Any News on MQA Lately?

The big question will be if the market goes for MQA.  Without a large enough catalog of music, I don't see the DAC makers investing in making their units MQA-compatible.

The MQA folks have said that non-MQA-compatible DACs will be able to play back their files (as they are in a PCM wrapper), but from the few articles I've read on the subject, it seems that FPGA-based DAC manufacturers report that the resulting sound quality is not good.

I guess time will tell.  But it seems that there was a real flurry of excitement about MQA earlier in 2016, which seems to have calmed down.

Aside from the technical details, I'm guessing that if MQA doesn't gain "traction" in the marketplace by the end of next year, it'll go the way of SACD/DSD.
I'm reading that Warner Music is working on converting many of the albums in their catalog to MQA, I hope that's accurate.  But I'm also reading that Tidal has put "on hold" their plans to stream MQA.  Not the greatest news for the format.
I must say, my AIFF files (most 44.1/16, some higher res) decoded by my PS Audio DirectStream DAC sounds pretty darn good!  It would be a "hard sell" for me to abandon that DAC, especially if I needed a "microscope and tweezers" to find the improvements that MQA offers.

The "re-mastering" comment is (to my way of thinking), key.  If I understand the advantages of MQA, it's that the removal of "blur" requires that they go back to the "analog to digital" point in time and fix it at that point, so when the DAC does the "digital to analog" conversion, it's somehow "linked" to that earlier point in time...in the way the DAC does its job.
It would seem to me that the only way to do that would be to "re-master" the music.
I suspect that "re-mastering" is not cheap, so I wonder if the "business case" might preclude most labels from producing much MQA...especially since the majority of people of OK with MP3 on their phones, the hi-quality audio market is just a small sliver of the overall music consumption world.

Lots of great info here, thank you everyone for what has been contributed.

In my travels, one of the audio salesmen I encountered said that "remasters" oftentimes were the reason why newer versions of the same old music sounded better, especially when they could go back to the old "analog" tape.  If that is true, I suspect what he's saying is that going from the original analog multi-track source to the now new original digital would make that conversion much better (with a newer analog to digital converter in the path).  He also said that starting out with original multi-track digital source, to digital master could also be an improvement, but (in his opinion), not as much of an improvement as starting out with an analog multi-track source in the first place.

Thinking of MQA, I'm guess something similar applies?  If the engineer can mount an original analog multi-track tape and master from there, the first analog to digital conversion would have the advantages of MQA, with the "de-blurring" happening there?  Would there be some sort of similar MQA benefit when the original multi-track recording was itself a digital source?

Got an email from Tidal this morning, they are rolling out the first MQA streaming on their desktop app (I presume they don't support it with the browser version).  They are branding this "TIDAL Masters".

I have a PS Audio DirectStream DAC, which from what I read doesn't do well with MQA.  So this weekend I'll make my way down to my local shop and see what MQA sounds like with the Explorer2 DAC...for $199 worth getting one, to see what all the fuss is about MQA.

I've been communicating with Robert Harley from The Absolute Sound.  The "MQA's unexpected twist" means that the MQA company has loosened up the requirement that the "unfolding" be done in the DAC hardware.  So, if you uncheck the "MQA passthru" option on Tidal, the desktop app will "unfold" the MQA files and present an up to 94/24 file to your conventional DAC.

But apparently that will not provide you with all the benefits of MQA, specifically the reduction in digital "blur", which seems to only be able to be done in the (MQA certified) DAC.

In my case, when I've compared albums on Tidal which are offered in MQA and "regular" FLAC versions, playing thru my PS Audio DirectStream DAC, the MQA versions which are "unfolded" by Tidal sound a bit "dull" compared to the "regular" FLAC versions.  I've tried that with about a half dozen albums, same result.  I wonder if there's something with the FPGA design that causes that?

So, with the news that Universal has joined Warner and Tidal, I'm wondering if that's the news the DAC manufacturers were waiting for, to incorporate MQA into their future hardware designs....or, could it be that DAC chipset companies like ESS will put that feature into their future offerings?