I thought you are in Canada can’t you use Amazon HD for high resolution or at least Deezer HiFi for CD quality?
I don’t know much about what Amazon is about. I’m ok at this point with the choice on Tidal but would hope Qobuz shows up in the near future. I don’t think a true Audiophile streaming service is in the cards anytime soon.
Qobuz would definitely be your best bet and hopefully it will be available to Canada soon. Amazon HD does provide native high resolution files unlike the mqa tidal garbage. However unless you are using a bluesound node Amazon does not correctly output bit perfect.
I’m using a node 2i in my A/V bedroom system and a Gold Note Ds-10 in my main so it wouldn’t pay to switch.
I gave Amazon HD the 90-day free trial and decided to discontinue for multiple reasons, #1 DAC exclusive mode does not work, sound quality was no better than TIDAL, selection of titles was more or less the same, the search function was garbage and library management was frustrating, the nail in the coffin was security issues & concerns. I see that Deezer Canada has a 90 day trial for its Hi-Fi service running until the end of April, I might give them a shot. I would love to know what the issue is with Qobuz and Canada.
Some people were not (chose not to be) blind 4 years ago... (to be continued below): HIGHRESAUDIO TO STOP OFFERING MQA From the HighResAudio Press Release: HIGHRESAUDIO has stopped offering MQA. MQA is NOT lossless, the original signal is never recovered, estimate to recover at most 17bits (reduces the sampling rate), reduces the frequency range, SNR reduced by 3bit, aliasing with artifacts at 18kHz. MQA encoding filters manipulates drastically the original source. No analysis tools are available to verify the encoded MQA content. Therefore no quality control is possible. highresaudio.com stands for offering purity, original mastering source, none manipulated, tweaked or up-sampled content and codecs that are widely supported and offer use of freedom. "We hope that MQA will adjust all the above issues. We are truly disappointed, the way MQA has progressed in the past year. We have been mislead and blinded by trust and promises." MQA Claims: - Compressing High Resolution Audio for Streaming Applications by keeping the audio quality. - Applying adaptive filters to do "time domain optimization" MQA Summary: - MQA is NOT lossless!!! The original Signal is never recovered! - We estimate that MQA is only able to recover at most 17Bits at 96kHz - The primary MQA benefit is the reduction of the bit rate. We will prove that an alternative method can reach a similar reduction but keeps the "Sample Rate" and therefore the "Timing" of the audio signal. - MQA is not usable for "Legacy Devices" because of heavy Aliasing causing increasing distortions beyond 18kHz. - Applying adaptive filters that permanently change the original signal will most likely do more harm than good. Well, we want the original signal and not something that tries to resemble it as good as possible. It may sound different, but how can it be better than the original record? I have asked MQA weeks ago to correct the marketing communication towards the end user and media. As long as MQA is not prepared to straighten the facts, we will not offer MQA any more. The customer needs to know what he pays for, and we have to be able to check technically what we offer and sell to our customers. We are in a very sensible and delicate niche music market. Over the past seven years we have established a very good market position, created a new business for the music industry and artists and customers that cherish the best audible sound reproduction. We moved the music and HiFi-industry into a new business domain, with very little support from anyone. Our USP is that we guarantee (and this is not just said and done) your customers, nothing but the true, native and original source. We can analysis and verify any other audio codec (with MusicScope even DSD and DXD). For MQA is nothing available to assure that the customer is getting our "promise“. We are in the first and front rule, selling music and technology to a new and established customer, that truly expects nothing but the real thing! Selling HighRes Audio files requires so much dedicated and detailed work prior in selling (download / streaming) the music. This time needs to be invested by qualified audio engineers and a team that understands the total reproduction path. An extensive quality control is therefore a „must-have“ and needs to be in place to fulfill the "promise“. If these parameters are right, than we can provide our customers with honest facts to purchase MQA, and then we will continue to only offer "Authenticated MQA" again. Since beginning 2016 we offer native Studio Masters for MQA encoded, where we can trace and verify the origin of the source. Meaning from Mastering Studios that use MQA in their production workflow and process and are personally signed off. No matter whether downloading or streaming. The perception and expectations of the customer is different. We can not sell and promote HighRes unless HighRes is supplied! For our customers, quality, trust and reliability are the top priorities. Am I now the bad guy? No, I would like that we continue to offer in the niche, customer native and original high-resolution music. There are plenty of new and established customers that are looking for high-resolution albums every day. The HighResAudio market would have grown rapidly and successfully, if the awareness among the responsible people in the music industry were familiar with our target group. Since 2010, we have been a single player on a broad front. Our mission: to offer music lovers, artists, hi-fi enthusiasts and manufacturers of audio devices to offer a new perspective in the digital age for the perfect music reproduction for a unique listening experience. Lothar Kerestedjian, Managing Director, HighResAudio (continued).. now they offer MQA and not a word of explanation.. Someone could ask what happened.? The answer is very simple..
