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.” 
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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 
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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Interestingly Android outputs my 44khz files (played in Poweramp) at 48khz, too. So it not only downsamples MQA, it upsamples 44 to 48. Apparently Android outputs everything in 48. I too never knew this before recently as I had a LG phone until I recently moved to a Samsung and had to reconfigure my whole mobile audio setup.
As for whether MQA is snake oil or not, 
. Personally I prefer Qobuz because I know exactly what a flac is doing. And I’ll probably ditch Tidal entirely for Spotify Hifi when they roll it out.
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Are there any DAPs that support true MQA playback? Any android-based, like the Sony walkmans?
Any DAP as long as is Android based and allows you to download and use the Tidal app will be supporting MQA playback (decoded through Tidal app). If you need a player that decodes MQA by itself for files that you eventually can buy iBasso 160, 220, 300, Astell&Kern’s, Pioneer XDP 300 R and many others I surely miss.
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Not sure if you ever got the answers you’re looking for but the MQA site has a pretty good listing of what devices do MQA including DAPs
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This had exactly what I was looking for - whether or not the FiiO M15 supports MQA playback, given that I had read that android has its own proprietary downsampling and to get the light to turn purple on my HELM Bolt dac, I have to use USB Audio Player Pro with bit perfect mode and all that mickey mouse stuff to actually get my phone to play MQA. Given that the USBAPP app doesn’t support offline playback, I wanted to a way to use the Tidal app to get offline MQA playback.
I found this excellent video that I think a lot of people on here may find useful.
A lot of this stuff came as a surprise to me, but it seems like he did his homework and made a very compelling argument against Tidal and MQA in general.
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Jeeze, after watching that how can anyone conclude anything but that MQA is a total scam!
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And that Tidal is a total scam.
For those of us who lived through the transition from LPs to CDs in the 1980s, there’s a strong case to be made that digital formats after CD/WAV are suspect as proprietary scams. It’s fine to move from 16/44.1 to 24/192, but none of the other changes make sense…
The original CD Redbook format is not suspect because (1) it was a sincere and naive effort to improve the music release format beyond the wear, dirt, noise, fragility, and quality limitations of LPs, and (2) the massive companies creating the CD format – Sony and Phillips – employed no copy protection and apparently never considered that copying would be possible in the future. Only 10 years later (mid 1990s) did they realize they’d given away the store, as CD ripping was born. It first went through an audio card with “not great” output, but then direct digital rips were developed.
Starting in the 1990s the content/hardware vendors tried to make CDs seem obsolete through MQA-like marketing, and also added copy protection to every digital format thereafter. They pushed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to defend their protection schemes. Consider DVD, Blueray, Digital Cassette, SACD, and MQA. I recall SACD quality scandals too, as the music labels sometimes just converted old CDs to the new format with no actual content/quality changes. Sony/BMG also got in deep trouble by adding a rootkit (or virus) to copy protect new CD music releases in 2005.
I concur with this video about the value of keeping music files in a simple non-nonsense format (CD/WAV/FLAC), and then filtering as desired during playback. Tidal gets away with its MQA marketing smoke-and-mirrors because they filter and smooth the high end anyway. This could be done equally well or with alternative profiles by the DAC alone.
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