I don't really trust TIDAL about any of this especially the provenance of their material.
I unsubscribed from their service after realizing that their entire catalog was infested with MQA.
I honestly don't see them as a reliable streaming service.
.
MQA Bankrupt?
- Thread starter sidvee
- Start date
I don't really trust TIDAL about any of this especially the provenance of their material.
I unsubscribed from their service after realizing that their entire catalog was infested with MQA.
I honestly don't see them as a reliable streaming service.
.
Smart retreat and pivot !
reignofchaos
Well-Known Member
Same here - I didn't renew Tidal. Have moved to Qobuz now.
keith_correa
Well-Known Member
This reminds me of a cable seller on the Stereonet forums. He claimed to use "ancient" Western Electric wire to build his interconnects and sold quite a few. The buyers waxed eloquent about the wire and how it made everything sound so "organic" - they used the typical 6Moons type of prose to describe the sound that the cables imparted and went on about how the sound was such a revelation. Till one day, a buyer "unboxed" them and found the wire to be common available garden variety. That's when the buyers turned and the sound from the very same cables that was "organic" suddenly turned inorganic.What a scam it was till it lasted and how many audiophiles sweared by it for the superior quality of the MQA version just becase it was priced higher
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Daggers are out for MQA and understandably so, I never paid much heed to the MQA push on Tidal and quit Tidal after a few months.
But this is an industry where snake charmers and illusionists assume a pedestal rarely afforded to in other spheres of life.
Train your guns at other deliberate disinformation campaigns too, call out reviews that use words that have been out of fashion for couple of centuries, and first and foremost torpedo audiophile tiktokers! lol.
But this is an industry where snake charmers and illusionists assume a pedestal rarely afforded to in other spheres of life.
Train your guns at other deliberate disinformation campaigns too, call out reviews that use words that have been out of fashion for couple of centuries, and first and foremost torpedo audiophile tiktokers! lol.
The other famous scam is the MoFi one where "Audiophiles" paid a cazy premium for "Analog LPs Directly from Masters" . People who bought it including "Gurus" like Fremer praised it as organic since the Tapes were using to directly stamp the LPs. I bet all the people who paid the premium got the bragging rights to be-littled the users of "Digitally Mastered LP Records" not getting the true experience etc. Later it was exposed that MoFi was using DSD to record the data from Tapes and then used the DSD to cut the masters before transferring to LPs.
I bet all the guys who claimed that they "Heard the Difference", " I was Organic with Analog Quality" etc had their BS called out.
www.audioholics.com
I bet all the guys who claimed that they "Heard the Difference", " I was Organic with Analog Quality" etc had their BS called out.
Mobile Fidelity’s Digital Vinyl Debacle: Are your records really analog?
Mobile Fidelity has been caught in a lie. After years of claiming to produce pure analog vinyl, it's been revealed that the company regularly uses digital DSD transfers in the production of its remasters.
www.audioholics.com
square_wave
Well-Known Member
MQA was supposed to give a high res solution at a lossy file size. But it does not sound as good as a real high res file. Qobuz high res sounds better. A high resolution file downloaded from hd tracks played from a local network storage also sounds better. Apple to apples comparison.
End of the day, it all depends on the quality of the original mastering. CD quality if mastered well sounds really good. Badly mastered music irrespective of file resolution sounds equally bad.
Overall, this high resolution digital is a mixed bag. Some albums sounds way better than 16/44 and some not so much. The ones that sounds way better is surely not because of the higher bits only. The big factors that contribute to the quality could even be a different master, different process used when they made the new file etc.
One thing to keep in mind is the normalising of album quality that happened when high res digital and streaming came into the picture. In past, while buying cds, they quality used to wildly differ based on which region you were buying the cds from. I have many duplicate cds from various regions - Europe, Uk, India, Japan etc. They all used to sound quite different. Some were really bad. Most of the horrible ones were printed in India. But if you listen to same album on Qobuz, it sounds more or less as good as the best version of the cd out there. That is a blessing. In some cases the best cd version will sound better. I have some Japanese cds of dire straits. They sound better than Qobuz.
If a good version of the cd is played from a very high end transport, they will trounce the streaming thingy. So, people who own a large collection of the best versions of cds of all their favourite albums and they play using a dedicate transport into a dac, will always say that the cds sound better than streaming. It gets weird as you go deeper and deeper.
MQA should be the least of our worries!
