General MQA Discussion

And in the interests of my/a first fourth bottle of wine since returning to the USA (no doubt immigration are now saying “WTF did we do?” and the TSA are in definite “WTF” mode …) … some more appropriate lyrics from those of my former home-mates:

"In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines
So we sailed up to the sun
'Til we found a sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our purple submarine

We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine
We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine

And our friends are all aboard
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play

We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine
We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine

(Full speed ahead Mr. Parker, full speed ahead
Full speed ahead it is, Sergeant
Action station, action station
Aye, aye, sir, fire
Captain, captain)

As we live a life of ease
Everyone of us has all we need (has all we need)
Sky of blue (sky of blue) and sea of green (and sea of green)
In our purple submarine (in our purple, submarine, ha ha)

We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine
We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine
We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine
We all live in a purple submarine
Purple submarine, purple submarine

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Not hating, but I think ifi calls it magenta. But, yeah. It’s a pretty shade of purple.

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Clearly iFi are looking at things through rose-colored glasses … their indicators are as purple as purple things get!

“Magenta” is just a fussy way of saying “purple” when one has consumed far too many soy-based beverages, is ignorant of Pantone … and/or has a predilection towards RGB color values that have G indexes > 0.

Happily my DAVE, when fed rebook content via an M-Scaler shows it’s bit-rates in purple.

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:rofl::rofl::rofl:

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Ifi are beta cucks! :laughing:

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Interesting. I haven’t gone down the MQA rabbit hole just yet but am interested in hearing the differences and if it adds to the musical enjoyment

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MQA isn’t all that great… you are better just using proper lossless streams or your own FLAC files…

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Yea, I’ve heard very mixed reviews and wonder if it is just a fad. Will it be around in a few years or will something different take its place?

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It is so good to see people starting to see it is a scam. It may be difficult to turn the tide, but it would be great to watch MQA disappear.

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I read somewhere a description of MQA as “Tidal finding a way to market DRM.” :laughing:

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When it comes to @TylersEclectic it’s always wisdom. MQA can be good or evil. It depends in which hands it falls. At the moment I can see it only as a big market strategy to take music off the hands of musicians and bring it back to the ones that build their life on others’ talent. Instead of using Tidal and it’s bit perfect streaming I love to buy my music from a musician directly on Bandcamp. Am I losing quality? I don’t know, I don’t have technical competence to judge it. Am I doing something fair? Yes and a fair lived life is the only heritage I want to leave to my son (plus 10.000 pieces of vinyl collection).

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I don’t support MQA, but neither do I abhor it. Many albums that use MQA have had a bit more care in mastering than they would have sans MQA. For that reason, it’s not all bad. I have several DACs that do MQA, but my main one, the Bifrost2, does not. I subscribe to TIDAL, as I find they have much of the more obscure music that I want.

I confess that I can’t often differentiate between MQA properly unfolded and a Hi-Res audio file, although I can usually tell it from Redbook quality FLAC. So other Hi-Res services are just fine in my book too. I haven’t decided to afford both Qobuzz and Tidal. And ROON is more important to my style than MQA.

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That’s about the only saving grace I may consider about the format as well; although, given the increasing extension high res music may get in to the gen pop it will likely become less relevant.

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I prefer mqa to dsd or flac tracks. Whatever filter or compression, they are using with MQA I enjoy it.

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At the end of the day, that… is all that matters! If you enjoy it who cares what other people think :wink:

We are in a hobby about enjoying music and the “tools” that convey it upon us!

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Can’t emphasize this, personally speaking, hard enough.

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So, when switching between HiFi and MQA on Tidal, is it using the same master file and lowering it for HiFi or does it use different masters?

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They use different masters.

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I’ve been spending the last few days deep in confusion about MQA & how I’ve been using my Tidal Hifi subscription for the duration of the year so far. It wasn’t until I watched Darko Audio’s recent video about Android vs iOS for high quality audio that I was made aware that android has automatic downsampling. So I purchased USB Audio Player Pro & the MQA ‘license’ and finally got a purple light on my hip dac for the first time. Up to this point I didn’t even know that the color of the light on that little dac indicates the type of audio it’s processing. Even then, it’s absurd that I can’t get MQA playback out of the Tidal app on android in any way. Could I theoretically switch to iOS and get MQA playback directly from the Tidal app? Is this all just snake oil? I only use streaming services and at this point, I have no locally stored music that isn’t downloaded from either Spotify or Tidal. I’ve never even heard a FLAC file. Where do I find them? Will Tidal ever update an app that can sidestep android’s downsampling like UAPP does?

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iOS to camera connection kit to hip dac = purple light.

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