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Tidal class-action

MQA declared bankruptcy.  I smell the fear of a class action lawsuit against Tidal.  We could do that.  Tidal has 8 million subscribers, we don't know how many or how long they all were paying double by subscribing to the 'nobody can prove Tidal has any tracks higher than 44.1khz' plan.  They probably have lots of people on phones who haven't even heard of MQA who trust them and wanted the one that sounds better.  They're right not to have to listen to any talk about MQA if they want the plan that sounds better.

MQA means you can't prove the file is an original copy or not. That Beethoven track you like it says is 192 could actually be Dua Lipa at 11khz.

The bankruptcy move was probably to protect themselves from Tidal, who is the receiver of people's funds.

 

audioisnobiggie
audioisnobiggie OP
82 posts
 

If you haven't yet discovered everything that was recorded on tape, wouldn't you still eventually rather discover the dac they play the music on for the conversion to vinyl that they all need now?

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curiousjim's avatar
curiousjim
4,794 posts
 

We have Amazon HD and Qobuz. I tried MQA through two streamers and two DAC’s and it sounded fine, but it was not a reason to go to Tidal instead of one of the others.

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jji666
538 posts
 

I'm no MQA fan:  (1) end-to-end systems with a clear opportunity to turn it into DRM in the future; (2) end-to-end system that doesn't work - just check dropouts from MQA handshakes with various DACs...open standards that don't require some handshake at every hop just work better, (3) it's not lossless and for a long time they argued it was; (4) only a few recordings received white glove treatment, the rest was batch processed and (5) this all means their marketing was obnoxiously over-hyping.

And yet, what the OP is saying is completely incoherent.  There are so many good ways to burn MQA and yet the OP seems to have missed shooting the side of the barn from 10 feet away. 

But the OP did make a splash.  I had fun reading and responding for 10 minutes.

moto_man
370 posts
 

I am surprised at the hostility being thrown around here.  What is the purpose of MQA files?  At least for me, I thought that it was a hi-res stream that through methods unknown, was "unfolded" to its former glory by your DAC.  I have both Tidal and Qobuz and I like both . . . Tidal is better at curating playlists and so forth, I think but they both have very similar catalogs, at least in the classic rock and jazz categories.  But why pay for a Tidal tier in order to get MQA, when MQA is really just a Redbook file with some sort of upsampling applied?  To me, that is the real issue.  It is not disclosed that that is the nature of an MQA file, and if my rudimentary understanding is accurate, it is false advertising to say that is.  I am not attacking how MQA sounds, or whether it sounds different than a hi-res FLAC file on Qobuz.  I am only commenting on the fact that it does not appear that MQA is what it is marketed as.

That can be the basis of a class action.  Yes, you get very little, and the lawyers clean up, but lawyers need hi-end equipment too, you know . . . :)

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