Tidal class-action

So maybe your sick fantasy will come true and you win $2.72 in settlement? Your hearing can never be fixed, you will never hear the difference that is is the real reason why you are so bitter.  

bowinkle:

mqa’s use of upfolding instead of upsampling can indeed make your yamaha indicate whatever they want. When Tidal gets a 384 track, they will say that if you bought the same 10k dac with their cheap chip in it first, your dac will light up 384, also, from a 44.1 stream, instead of them streaming you the original 384.

If you're listening in your car, you'll have to trade it in for the current model with the chip in the dashboard that only works on Tidal, to get upfolded bitrate from Tidal.

This could become explosive. So many manufacturers have already gone to great effort and expense to incorporate MQA into their equipment. Then on top of the losses there, I am thinking that this is just another tactic to eliminate 'ORIGINAL Recording Quality' from the market just like they did years ago with SACD.
Also I have to say just look at WHO is saying what. I mean there were so many people BRAGGING about the quality and saying this is the ultimate and I wonder if those aren't the exact same folks that are now crying about being duped into thinking they are being cheated. That only shows how gullible the minds are when discussing Audiophile topics.

I told you all that Tidal MQA sucked.

I'm a Qobuz subscriber so i don't have a dog in the MQA fight but I have a question I hope someone here can answer. Qobuz transmits files in the FLAC format which allows various lossless compression levels. Does Qobuz compress its FLAC files to save bandwidth?

I did a search and I can't find anywhere that addresses this question. BTW, when I ripped my CD library I used the zero compression setting in dbPoweramp because I don't want the processor to work any harder than it has to when it plays the files.

click this username’s info... @audioisnobiggie

joined just this week, all 30 axe-grinding posts right here  🙄

It won't have costed much for the gearmakers of gear cheap enough to use the chip to have put it on there.  They can't cost too much, you can get the dac's for only 300.  Then it will unfold hidden data that takes no size, instead of upsamplnig.

juss49:

I haven't had much to complain about, until mqa.  I guess I could start another thread telling people I love mqa unfolding, so that I'm more popular.

nyslkye:

Why only 2.79, when people have been paying an extra $10 for years?

My hearing is broken if I think higher res sounds better?

Any talk of mqa should be unnecessary.  Compared to just streaming higher res, it's all noise.

@audioguy85 

It's much more fun interacting with a physical copy of something. Watching that record spin, or the reels of the cassette spinning in the Nak or Aiwa....I own 5 turntables for a reason....they all do something different and are a joy to use.

You enjoy physical media, I enjoy finding new artists and music that I really like but never would have known about without streaming. 

I have a large collection of albums in various formats that I had fun putting together, but playing them now really doesn't do anything for me.  To each his own.  Enjoy your music!

@audioisnobiggie 

Why only 2.79, when people have been paying an extra $10 for years?

Legal fees.

tomcy6:

Well we'd just have to settle for justice served, sent a message to the future, then.

@tomcy6 why does playing your records not do justice or do it for you? Curious.....because if you have the proper analog set up, there is nothing that can compare. Also, i do stream, just not hi res....as I mentioned in my reply. I stream when I'm both lazy and want to find new music. Then when I find something I like, I go out and buy the physical copy.  

HDCD was a similar technology applied to physical CDs, where the native sample rate had a fixed limit.  I believe MQA is similar, but used for streaming, where the potential signal bandwidth continues to increase.  If you have a high speed Internet connection and local network bandwidth, you don't need or want MQA.  However, if your stream to DAC is bandwidth limited, it may be of value to you.  Over time, though, the audience for processing such as MQA grows more limited, just like HDCD was effectively superseded by SACD (which is also heading towards obsolescence due to high rez streaming)

The OP comes across more as prejudiced than informed.  Buggy whips weren't proven ineffective or fraudulent, they just weren't needed for cars.

PS FLAC is a compressed file format.  It needs to be rendered back to its original state (wav for audio files) to be converted to analog.  This capability can be built into a DAC.

I think I remember my first internet speed after using a telephone modem was around 200kbs.  Enough for 192 uncompressed, not even flac'd, if they had had it.

People probably usually have around 100Mbs now, your higher res audio is a tiny trickle that must cost nothing, since games companies will let you download constantly at full speed, even though there's no reason to.  If there were, I'm sure it would eventually change.

cleeds:

It's the lawsuit thread, so that's what it's about.  People are just saying why they aren't interested, or we would only get $2.79 each.

When I don't get what I'm paying for, I want my money back.

