MQA. What is it and is it any good?

[buddikamahinsakeerthisingh]

I love this guy. He can explain everything so nicely without hurting Anyone.

[AVINIDE]

Few things which should be mentioned.

1. TIDAL mostly uses 24/44.1 FLACs for MQA, sometimes 24/48, sometimes 16/44.1.
2. MQA is lossy, and mostly resampled! The "unfolding" process is just decoding/resampling, depending on the track.
Some songs (ex. from Pink Floyd) are in true 24/96 format encoded into 24/48. It's still lossy, but you can see on a spectrum buzzing from analog gear at 30 kHz.
However most songs with Master quality on TIDAL have just badges applied to them. Rihanna - SOS is encoded as 16/44.1, yet during the playback (at 24/96) there are harmonics above 22050 Hz which look like a mirror of everything what was below that threshold - this indicates resampling.
3. If they're already using FLACs for Hi-Fi (16/44.1) and Master quality, then why they can't just use pure FLACs rather than adding that MQA nonsense?
4. The highest "unfold" can be done up to 24/352.8, however the highest decoding without resampling is 24/96.

[AudioMaverickcom]

MQA would have been great 15 or 20 years ago. With today's bandwidth, storage and processors... I'll stay with uncompressed. Thank you, Paul, for another great video!

[chpsk]

Neil Young dropped his music files off Tidal. Stating "MQA is not my master". He says the MQA did not sound the same as how he mastered them.

[cavalodeferroironhorse]

Paul is that kind of specialist who explains things to us in a sincere, simple and honest way, without hidden interests and with a common sense that doesn't offend anyone and understanding the subjectivity of the subjects.

[bigadventure]

That was the best reaction to MQA that I have heard. It makes no sense that we can stream hi res 4k film but cannot easily and readily stream true hi-res audio. Just points out how few of us actually care about audio. The vast majority are passive listeners not active listeners of music whereas in film it is the opposite. It's a strange thing.

[alexsiuwh]

This is a fair and precise discussion of ups and downs of MQA in 10 minutes. A great thanks to a piece of technology

[louie]

Agreed. Our high bandwidth does not need an obsolete solution to a problem that has already been solved.

[gordonmccallum]

Exactly!! It's about what your ears tell you! I have a vintage amplifier, and I've tried almost all streaming platforms, and found Tidal remarkably better no matter what they use to make it sound better.

[Rythmboy]

Wasn't there a time in the early 2000s that Microsoft said that the 64kbps wma files were "cd quality"? And most people were like "yeah, it sounds just like a cd". The same was said about the 128 kbps MP3s

[thepracticalaudiophile]

Before I knew that MQA was compressed I was listening through a pair of Klipsch rp8000f speakers and my first thought when compared to Qobuz and Apple lossless was it sounds compressed. My friend who's an MQA lover was surprised.

[matthewJ]

I've gotten back into CDs. And I like the older cds. Everything until the 2000s where the best. After that something changed in the industry

[bruceblosser]

Frankly what you actually said is: "I think my customers are idiots, but if they want to pay extra for the Magic Snake Oil, I am going to give it to them!! As long as they PAY!" :)

[chrisrussell]

Thanks for tackling this issue. I can't agree with you more. No bandwidth problem, no need to crush the music. Imagine the same for video, people would be up in arms

[wbmgr]

I’m right there with you. As a business person you’re there to give the customers what they ask for while upholding the values of the brand. But as a person, I don’t prefer to listen to any compressed musical format. They all just make me feel like something is off and as a professional who works with sound all the time I can promise you its not subjective. If someone uploads an MP3 or WMA into our music library at work and I hear it playing even from around the corner I almost always can tell that its not one of the master quality songs right off without any effort. They just don’t “sing” in the same way as a master quality file.

[richvanasse]

Hi, Paul. This is some 4 years later and still billions of people don't have the available bandwidth. It reminds me of the EV hype: the majority of the world could never afford or sustain it (and maybe nor could the planet). Full spectrum high quality audio is affordable to relatively few people on the planet, so I'm glad there's something like MQA (I don't listen to much of it, but maybe it affords people an opportunity they otherwise wouldn't have).

[johanragnarsson]

He talks and talks and talks and at the end he never answer a question if it's a contreversial topic. The man is a genius.

[acoustic]

Bob Stuart originally told everyone that MQA is lossless. So he lied. They tell the record industry, MQA is saving your crown jewels, while at the same time they tell buyers, MQA is better than the original master. More lies.

[bryede]

Here's what I want to know: Why do we need MQA when we already have compressed formats that support higher resolutions? I mean, the only difference seems to be that an unprocessed MQA file is still listenable despite losing bits to data noise. That's neat, but don't existing methods work pretty well for compressing high-resolution audio?

[jyrkih]

The fact why MQA has taken off so well with the record companies is because that they don't have to offer full master quality to the public. Fully decoded MQA is only available from the analog output of the DAC supporting MQA. No digital version of decoded hires track is available for copying. In addition MQA offers possibility for metadata so the audio files can be watermarked. From the record companies' perspective MQA makes sense. To make the consumers like the MQA they have created the temporal smearing hoax to sell it to audiophiles.
Nowadays there are more and more DSP devices in audio equipment that require decoded digital signal for processing. MQA doesn't work with those as you can't decode the signal after it has been processed by DSP. Also many audio companies have put huge effort creating proprietary digital filters on their DACs and MQA requires that the filter is replaced by their own filter.
MQA is a DRM for the record industry, man in the middle collecting licence fees and creates unnecessary limitations for equipment manufacturers. There are too many cons and too few pros for it. Despite their claims on audio quality it's never better than the original hires audio file.