Any News on MQA Lately?

Yeah Erik,  I think I misread the Stereophile measurements completely.  I now believe all three filters are without MQA so I deleted all my posts so that I don't spread misinformation. 

@tomcy6  No worries. The truth is MQA is a very ambitious encoding format and it's easy to misread how parts of it fit together. I went a long time thinking it was lossless, until Benchmark set me straight.

Best,


Erik

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.