Well, I am a trial lawyer and a Tidal HiFi Plus subscriber. I have absolutely no idea what @audioisnobiggie is talking about. Is he claiming that MQA is really a red book rate, that is somehow upscaled to 96K? If that is the claim, then there is some fraudulent marketing going on and there may be a claim based on false advertising. But my understanding of MQA was that it actually takes a hi res file and “folds” it so that it streams using less bandwidth and then a DAC with the appropriate chip or software, “unfolds” it to its hi-res state. If someone could explain what is going on, I could be a little more cogent.
Tidal class-action
MQA declared bankruptcy. I smell the fear of a class action lawsuit against Tidal. We could do that. Tidal has 8 million subscribers, we don't know how many or how long they all were paying double by subscribing to the 'nobody can prove Tidal has any tracks higher than 44.1khz' plan. They probably have lots of people on phones who haven't even heard of MQA who trust them and wanted the one that sounds better. They're right not to have to listen to any talk about MQA if they want the plan that sounds better.
MQA means you can't prove the file is an original copy or not. That Beethoven track you like it says is 192 could actually be Dua Lipa at 11khz.
The bankruptcy move was probably to protect themselves from Tidal, who is the receiver of people's funds.
Showing 4 responses by moto_man
@audioisnobiggie, I have briefly looked into the tech of MQA and found it surprising. Here is an excerpt from the article on MQA in Wikipedia: 'MQA encoding is lossy;[24][25] it hierarchically compresses the relatively little energy in the higher frequency bands into data streams that are embedded in the lower frequency bands using proprietary dithering techniques, allowing for an apparent reduction in sample rate and hence file size. After a series of such "origami" manipulations,[26][27] a dithered and shaped version of the original audio, together with a touchup stream (the compressed difference between the original and modified streams), are distributed as a single 24-bit stream, with the most significant bits occupied by PCM audio compatible with non-MQA playback equipment. Depending on the implementation, as few as 13 bits may be reserved for PCM audio, with the lower-order bits rendered as noise by equipment without an MQA decoder" This strikes me as mumbo jumbo. Why would I want some weird lossy compression with a side stream of the compressed bits that is then recombined in one's system, when I can stream the same thing at 24/96K FLAC through Qobuz? How can a weird "origami" process applied to a 16/44.1K file sound better than a lossless 24/96 stream? To me it makes no sense at all. As for all you class action naysayers, the harm is that I paid a higher price to have access to something that supposedly delivered high res files, but instead was delivering Redbook files that were artificially processed and then re-processed. Not saying that that is what happened, because I don't yet fully understand the whole MQA tech, but it sure seems like false advertising to get people into the higher tier pricing. The harm is the differential between that tier and the next one down . . . |
I am surprised at the hostility being thrown around here. What is the purpose of MQA files? At least for me, I thought that it was a hi-res stream that through methods unknown, was "unfolded" to its former glory by your DAC. I have both Tidal and Qobuz and I like both . . . Tidal is better at curating playlists and so forth, I think but they both have very similar catalogs, at least in the classic rock and jazz categories. But why pay for a Tidal tier in order to get MQA, when MQA is really just a Redbook file with some sort of upsampling applied? To me, that is the real issue. It is not disclosed that that is the nature of an MQA file, and if my rudimentary understanding is accurate, it is false advertising to say that is. I am not attacking how MQA sounds, or whether it sounds different than a hi-res FLAC file on Qobuz. I am only commenting on the fact that it does not appear that MQA is what it is marketed as. That can be the basis of a class action. Yes, you get very little, and the lawyers clean up, but lawyers need hi-end equipment too, you know . . . :) |