Yeah, 'interesting' is one way to put it. That graphic could easily be misconstrued as providing some type of surround sound, when it isn't that at all.
Sadly yes to your first question they have been batch converting lots of titles. As to your second question it’s looking that way if they can remain in business after Spotify’s HiFi announcement. And yes not the wisest choice and it wasn’t even to begin with.
Not really. Apple aren’t claiming to have a premium offering that matches / surpasses Hi Res quality.
I'm doing the free Qobuz thing for about two more weeks. If not I'm gonna be spending $$ very quickly
Not really as they just think music is something else for them to sell in their store. At least they helped to make the other holdouts offer it (at least one of them anyway (Spotify) and hopefully Apple in the near future) and lower the prices of two of them (Qobuz, Deezer). Yes Amazon has the money, manpower and cloud to do it with but they don’t seem to care to utilize it properly or they really are that stupid. Take your pick. Qobuz is a really small company but they are more focused and willing to listen to feedback but are slow to change because they just don’t have enough manpower to work that fast currently. Deezer is the one I don’t get it’s like they are just sitting in park not knowing or even caring of doing anything to improve. They are lacking in a couple of features. No one seems to talk about them, even less so than Pandora.
I'm more interested in the download end of it. I only stream in the car, there's no need for anything as high as 16/44.1 streaming AFAIC. As a dedicated prime user, I'd be really interested in them offering CD quality or higher downloads.
mastered for itunes is very different than MQA- mastering for itunes just means that the audio is tweaked to optimize how it encodes using AAC. i still find it amusing that neil only objects to mqa on tidal because of the word 'master' heh
I don’t really see Amazon selling high resolution downloads in the future. Qobuz is safe with that for as long as they can afford it or make enough money to justify it. Apple might not bother with it either if they do end up with a HiFi streaming tier themselves. I would like to see what Apple would allow for uploading one’s own content in high resolution if/when that happens.
I'm late to the thread, but....... I've been happily using my Bluesound Node 2i to stream Tidal MQA for about a year now, and I'm quite happy with the sound quality from each. However, at the moment I'm listening to MQA Dire Straits, which I also happen to have on SACD. The SACD version is easily better, not that the streaming is bad. There are other MQA streams that sound even better, like Candace Springs, but I don't have a physical disk for comparison.
Tidal is a minnow, yet it tries to pass itself off as a music streaming big boy. Spotify has 155 million paid subscribers. The free tier sees that more than double. Tidal hasn't reported subscriber count in a while, but rough estimates have it at between 3 - 5 million. About 1/20th the size. Spotify is Netflix and Tidal is Shudder. For comparison, Deezer has about 7 million subscribers and it is still considered a smaller player. Spotify going CD-quality lossless without MQA is yet another nail in the coffin for MQA. It is today's equivalent to HDCD from the early 1990s. Who uses MQA these days? Tidal and a few niche CDs? MQA fundamentally is a market failure.
Technology does not really effect sound quality that much. 90%+ comes down to the recording and mastering; not whether something is MQA or high-resolution. The Mofi Dire Straits SACDs are absolutely outstanding, primarily because they were mastered with care (and the original recording were superb).
Have to agree 100% with your comments on mastering. Agree also on the MoFi Dire Straits SACDs, they really are very well mastered.
Let's hope that this audio format coup is dying indeed, some (mainly Warner and Tidal) are still pushing though. I (un.?)fortunately can clearly hear the difference even on systems not exactly matching the quality of mine. BTW - so called hi-res MQA is 17bit max.. let's call it ..reverse progress.. in comparison to lossless hi-res.. .
This thread’s costing me money. I’ve just ordered the Love Over Gold SACD. The dangers of having an iPhone and a PayPal account. I’ll get the DSD layer ripped...
I guess it's not the worst idea for spending some money BTW all Analogue Productions Stevie Ray Vaughan SACDs sound just great, as usual in case of AP
I'd actively avoid an MQA release of SRV or Dire Straits material, but i've no problem chasing after a well regarded remaster of something that sounded good to start with; if Qobuz had a Hi Res stream of it i'd go for that, but i'll settle for an SACD.
I have a strong preference for hi-res over redbook (I don't stream music for serious listening) and a slight preference for DSD over PCM. Everybody's mileage...
Let’s hope Spotify didn’t leave MQA off the front of their CD quality announcement. If the labels give MQA-CD quality to them they really don’t have a choice. I wouldn’t count the virus out just yet.
The video redefines lossless as, you can make a copy of the file without losing fidelity in the file? It's a joke. What is funny he goes on to say that sample rates above 48khz don't contain much if any musical information. He may be right however that goes against any argument for MQA. MQA trades bits (increasing the noise floor) in exchange for a higher sample rate. His own argument is that there is nothing to be gained with the higher sample rates. I turned it off at that point for his lack of logic.