Any News on MQA Lately?

Aside from the technical details, I'm guessing that if MQA doesn't gain "traction" in the marketplace by the end of next year, it'll go the way of SACD/DSD.
I'm reading that Warner Music is working on converting many of the albums in their catalog to MQA, I hope that's accurate.  But I'm also reading that Tidal has put "on hold" their plans to stream MQA.  Not the greatest news for the format.
I must say, my AIFF files (most 44.1/16, some higher res) decoded by my PS Audio DirectStream DAC sounds pretty darn good!  It would be a "hard sell" for me to abandon that DAC, especially if I needed a "microscope and tweezers" to find the improvements that MQA offers.

@ejr1953 

You bring up a very good point. MQA isn't just competing against high resolution data files, it's competing against the latest crop of DAC's. Over the past 5 years or so the performance of DACs with Redbook has markedly improved while the performance at super-high res has remained more or less constant.

Reference Recordings uses HDCD (developed by Keith Johnson, also of Spectral fame,and Pflash Pflaumer who is the technical wizard of Berkely Alphac Dacs) which is good enough that Microsoft bought it. How is MQA superior (significantly) to HDCD. At least HDCD was not involved in DRM.

Hi @ptss

HDCD is the perfect analogy. HDCD is a pretty complicated format as well. Microsoft bought HDCD but then did nothing at all with it. It's a shame because I would love to have a software scanner to go through all my FLAC files, and decode any HDCD content.

MQA is not involved in DRM either. There is no playback, copy or encryption restrictions on the files or the decoding.  Just like HDCD however, you must have compatible hardware. MQA IS attempting to be an authoritative standard so when your MQA light goes up  you know you downloaded the file without additional alteration/compression done by the download service.

HDCD was a recording engineer's toolbox. It was up to the engineering team to decide which features, and when and how much they would take advantage of. This is a little different from MQA as everything is done by the hardware vendors. The recording engineers don't really have any control over MQA besides turning it on or not.

One thing that I should point out to anyone comparing MQA, is that to do it right re-mastering is required. Meaning you have to work your way back to the original multi-track digital files before you can produce a 2 channel MQA product. Becnhmark Media has a lot more on this.

In any event, when I have heard significant differences what I heard seemed due to this re-mastering and the choices taken at that time. If you've ever heard good re-masters you know what I'm talking about.