also seems headed the way of the Dodo.  MQA may not actually be dead, just reorganizing financially.  I don’t care for MQA but hate to see another format in trouble, even if this one seemed rapacious 

Decades ago when CD sales took over albums and vinyl sales went down and down, as CD players and CD sales went up and up. Digital got better and haters of albums and turntables were saying you were a fool to keep albums. Manufacturers of quality turntables stopped making them, companies went out of business. Companies stopped making record albums. I always welcomed both formats and kinda ignored the haters. I couldn’t understand why people jumped over to the CD format and kept saying albums were sooooo bad. Now albums have come back, sales have gone way up.... past CDs. Even with HQ digital, albums are touted as better sounding??? So what is it really? Are we fools for luving analog? Are we fools for luving digital.... even MQA? Who is trying to make mega bucks from audiophiles? The turntable, cartridge and record album manufactures? Alongside the sleazy MQA developers? Even to this day... the debate rages on... digital is better than analog, analog is better than digital???

I say welcome any new format and buy what you want, nobody bends your arm. And please don’t try to convince me one format sounds better than another or one developer is trying to make money off the average guy...that debate has been going on for years.

Nobody is going to sell their 10k dac they’re impressed with to try mqa.

MQA is the wrong format to care about. It says it folds sample data into fewer samples to take less space, then the secret way unfolds them back, and won’t let you encode it, only decode it, or else you might just find out Tidal actually doesn’t have any original higher than 44.1 res files. They didn’t think people would be able to know the difference true higher res streaming would make that way. And you still don’t. If you are using Tidal right now, and the track is supposed to be higher res, you don’t know what it should sound like if it were not mqa

SACD is not dead, it prospers as even higher bitrate dsd files.  They're up to dsd256, up from the original 64, so far.  There's probably higher already, my dac can do 512.