Berkeley Audio Design and MQA?

What makes you think that Qobuz is meddling around with lossy compression? Do you have any evidence of this?

My statement was purely a hypothetical to illustrate why authenticated music files is a valuable feature. @8th-note

I picked Qobuz purely as an example, but it holds.  If Qobuz or Tidal or anyone else does any sort of manipulation of the original source files I would have no way of knowing. 

@yage - That's kind of a straw man. Yes, we could do it, but no one is doing it so it's not really the point.

The point is,  I wish some one WOULD do it cheaply.

Perhaps the single thing MQA was doing, which Pono also did (I miss that player) was to authenticate bit streams. If Qobuz is meddling around with the bits somehow by using lossy compression, or some processing we are not expecting we have no way of telling if we are listening to the released recording or someone’s doctored version of it.

Kind of like cryogenically treated cables. No way for me to tell either way.

PS - The only discernible difference I have heard from MQA was the forced use of an apodizing digital filter.  Personally prefer others, but if I think about the sound quality, I think most of what I'm hearing is the filter choice. As I've said before, in a modern 5G/500 MBit / 2 Terabyte storage world I have no idea what MQA is doing in the 21st century besides charging a license fee.

Don't they release 1 dac every 10 years?? 🤣