End of the day, it all depends on the quality of the original mastering. CD quality if mastered well sounds really good. Badly mastered music irrespective of file resolution sounds equally bad.
Overall, this high resolution digital is a mixed bag. Some albums sounds way better than 16/44 and some not so much. The ones that sounds way better is surely not because of the higher bits only. The big factors that contribute to the quality could even be a different master, different process used when they made the new file etc.
One thing to keep in mind is the normalising of album quality that happened when high res digital and streaming came into the picture. In past, while buying cds, they quality used to wildly differ based on which region you were buying the cds from. I have many duplicate cds from various regions - Europe, Uk, India, Japan etc. They all used to sound quite different. Some were really bad. Most of the horrible ones were printed in India. But if you listen to same album on Qobuz, it sounds more or less as good as the best version of the cd out there. That is a blessing. In some cases the best cd version will sound better. I have some Japanese cds of dire straits. They sound better than Qobuz.
If a good version of the cd is played from a very high end transport, they will trounce the streaming thingy. So, people who own a large collection of the best versions of cds of all their favourite albums and they play using a dedicate transport into a dac, will always say that the cds sound better than streaming. It gets weird as you go deeper and deeper.
MQA should be the least of our worries!
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Very aptly said. I don't have a high-end cd player. But when I hear the same track on a cd vs hearing it on Spotify, there is a big difference in most of the tracks. Spotify sounds dull & less dynamic in comparison. Though I have not heard Tidal or Quobuz to compare with CD's.
square_wave
Well-Known Member
A Cd vs Spotify is not an apples to apples comparison. Don't even try ! Sorry for taking this thread off topic!
MQA LIMITED - Administration, England & Wales
Appointment of Administrators In the The High Court of Justice Court Number: CR-2023-001732 MQA LIMITED (Company Number 09123512) Nature of Business: Sound ...insolvencyintel.co.uk
Cheers,
Sid
MQA LIMITED - Administration, England & Wales
Appointment of Administrators In the The High Court of Justice Court Number: CR-2023-001732 MQA LIMITED (Company Number 09123512) Nature of Business: Sound ...
Cheers,
Sid
Read somewhere yesterday that the new owner of MQA is Lenbrook Group which also owns NAD, PSB Bluesound Node etc..
www.forbes.com
Lenbrook Group Rescues MQA High-Resolution Audio Technology
MQA technology, which aims to reproduce music close to the original studio master tapes as possible, has been acquired by the Lenbrook Group of Canada.
www.forbes.com
From the beginning, The Reference Point of Comparison for MQA should have been MP3, they Tried to Fool everyone into believing that they're better than FLAC. They could've got away just by selecting a better master instead of this Potpourri.
Personally, Never Got convinced into MQA bandwagon. Tidal was Favourite because it was cheaper than Spotify Premium owing to Tidal Turkey & Argentina and not because of MQA.
Roon always had option to prefer Tidal vs Qobuz, or non MQA version so it didn't matter & I Never bought a DAC solely for MQA.
I'm Not interested in MQA Corp going Bankrupt, I want the main perpetrators of this scam go personally bankrupt. Because at corporate level declaring bankruptcy absolves them from many responsibilities, its just a financial mechanism & The perpetrators will come out with something new to scam us sooner or later.
MQA as acronym now stands for
My Quality is Awful!!
Personally, Never Got convinced into MQA bandwagon. Tidal was Favourite because it was cheaper than Spotify Premium owing to Tidal Turkey & Argentina and not because of MQA.
Roon always had option to prefer Tidal vs Qobuz, or non MQA version so it didn't matter & I Never bought a DAC solely for MQA.
I'm Not interested in MQA Corp going Bankrupt, I want the main perpetrators of this scam go personally bankrupt. Because at corporate level declaring bankruptcy absolves them from many responsibilities, its just a financial mechanism & The perpetrators will come out with something new to scam us sooner or later.
MQA as acronym now stands for
My Quality is Awful!!
Too late, Tidal is already streaming Hi rez flacs now & they themselves call it higher quality.Read somewhere yesterday that the new owner of MQA is Lenbrook Group which also owns NAD, PSB Bluesound Node etc..
Lenbrook Group Rescues MQA High-Resolution Audio Technology
MQA technology, which aims to reproduce music close to the original studio master tapes as possible, has been acquired by the Lenbrook Group of Canada.
The truth is out now, over rated compressed audio format.
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