I am sorry, but this argument is absolutely speculative.
MQA has been around for 6 years and a half. Yet, its “technical possibility to have a valid quality improvement” has not been proven.
What exactly would be their difficulty to prove that?
All we have noticed is a very great deal of media attention and focus, and an opaque wave of pseudo scientific fluff, very reminiscent of the arguments about human acoustic perception that was peddled to sell the MP3 format to the Great Unwashed.
You may still enjoy MQA sound quality, if that is what you like, and feel good for having embraced the “next big thing in audio” before us, mere mortals, but please spare us the jesuitic argumentation.
That worked for me in Audirvana 3.5 (Settings > Tidal > Lossless) but after doing the same in Studio, my non-MQA streamer is still displaying the first MQA unfold. Did I miss something? TIA
I have no idea. Probably same or similar reason why one “lossless” audio player having “unique audio qualities” over other lossless players is often claimed (including by you) but never proven. Difference of course being that while differences between lossless players are unprovable due to being nonsense, some of MQA claims, despite their scam marketing, are technically possible.
No, it was not debunked at all.
Very weak “response” by BS, the fact that kind of lame reply took 35 days to compose is mind boggling. MQA looks desperate and foolish by making such a bad attempt at rebuttal to that video.
Actually Danny has admitted on the Roon forum that they pay MQA directly (not through TIDAL) on a per stream basis, and that invoice has skyrocketed since Warner Music Group’s removal of standard Redbook in favor of MQA only. Dirty pool there.
The above is likely in addition to some standard license fee that Roon had to pay upfront for MQA.
Exactly, because you know it’s the same payment model as was disclosed/confirmed by Roon.
Additionally, be sure not to subscribe to TIDAL at all, or only if they offer the mid-tier “non-Masters” plan in your region.
Of course not, only Audirvana themselves could provide you with your demand, however a strong indication of how this works has been made public by Roon. Chances are good it is exactly the same for Audirvana.
I suspect it doesn’t cost Roon that much. Most of the Roon endpoints are MQA decoders. Even if they pay per decode, it’s only when playing to non-MQA dacs or MQA renderers, and pretty much limited to Tidal.
It remains with assumptions because we only get information from hearsay. Everything is mysterious. While it is only a codec.
And if it were not relevant amounts of money, there would be no revenue model for MQA.
We just don’t know what percentage of users activate the core decoder. Anyone who uses EQ, Room correction, volume controle, multiroom without MQA, People who don’t know how it works and just choose renderer. The number of MQA files will only increase. it will be quite a reasonable percentage.
Again no one knows and all we can do is argue uselessly about things we don’t know. and what we hope it is or isn’t. It’s weird that we ended up here. we share a great hobby and instead of talking about music we spend our time on codecs and software bugs.
Well that doesn’t really help either. ALL of Warners catalog is now exclusively MQA even the 16/44 (Actually more like 13/44)
So even if You think You playing truly lossless, You’re not.
Whatever that cost is, Danny has complained openly about it on the Roon forum, the first such cracks in that alliance I’ve seen. He said their invoice from MQA had skyrocketed since the Warner Music debacle on TIDAL.
Though Danny has conceded other potentially negative aspects of MQA in the past, this was the first I’d seen where the tone appeared different and less than happy about that situation. Even if the cost is still negligible, you can see the wheels spinning, what would happen to those costs if all 3 major labels followed suit and went with the “one deliverable” approach they’ve admitted to wanting in the past? If Warner skyrocketed the invoice, imagine those costs at 3x with all three major labels in on the scheme. Thats not what Roon signed up for originally.
There’s no point to complain. They can just stop doing the core decoding. Sure, those with MQA renderers and devices without MQA support will be affected. They will be able to play it anyway, just without unfolding.
It’s fair enough, if you want MQA then you need to get the MQA decoder device. It’s how it’s designed to work. It’s the freemium model MQA is pursuing. This whole software decoder thing was invented because not many DACs had MQA support. Now the situation has changed. The only MQA renderers on the market are the dongle DACs and some iFi devices.
The same thing can do Audirvana also, if the MQA licensing burdens them too much. Just remove software decoding functionality.
Which is what this whole thread started with. Why should those that don’t use mQa (and what it does to music) pay for Your privilege ? Look at some of the smarter DAC manufacturers, they tell their customers upfront if You want this lossy format, then You need to pay extra.
That way those that want to be fooled pays for their misconception.
Fair?
It is fair, because it doesn’t make sense for Audirvana to micro divide functionality. You buy it as a package and use the functionality you need. You shouldn’t care what they need to pay in order to provide it as a product to you. If they didn’t include MQA functionality they wouldn’t give you a discount because of that. Same goes for Roon, they didn’t increase the price of the subscription when they introduced software MQA decoding.
I also don’t see anything wrong if the manufacturer charges more for the DAC with MQA capability, but I’m also not scandalised is some offer DACs that include the MQA capability without the ability to chose.
If you’re so much against MQA and you want to starve them of money, it’s on you to steer clear away from MQA. Just set your non-MQA DAC to MQA decoder and no software unfolding will take place.
It would be gullible to think that money from each subscription/sale would not be channeled into the payments of the fees that Audirvana as long as the functionality is in the software. It would be out of character of mQa.
It would be very easy to make the mQa “functionality” a plugin, another subscription if You like. That way those that “need” to “deblur” and “unfold” pay for this. In effect mQa is no longer a variable expense for Audirvana. The rest of us only pays Damien for the software that plays and streams our music.
I have no idea what the fee is (except way to high) but it seems to me that since management at ROON complains about the fees they must be rather substantial (combined)
Probably, but then you’ll have those that say that they don’t need radios and that should be an optional plug-in too. Maybe the podcasts, or upsampling using r8brain also. Before you know it, you have a micro-components platform. As a developer, I’m not sure I would want to go down that road.
Except there are no fees to be payed for usage of this functionality, neither for Audirvana nor musiclovers.
I say let those that are misguided into thinking mQa offers anything (other than extra fees) pay for the privilige.