News: Millions Of MQA Tracks Coming To TIDAL Masters From Warner Music

Those of us who do not stream have little interest in MQA. For local storage size is not an issue and the sound quality benefits of higher resolution and DSD are certainly worth it. And yes, original recording quality is the single most important thing. And honestly, yes DSD is alive and thriving. Even McIntosh has a DAC module that can handle DSD512 now. People are constantly putting the proverbial nail in its coffin, similar to what was done to vinyl not such a distance memory.

MQA's main benefits are to make it easier to stream, and take up less space for storing files on portables. Even that is not an issue now. I carry hundreds of albums on my portable of all resolution levels from CD quality to DSD256 (I will not put a MP3 on my portables :)).

Puma is not the first person in the industry that I have heard describe MQA as a a cash grab or - "MQA is just another licensing scheme and cash grab to rip off content creators, recording studios, mastering servieces and manufacturers, etc., etc. by charging licensing fees at virtually every step of the music creation, recording, mastering, distribution, playback, etc. process."

A friend works for Stereophile and he makes the exact same statement.
 
PMCH said:
For my system and ears, I prefer Tidal MQA over Qobuz HD by a small amount. I wish it wasn't so because Tidal is more expensive. I do have a MQA Dac.
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What you should try if you haven’t yet is to listen the “Hi-Rez” version of an album and switch over to the 16/44.1 version. You might be in for a major shock.
 
mep said:
What you should try if you haven’t yet is to listen the “Hi-Rez” version of an album and switch over to the 16/44.1 version. You might be in for a major shock.
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I have tried that many times. I almost always prefer the Hi-Rez versions. It may just be my ears, I don't rule anything out.
 
PMCH said:
For my system and ears, I prefer Tidal MQA over Qobuz HD by a small amount. I wish it wasn't so because Tidal is more expensive. I do have a MQA Dac.
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Nothing wrong with preferring Tidal MQA, even if MQA has been proven to be lossy. It is no different to the LP vs CD or tube vs SS preferences.
 
PMCH said:
I have tried that many times. I almost always prefer the Hi-Rez versions. It may just be my ears, I don't rule anything out.
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Interesting. I almost never prefer the so called hi-rez version of albums. One exception are digital recordings that were originally recorded at 24/88.2. Too many of the hi-rez versions have had the life sucked out of the recordings.

I suspect there are too many albums that were never recorded at the resolution and bit depth that is displayed on Tidal and Quobuz (except for the 16/44.1 files). I think that many “hi-rez” files are just upsampled 16/44.1 files that have been sheep dipped in digital filters if the albums were originally recorded to tape in order to remove the tape hiss.
 
mep said:
What you should try if you haven’t yet is to listen the “Hi-Rez” version of an album and switch over to the 16/44.1 version. You might be in for a major shock.
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What I learned from doing that experiment is that often it is next to impossible to tell if you are comparing apples-to-apples. For example, a Hi-Rez version may have been remastered. In which case, it WILL sound different. Or it may have been tweaked in a way that it sounds different but that is not explicitly stated.

Today, the technology exists for anyone to take any 16/44.1 recording (or even lower resolution) and upconvert it to Hi-Rez (I convert my 16/44 music to 512DSD on the fly). You are not doing any remastering but you are able to use sophisticated filters that affect the sound. I would not be surprised if some companies do something similar and sell them as Hi-Rez downloads and charge customers a pretty penny for it.
 
nicoff said:
What I learned from doing that experiment is that often it is next to impossible to tell if you are comparing apples-to-apples. For example, a Hi-Rez version may have been remastered. In which case, it WILL sound different. Or it may have been tweaked in a way that it sounds different but that is not explicitly stated.

Today, the technology exists for anyone to take any 16/44.1 recording (or even lower resolution) and upconvert it to Hi-Rez (I convert my 16/44 music to 512DSD on the fly). You are not doing any remastering but you are able to use sophisticated filters that affect the sound. I would not be surprised if some companies do something similar and sell them as Hi-Rez downloads and charge customers a pretty penny for it.
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That is exactly what they do..

The only high resolution I buy anymore is from boutique recording studios like Sound Liaison who "record" their own talent with a high resolution equipment and digital files to begin with. Granted, the music selection is often limited but it is a special "treat" when the new album aligns with one's taste. Sound Liaison Music Shop
 
One of the things MQA claims to do is remove temporal artifacts caused by the steep anti-aliasing filters used in early Redbook digital recorders.

