Because of all the negative comments in the online audiophile echo-chamber about MQA, I had ignored it until last Thursday when my friend called to ask me what I knew about Masters on Tidal. I had to say, geez I don't know anything about that, because I had read that it's the devil's spawn. He said, man you gotta try it, it's awesome.
So I did, and it is. My DAC is proudly antiMQA but Roon recently updated to decode MQA and sends the unfolded PCM 24/96 to my DAC. I understand there's even more potential for MQA than this, up to 8x unfolding for DACs that can count that high and don't have philosophical resistance to change, but for me MQA 1x still sounds better than the standard 44k flac files from Tidal. What I thought were cheap caps on my tweeters sound fine on MQA streams. That makes me question just how "uncompressed" Tidal Hifi tracks really are.
Surprisingly, there is some excellent music to be found in Tidal Masters that sound divine, even compared to the non-master Hifi versions on Tidal.
Masters are included in Hifi level subscription to Tidal, so it doesn't cost me anything extra. It seems like there's about 100 Master albums on Tidal? Maybe 10 classical, maybe 20 of jazz. I hope they add many more, or I hope to find out there are 20,000 Masters on Tidal and I'm just looking in the wrong place.
As I grow accustomed to this level of high resolution files I would consider buying hirez downloads of those recordings I really love and listen to a lot, if they are available. If MQA allowed me to store hirez files in significantly smaller space then I'd do it.
At this point, without reading much about MQA technology, I still hold the simple belief that it MQA is a new form of compression on same principle as flac, but either sounds better, or compresses smaller, or some other advantages over flac. Am I wrong?
I can see a future for MQA, if kids can hear the improvement over 192k mp3. And with national(ized) 5G coming, we'll need much bigger files to justify all the spending. We have a right to MQA! Every poor child deserves equal access to high resolution audio files! It's not fair! Check your audiophile privilege!
Listening to "Ben Webster Meets Oscar Peterson" on Tidal Masters now. Magnificent!