MQA files for bankruptcy protection

What’s definitely worth a footnote in the annals of audiophilia is the unprecedentlynhigh emotional response it caused. I don’t remember DSD, MiniDisc, HDCD, DVD Audio or Spatial Audio causing ese many characters exchanged online.

“MQA touched a nerve” may be a succinct summary.

 

Quite likely. So how is another company going to find/provide that value, I wonder.

Or is this simply Mr BS's final piece of MQA salesmanship?

A number of things touch my nerves more than MQA. The whole world of hi-res does, and has since the beginning. The more so because of its almost general acceptance now. Various bits of pseudo audio technology rub me up the wrong way: audiophiles insisting on treating computers as if they are valve amplifiers has caused some of my hair loss

But on the other side of the coin, so many advances in audio technology have been just incredible. Let's just take one biggie that covers many of them: digital audio. Wow. Best thing since sliced bread? Maybe, best thing since someone rubbed two sticks together and made fire. Or even since they rubbed other stuff together and made babies!

Sure, digital also opened the door to a whole other realm of bullshit. It's not that analogue was free of it! But digital is so much harder to understand. Thus easier to fool people.

Added to that, I think there is a personality thing at play. Some businesses, some business people, some ways of doing business, just rub some of us up the wrong way. (Sadly some of those do become hugely successful, of course)

 

BTW, I bought that Loki DSD-only DAC back when it was first released by Schiit, and it turned out to be a truly excellent DAC! I used it for playing a number of DSD recordings I bought from back when you could buy DSD file recordings from Chad Kassem's Super HiRez web store (RIP). LOL.

 

There was probably plenty of gnashing of teeth about those other formats in various audio circles as well. There is nothing new under the sun, including cynicism. We need to be careful with the "I wasn't around therefore it couldn't have happened" thinking.

Also important to realize MQA represents a tipping point for anti-consumer technologies that the public is now more aware of than ever... because the economy sucks, people are more aware of how broke they are and how much richer and more predatory these companies get, hence more bitching through more available channels.

 

I think the main reason MQA annoyed people so much was because of Tidal. Before MQA, Tidal was one of the only lossless streaming services, including the only one that was integrated with Roon.

Once they started shifting to MQA, people became pissed (myself included) that MQA was being forced down our throats, with no other option at a certain point. I think there was a lot of fear that MQA would spread to other streaming services like a virus, leaving us with no lossless alternatives and forcing our hardware/equipment choices in order to avail of the magic f'ing origasmy.

It’s one thing for a new format to come along, that I can choose to buy or not buy. It’s another when it becomes the only choice I have if I want high quality streaming audio.

 

In my experience, gents, the thing that matters most is the quality of the mastering.

Cheers.

 

This!

It’s the reason many of my LP’s from the late 50’s into mid 60’s (Jazz, Classical) recorded AAA, with minimal miking and processing, etc… all still to this day sound better than 90% of anything “net new”…

It’s a variation on the meme popularized by Linn back in the late 70’s… “It’s the SOURCE that matters” (closer to the source, the more important… it applies just as much to mastering as it does to things like turntables, etc…

 

Speaking as someone who pivoted into using (cheaper) streaming services for a lot of my listening because a lot of what I listen to doesn't require any more than relatively high-bitrate lossy codecs, I fully cosign this. There's the odd actually-well-crafted album that I go back to a lot, but those are the ones I save up to buy lossless digital copies of to store locally. BoomKat, Presto Music, and Bandcamp are great for this IMO (I'm not in Apple's ecosystem)

There IS a limit to how much compression is ignorable, though. Low quality on YouTube Music/Spotify sucks something terrible that it actually bothers me even for background listening.

 

Trigognometry?

I guess that mastering matters a heap. Perhaps everything from the mic to the master matters, as per @Bowmoreman's post, but I feel mastering can easily run everything that went before.

When I see something advertised as remastered ten or twenty years later, it actually makes me more suspicious than more willing to buy!

 

Same here.

When I first got into jazz back in 2002 - 2003, I fell prey to all of those Blue Note Rudy Van Gelder re-masters. I was looking to buy Wayne Shorter's "Night Dreamer" album but couldn't find the RVG version (Im not sure if there was ever a RVG version). I reluctantly bought the non RVG version and was so taken by the sound quality that I sold all of my RVG cds and purchased used copies of the non remastered versions off Amazon for less than I sold my RVG copies.