The low sampling rate of 44.1 kHz requires steep anti-aliasing filters in the A/D converter. These filters smear the time response and create pre-echo, something that never occurs in nature. By knowing the characteristics of the A/D converters in the original PCM encoders, you can create a correction filter and D/A reconstruction filter that significantly reduces the temporal distortion caused by the original A/D converters.

This is one reason that MQA encoded tracks can sound better than the original redbook ones.
 
W9TR said:
One of the things MQA claims to do is remove temporal artifacts caused by the steep anti-aliasing filters used in early Redbook digital recorders.

The low sampling rate of 44.1 kHz requires steep anti-aliasing filters in the A/D converter. These filters smear the time response and create pre-echo, something that never occurs in nature. By knowing the characteristics of the A/D converters in the original PCM encoders, you can create a correction filter and D/A reconstruction filter that significantly reduces the temporal distortion caused by the original A/D converters.

This is one reason that MQA encoded tracks can sound better than the original redbook ones.
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Absolutely but the Qobuz files still sound better to my ears. Again, I do not have an MQA dac. Actually I do, the audioquest dragonfly thingy but I am not even going to bother as my headphones are 300 ohms.
 
W9TR said:
One of the things MQA claims to do is remove temporal artifacts caused by the steep anti-aliasing filters used in early Redbook digital recorders.

The low sampling rate of 44.1 kHz requires steep anti-aliasing filters in the A/D converter. These filters smear the time response and create pre-echo, something that never occurs in nature. By knowing the characteristics of the A/D converters in the original PCM encoders, you can create a correction filter and D/A reconstruction filter that significantly reduces the temporal distortion caused by the original A/D converters.
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That's correct, and you don't need MQA to do so. dCS, Chord, TotalDAC, Lampizator and Schiit, just as some examples, all have and use excellent filters and filtering algorithms for producing excellent results when decoding PCM.
 
One of my favorite uses for TIDAL is the My Mix playlists. Great for music discovery. But Qobuz is my preferred streaming service, and the Lumin app makes going back and forth between those services really easy (especially since I’m not a Roon user). Even adding the same track to the play queue for quick comparison (e.g., MQA from TIDAL, High-Res from Qobuz) can be accomplished very quickly with the press-and-hold pop-up search features.

Tip: in the Lumin app, go to a TIDAL My Mix playlist. Press and hold a track and on the pop-up, press the Qobuz icon at the end of the line for the Album title. This opens the Qobuz search interface in the Lumin app with a list of matches, where the album is usually in the top 20 or so results; tap that to find the same song and add it to the queue. Now I can play songs from Qobuz servers but use the curated lists from TIDAL.

(Note: on the pop-up you get a line for Album title, Song title, Artists, etc.; I don’t press the Qobuz icon next to the song title in the pop-up since the search results (1000 hits max) are not sortable and the target song is usually not easy to find. I have much quicker results finding the desired song when searching for the album.)

So if you are like me, have a Lumin streamer, and like TIDAL’s discovery features, but dislike MQA and prefer lossless FLAC from Qobuz, maybe this tip will be of use to you. Oh, and another tip: after I’ve added all those Qobuz-matched songs to a fresh queue in the Lumin app I can save the queue back to Qobuz as playlist (in essence porting over the My Mix playlist from TIDAL to Qobuz).

Cheers
 
i'm not for or against MQA. it's typically slightly better than redbook on Tidal, maybe 70% of the time, but i always prefer the higher rez from Quboz......and 75% of the time prefer the redbook on Quboz to MQA on Tidal. and MQA is never as good as my files. period.

when i'm doing searches and investigate the best versions of recordings, it's easy to quickly hear these differences.

but the 800 pound gorilla in the room is your dac. if you have a high quality bit perfect dac that does not upsample everything, then higher rez PCM should be consistently superior. and if your dac converts everything to dsd (PS Audio for instance) then of course your result will be skewed. too much math going on for the result to be predictable.

overall i'm for more music to be offered for streaming. i pretty much think anything Bob Stuart does sucks, but will hold my nose for more music. so the net result of this news is positive. i would prefer if my Tidal subscription cost increases would go to the artists rather than Mr. Stuart. but that's the world we live in......and they did not ask me.........
 
Puma Cat said:
That's correct, and you don't need MQA to do so. dCS, Chord, TotalDAC, Lampizator and Schiit, just as some examples, all have and use excellent filters and filtering algorithms for producing excellent results when decoding PCM.
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Stephen - very true - The thing that Stuart et all can do that those wonderful DAC's can't is understand which A/D converter box was used for mastering and compensate for its specific anti-aliasing filters. Who knows if they actually do this when they encode MQA Masters, but it is an approach that has technical merit and tends to get lost in the discussions of what MQA is actually doing.
 
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