MQA can not prove to users that Tidal has the original higher res track on it's server, based on what it is streaming.  That's why it chose the name Master Quality Authentification, it's what end users would be unable to prove they get with it.

I can hear that there are many satisfied users, but how would they know it's wrong if it is?

I still don’t understand, why did you wait until MQA “declared bankruptcy” before bringing this injustice to light if it has been going on all this time?

Wow. A lot of hyperbole and bluster here from somewhat miss informed people looking to make something out of nothing. Tidal wasn't charing extra for MQA files, only offering them as part of a paid plan. You had a choice to buy the plan - or not. You knew / or didn't what MQA was supposed to be about when you signed up and btw- MQA was never conclusively measured or otherwise shown to "sound" better than non MQA- which presumably may have led to some of its current status. There's no "class action" lawsuit filed or pending either.  

I didn't know that Tidal and MQA files were mandatory for everyone to listen. I thought it was a service that us audiophiles and other like minded audio aficionados decided to sign up and pay for..... of our own free will. I didn't know millions of people were locked in a room and forced at gun point to listen to MQA?

It's a class action lawsuit for all of us..... (scratching my head) ?

Anyone who has worked in law or in any serious business knows what is being said here about lawsuits or class action suits for this MQA thing is completely ridiculous. People should stick to talking about interconnects and speakers and cartridges. Please don’t enter the real world where you don’t live, the comments are laughable and completely ignorant.  The OP here going on and on like a broken record.  It really seems like a teenager flunkie trying his daddy's big boy pants on, and them not fitting worth a damn.

moto_man:

You paid for top tier, and they call it upfolding instead of oversampling. That’s why they chose the name that mqa stands for, it’s a decoy that sounds better than higher res.

fbgbill:

I like streaming as the option to discover more music. I can just pump a lot of funds into my digital playback, and not have to spend on a separate tuner also for foreign exposure, so my playback from all sources benefits. I get better sound than movie theatres from videos and games, too.

audioguy85:

I found that the Tidal player didn't sound as bad as the Amazon one did. Even better, Tidal plays in Audirvana, my favorite sounding player, so it's playback shoots to the top of streaming, though Qobuz works in there too, which isn't in my country until next month. I’m disappointed Tidal is faking it’s higher res with mqa.

For sure you will beat foreign sources with all of your other gear, but for auditioning new candidates, why not improve what you’re getting also?

@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 . . .

It’s a relief hearing you disagree with everything even mqa says it’s doing, moto_man. You should be asking for an unaltered simple 24/96 stream, not lossless, if you don’t like people messing with your stuff.

MQA would probably tell Jay-z that he could do something so that it wasn’t the same as oversampling, so that they could have their stories straight. If Jay-z isn’t in on it, his whole company sure got taken.

If Jay-z shoots the mqa creator, all the other guys like that will want to kill him because of it.

I enjoy Tidal. Personally, I have been pleased with MQA. I like Qobuz. Sometimes streams from Tidal sound better than Qobuz, sometimes Qobuz will sound better. Do I prefer vinyl- yes. I tell “most” (99%) guests, and they agree, if they had never heard my vinyl set up my digital would sound better than anything they’ve ever heard. Tidal does a better job for me creating mixes and suggesting new artists than Qobuz . Digital, no matter which platform (I use Spotify most frequently away from my system) is how I discover and sample music before I buy it on vinyl. 
 

I’ve never understood the vitriol that gets tossed around about MQA on this site. Seems like much ado about nothing. 

If you haven't yet discovered everything that was recorded on tape, wouldn't you still eventually rather discover the dac they play the music on for the conversion to vinyl that they all need now?

We have Amazon HD and Qobuz. I tried MQA through two streamers and two DAC’s and it sounded fine, but it was not a reason to go to Tidal instead of one of the others.

I'm no MQA fan:  (1) end-to-end systems with a clear opportunity to turn it into DRM in the future; (2) end-to-end system that doesn't work - just check dropouts from MQA handshakes with various DACs...open standards that don't require some handshake at every hop just work better, (3) it's not lossless and for a long time they argued it was; (4) only a few recordings received white glove treatment, the rest was batch processed and (5) this all means their marketing was obnoxiously over-hyping.

And yet, what the OP is saying is completely incoherent.  There are so many good ways to burn MQA and yet the OP seems to have missed shooting the side of the barn from 10 feet away. 

But the OP did make a splash.  I had fun reading and responding for 10 minutes.

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 . . . :)