 

Remastered labeling often makes me cringe. It might be a good one, but often it is a loudness wars hack job.

 

I really believe that it's just another money grab from the labels on the fans. "Remastered: buy it now so you can complete your collection and play this louder with more bass on your pedestrian equipment."

 

At times I imagine the "remastering" tech sitting there and turning up the two knobs labelled "volume" and "compression", hits the batch processing button for the album, claps the cheetos dust off his hands and calls it a day.

 

I want to give a shoutout to Chris Connaker of Computer Audiophile (now called Audiophile Style if memory serves) for hosting the infamous "MQA is Vaporware" thread that was such a thorn in the side of the legacy (audio) media hyping MQA and which allowed "mansr", archimago, and of course others to do the yeoman's work of deconstructing this fraud. Unfortunately Connaker supported the likes John Atkinson, Jim Austin & others in the legacy media gaslighting on the thread entirely too much, but I try to give him a break because he was/is in the end too $dependent$ on the old anti-consumer audiophools culture.

Seeing MQA die a market death is certainly satisfying. Sometimes the good guys do win.

One more time: f**k you Bob Stuart!

 

I do wonder how the MQA guys, after that RMAF video went up with the MQA panel years back if they themselves thought they looked good from it. Were the guys at the top in a way so deluded to think that panel went well and gave themselves a pat on the back. Was the team so full of themselves for years that even if we gave them the benefit of the doubt that a few manufacturers every year was adopting MQA enough to justify the company from chugging on?

Even if I was to be as generous as I can to MQA, I truly wonder what was going on in the minds of the executive team with MQA. Just looking through the past year and given hindsight did the MQA team really expect and fool themselves to think the other major streaming services would have cared about adopting MQA when their goal is profitability and scale which each service has struggled with in one way or another.

I saw a few of my older posts talking about Sony's 360 reality audio and going to NAMM show again this year, immersive audio is all the rage. The Maxwell was far and wide our best selling headphone last year to the point where any stock we got in was usually gone in a week. The success of the Maxwell in my mind was likely one of the key factors in Sony deciding to acquire Audeze to expand the immersive audio lineup. Seemed like every vendor had some sort of Atmos/spatial audio software/hardware or were wanting to talk about it. Engineers and attendees I would hear time and time again that if there is anything that pays the bills, its immersive audio.

If MQA probably spent some time to develop something like this and also were open and transparent might have seen some actual adoption and growth with manufacturers falling over themselves to implement it. Instead they made a walled garden and only let others in if they will were willing to pay in. In a way it feels like they thought the old audiophile salesmen tactics would work on the mass market and quickly found out the general public doesn't care unless it actually made a difference.

 

MQA was never about sound quality. The big idea was to control the whole chain from the AD at the studio to DA at your home. If you remember the initial marketing talk, it was about ensuring the authentic "sound" reaches the listener, hence M-aster, Q-uality, A-uthenticated. The studio cooks in their metadata and the file carries a DRM.

It was a colossal land grab, but if you know that the ex-Dolby folk backed it, then it's less surprising. Alas - it was too ambitious. The studio side wasn't buying it probably because they're already balls-deep in gear that actually does the job fine. Now they'd have to get MQA's version of AVID or a special DAW to sign their stuff. Ain't gonna happen. And when that fizzled out, it just became a thing for audiophile loonies.

 

I just hope that a silver stake has been driven through its heart.

I wouldn't want to walk near its grave... in case a ghoulish rotting hand should shoot up from the ground and grab me by the balls.

One has to be sure that stuff like this, when dead, is truly dead, and dead forever.

(wait, I think it should be silver bullets. So what should the stake be? And do we need garlic?)

 

ATMOS is a gatekeeping technology to extend the lives of bigass studios. Mixing stereo in a reasonably equipped home studio is a solved problem. Especially when C19 struck, home studios exploded and like with many other things, people learned that doing it at home actually works and it feels better.

Of course, ATMOS also makes people buy a dozen shitty speakers/amps/conversion channels. So that's cool as well. I was at the last pre-C19 NAMM Show manning a booth and Focal/NAIM were showing off a multi-channel room near-by. It was beyond bad. Everything that's wrong with Focal speakers, only multiplied by the number of channels they had there.

The only place I actually see ATMOS working is headphones. And I find object-based mixing pretty neato.