Why is everyone so down on MQA?

People are mostly down on MQA because:

(A) Tidal encoded significant number of 44/16, that is, CD-quality files, with MQA. This was not a smart move, because compression inherent in MQA took its toll on a format that wasn’t highly resolving to start with.

(B) MQA is a proprietary lossy DRM-enabled format. This adds friction to its use, as one needs to have a compatible streamer to fully unlock the MQA data. Moreover, MQA licensing cost naturally makes such streamers more expensive.

MQA’s sweet spot would be streaming of 192/24 and 384/24 files. Compression could be beneficial for the provider’s expenditures on bandwidth, loss of sound quality would be imperceptible, and pirating of essentially full-resolution studio masters would be inhibited.

MQA was not really a solution for a problem that didn't exist; to my mind, it was a thinly veiled, cynical attempt to ring fence and monopolise the streaming market. It was never about giving the end user a superior listening experience.

@painter24

MQA was not really a solution for a problem that didn't exist; to my mind, it was a thinly veiled, cynical attempt to ring fence and monopolise the streaming market. It was never about giving the end user a superior listening experience.

MQA solves two problems:

(1) High bandwidth costs. A streaming provider has to either eat the significantly increased expenditures (~6.5x for 192/24 PCM/FLAC as compared to 44/16 PCM/FLAC), or to start charging customers significantly more and thus lose market share.

In places like US, Europe, South Korea, Japan, this may appear to be an insignificant concern, because streaming subscription is relatively inexpensive in comparison to average incomes. In some other countries, things are different. 

(2) Pirating. In countries such as China and India pirating of music is still a big concern. MQA mitigates this issue: without full MQA decoding a pirate will only get a diminished, lower-quality version of a master.

Also, I would not be surprised to learn that MQA uses watermarking, extending to decoded analog signal, which could enable tracing of pirated copies. That would explain stubborn refusal of MQA people to provide their encoding device for non-commercial testing. 

Tidal MQA sounds fine and I'm not sure how much unfolding is happening (Schiit Bifrost 2/64 multibit upgrade), but then my system sort of makes everything sound from fine to outstanding...and that's how it should be. 

I am a firm believer in letting the free market decide.... eventually those that have poor value propositions will just disappear !  It's capitalism at its best.