I don’t give a rat’s ass about Neil Young or CSN or if Cher jumps on the bandwagon. But MQA isn’t part of the equation to me in the first place. I subscribe to TIDAL’s fairly new Hi-Fi tier that tops out at CD quality without MQA which is fine by me and my ears and saves me $12 a month over getting "High Res" files.
Tidal used MQA as a marketing tool to lure in unsuspecting "audiophiles" and it worked! I stand by Bob Carver’s white paper assessment of the current incarnation of MQA as being little more than snake oil, not audible to humans at all. And any "changes" it makes to the music are CHANGES, not any added detail that is present in the original file.
Anyway, I have all the Neil Young and CSN I care about on vinyl or CD, so their absence as "Masters" from Tidal isn’t important to me. They are all still there in CD quality. Good enough. There’s too much new (and old) music to discover better than listening to the same old songs a hundred times.
Neil Young calls out Tidal
TIDAL is calling their files of my songs Masters. But TIDAL’s MQA files are not my masters. I make my masters - not TIDAL. I made my masters the way I wanted them to sound. If TIDAL referred to their titles as TIDAL MASTERS, I would have no problem, but they don’t. They call them Masters. I had my music removed from that platform. They are not my masters.”.
https://www.realhd-audio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/210118_NYA.jpg