Blah Blah Blah... Here is something HighResAudio is forgetting.... Each Album I buy is the size of a HD Movie! I have many Thousands of Albums. Im NOT Willing to store a few Dozen TeraBytes of HIRES AUDIO. Never going to happen. I started too and Stopped at like 40 albums because its stupid, cumbersome and costly. I already have over 2 TB of AIFF PCM Audio and another 750GB of MP3 quality albums. I bet there is only a Tiny Percentage of the Audio enthusiasts that would. Im a Huge Enthusiast and im NOT and neither are any of my friends who collect music too. Not happening! Instead we PAY a monthly service fee to someone like Qobuz to play the albums and Never have to worry about storing them and backing them up and so on. And at $25/album in HiRes, its MUCH cheaper to pay Qobuz or Tidal than anything else. its a NO Brainer. MQA was designed for the service provider that's delivering the data. If Manufactures supported the MQA part of the DAC chips they use then we can all get the most quality available instead of a reduced to software only. Im a fussy Mother F'er and I find the Audio Quality of MQA perfectly Fine. Its Nothing Like comparing LPCM to MP3 as these critics somewhat insinuate. No, its not as good as others but its fine and since im not buying them anyway its only a consideration I have to make when choosing a service provider. I paid $49 for a year of HiRes Tidal. And Qobuz is just under $200 annually which is the price of maybe 8 HiRes downloads from HighResAudio. So good luck to any audio file download stores that's trying to sell ridiculously large files of Audio to consumers. It didn't work for Movies or TV Episodes for that same reasons and we all use streaming services instead.
Mp3 quality albums..? MQA quality perfectly fine..? Well.. 1. Somehow these 2 statements correspond with each other, I think 2. MQA quality perfectly fine for you but not bit perfectly fine, that's for sure And now for something (not) completely different. IMO an extremely interesting material by Golden Sound - 'I published music on Tidal to test MQA - a deep dive into MQA, and its problems.' (lots of interesting links below the youtube video!) 0:00 - Intro 1:15 - Summary of topics 1:47 - Pre-video clarifications 3:44 - What is MQA? 5:41 - How I got test files encoded in MQA 6:57 - MQA 44.1khz vs Native 44.1khz 8:14 - MQA HiRes vs Native 88.2khz 11:11 - Reduced Dynamic Range 11:47 - Does unfolding work? (Many MQA releases are just upsampled 44.1khz) 12:41 - No Lossless on tidal if track is MQA 13:47 - MQA "Authentication" means nothing 14:30 - MQA Upsampling filter is leaky 15:33 - Filter attenuation analysis 16:54 - HiRes unfolding analysis 18:53 - Full decode analysis 19:54 - Conclusion 21:19 - My Opinion, and testing cables 25:46 - Why are manufacturers supporting MQA? 27:13 - Best way to play MQA files 27:44 - ifi GTO filter is MQA 28:56 - MQA's response 37:02 - Credits/Thank you
You gotta love how MQA had his files removed so none of us could hear. What are they hiding? What are they afraid of? IMO they’re the PT Barnum of the audiophile world.
For a proper evaluation you would need his original files and then listen to the TIDAL versions. Is there an audible difference? Does he talk about that?
You not converting them to lossless compression formats & massively reducing that load is on your court & you're free to shoot that ball into the goal at any time you want. Till then it's pretty much a non-factor.
Remember how Samsung Blu-ray players stopped working suddenly one day? That is my fear of the streaming services. For 24bit/96kHz flac files, a 60 minute music album is around 1 gig.
Yea b/c 24-bit. It will be much larger with 24-bit WAV/AIFF. Regardless, if he has all that in an uncompressed PCM format, then lossless compression formats are an easy antidote.
I have more hi-res albums than I can possibly count, and even that is a drop in the bucket compared to my standard-res lossless library. And the whole thing is still nowhere near a dozen terabytes, let alone several “dozens of terabytes”
And a 1 TB HD is $40-$50. That's enough storage for 1,000 24/94 albums (assuming 60 minutes average length).
I have a 4tb portable toshiba HD just for HD downloads. Although, I cannot hear any difference between a HD file and a flac that I made from the same CD.
If someone prefers to read, an hour ago the author posted this on another forum: I published music on Tidal to test MQA - MQA Deep Dive .
This is hardly a surprise... MQA has been scrutinized by many fellow listeners for years & shown to have some serious implementation flaws (not to mention blatant faking & straight-faced lies when it comes to MQA-CDs in particular).
That video has literally broken half the audio groups on Facebook. Reposts get locked down (one did here just a little while ago as well) and the venom from the MQA fanbase is almost unbelievable. I mean, I get it - we are all passionate about the stuff we use. But it has denigrated into something else entirely in so many of the discussions that have been allowed to continue. I don't use it and really don't like the idea of MQA but that's it. I don't really care at all beyond that - just be good to each other and enjoy the music.
