All Time Low - Nothing Personal [FLAC]l
Zach, I am interested in what you are seeing for decoding times. I have seen little here on that, but much more on the encoding time unless I missed it. But as I am starting to look into some portable flac media players that may actually become an issue.
All Time Low - Nothing Personal [FLAC]l
TLDR: MQA isn't lossless, is arguably worse than normal flac, and is seemingly nothing more than a (quite effective) scheme to generate licensing fees. With the frustrating addition that if you are a Tidal user, even if you have no MQA dac, and use the "Hifi" streaming quality setting, MQA encoded/lossy files will still be served to you. And the only way to avoid that being to switch to Qobuz.If you disagree with this post, or if someone from MQA/Meridian is reading this, it would be excellent if you could provide alternative evidence supporting MQA's claims. If they are true it'd be EXTREMELY simple to demonstrate/prove and so the current lack of any evidence other than marketing claims is concerning.I figured that given how aggressively Tidal has been expanding their use/incorporation of MQA (with now many redbook files coming MQA encoded even if they are not able to be unfolded to hires), and there seems to be an awful lot of debate about whether or not MQA is good or lives up to the claims, and not much testing going on, (including lack of evidence from MQA themselves), I should try to remedy that.I'd like to preface this by saying a few things:- This is not a dig at any manufacturer that incorporates MQA. MQA has been very successful from a business/marketing standpoint, and so customers are demanding it. Therefore its understandable that manufacturers like PS Audio are going to add it to their products even though they openly say they do not like MQA. - If you feel MQA sounds better, that's totally fine. Lots of things sound good and objectively perform bad, many tube amps for example. This is not addressing what sounds good to YOUR ears, this is addressing the hostile business practices and unsubstantiated marketing claims of MQA. - Further testing will be done by performing some null tests with the final unfolded analog output of an MQA dac soon, and i'll post here once that is completed.
