The best part about MQA bankruptcy..

Most of these ignorant replies

@p05129

Point out one. Point out any reply you feel is actually ignorant. Personal experience is not ignorance. It’s the opposite. It’s sharing of knowledge gained one person at a time.

How can a $50 cable sound better than my .02 cent cable, must be snake oil.

Well, this is a straw man argument that’s actually the opposite. In this case we are not going from theory and declaring the process bogus, we are going from personal experience, and some analysis by folks such as Benchmark Media to make our points.

BTW: I was personally very excited about MQA at first. It was my own listening tests which failed to find value. Even members of the SF audio society with systems much more expensive than mine were having a really difficult time finding a reason for it.

The post about having to spend $$$ to get mqa. BS, with a firmware upgrade my last 2 DACs got mqa support.

That didn’t happen for free, and the point is that MQA is a brand that is licensed and therefore adds to the cost per unit. It’s not something they are giving away.

Are you aware that MQA is a lossy format? See the Benchmark white paper on it.

If I was a rude, self righteous person I’d point out that you haven’t read it and you are probably therefore ignorant, but I’m not like that.

My reply, get new ears or get a good system. I’m sure most of you were also sacd naysayers, just hated to buy sacd discs or have to get a sacd player.

You are setting up a tautology: If you can’t hear how good MQA is you must have a bad system or bad ears.

All in all a very pleasant way to address others on this board.

These are all practically ad hominen attacks on other posters.  I strongly suggest that if you want to refute the thread, post personal experience, including equipment and examples that would let others follow along with your reasoning.

Erik, love the play on words you used on ’unfolding’.

@cycles2

True credit here goes to @onhwy61 , I just borrowed his idea.

Yep.  People on 56K ADSL modems are absolutely the target market for MQA standalone DACs. 

We're not the slowest!!

That's got to be a great vote of confidence, @philosurfer 

don’t know where [everyone writing about this] gets their information. Here’s a source from which I’d argue that compression is still very useful (are we really that elite?):

@philosurfer 

The US lags behind the rest of the world due to it's insistence on capitalism uber alles.  Performance per community and cost per connection varies a great deal here, but MQA is an elite product.  It's not for your average buyer of ear buds, so I think I'm safe saying that if I can stream Netflix 4k I don't need compression for music, and therefore, for the target audience, MQA's compression is a non-value.

FTR: I have an early MQA capable DAC and I ended up turning it off early on. I couldn’t hear a benefit and my DAC forced me to stick to apodizing filters which I didn’t like as much as other choices.

From a pure sound quality perspective I’ve just never heard a reason to use it, and from a bandwidth savings perspective it’s the 21st Century and even in the US we don’t need it.

At first, for me, the best part of MQA was the A part: Authenticated. It meant that the streaming service did not alter the data from what had been originally released.

The bit compression, etc. seemed useless in the face of modern internet and phone speeds.

What I didn't appreciate so much then until I read the Benchmark white paper on it was how much you lose.