Mythbusting Tidal’s MQA Format – How Does It Measure Up?
hackaday.com
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I migrated to Tidal after the Google Play Music to YouTube Music debacle, and have found Tidal's usability to far exceed Spotify. However, attention needs to be drawn to this BS MQA situation.
I truly despise audiophile snake-oil, it's anti-intellectualism dressed up as expert knowledge. The fake blue light on these DACs is one of the most brazen examples of this I've ever seen.
As a citizen of the internet, FLAC is all I could ever ever want. Ive never put much thought into MQA except to express skepticism, and to make a conscious choice to never use it.
This article is very cool. I was never going to get around to the nuts and bolts of why MQA folding is short of perfect. I just knew it wasn't perfect.
People go mad for tube gear, because it's inaccurate, but inaccurate in ways people find pleasing.
Similarly, there used to be significant differences in the "voicing" of different brands of amplifiers-- a Harmon/Kardon would sound quite different from a Yamaha of equivalent paper spec. And, since both were claiming "1% distortion" much of the difference had to be in how it handled that 1%.
The modern equivalent would be codecs which are designed to degrade gracefully at their limits. I could imagine being able to tag a section of a recording as "clipping" and having the codec have special rules to handle it, or even user-adjustable voicing to process it differently.
I have had the privilege of being introduced to the notion of "only as good as the weakest link", and "train your ear neutral" around the time I transitioned from headphones to speakers. Since then, 7 years ago, I have been putting a couple hundred dollars a month into my hobby. It's always tempting to take a shortcut to audio bliss, but it's a dead end. One transgression, and progress can come to a dead halt. Any comparisons, A/B's, and purchases are forever tainted.
I will only purposefully add coloration or distortion in one single part of the chain. For me, that's the "warm", "green" filter on my Qutest DAC. It could also be a Tube amp in the future. But I'm certainly not going to waste it on MQA.
MQA is not "free" (even if I don't have to directly pay for it), and even if it were, and were equal to FLAC, I still wouldn't use it. The computational power required for the best folding means more money must be spend to isolate the electronic noise generated by the processor. And even if I did that, I would then have to have a more powerful processor, which would cost more money to have a higher voltage Linear Power Supply.
I spend a lot of money. There is zero chance I would purposefully introduce an abhorationn like MQA, even if it were free. I would pay dearly chasing perfecting that was tainted in the D/A realm.