You’d be surprised. People talk and this is very negative publicity. Which brings me to the original though of why use MQA if it’s not going to improve sound or decrease file size other than leverage as anti piracy so they can negotiate better deals with the content creators and record labels?
I’ll be keeping an eye out for Q2 numbers.
EDIT: and another though, audiophiles are the one most likely to buy Tidal’s costlier plans, so a larger financial hit.
Doing some digging into Tidal background and finances…
A lot of questionable practices, not just MQA.
and finished off 2019 with a $50 million dollar loss.
It really doesn’t matter. MQA’s whole shtick is based on lies and marketing jargon. As someone else so eloquently put it, it solves a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s a money grab. But hey, if you are into it, go, spend the money. I could give a shit less about Tidal or MQA, so again, it doesn’t matter to me. I won’t be buying into MQA or the extra expensive gear required to support it.
For me, Tidal sounds better than Spotify no matter if it says MQA somewhere or not. The user interface is good and the collection is large. Cant really see anything negative.
Spotify is basically MP3 quality. Of course it’s going to sound worse. Compare it to Qobuz.
Besides deceptive business practices, it’s a great platform!
Tidal is like comcast. If there was a better option it would be an easy switch. Comcast has just shit business practices and ethics but they’re still better than the rest. Tidal stomps spotify in quality but are just shitty as a business.
Qobuz seems to have some issues so will not try that for now
The nice thing about all of these services is that most will offer a trial of some sort. It could be worth looking into. At the end of the day its all about what you prefer as well, so if Tidal is what you wanna use and spend money on then have fun and enjoy 
In my opinion it cant hurt to widen your experiences though.
Re Quboz, I got it a month ago and it works perfectly (Live in Denmark):
Have not tried it
Never had a dropout (happens to me sometimes on Deezer)
No, but I am okay with that. Deezer gives me the rest.
I have never experienced that and I listen everyday.
I think Quboz is the best service for me, the quality is high and most of my music is there. I use Deezer for the rest and their quality on flac is quite ok.
LOL, as if i would trust What Hi-Fi. This site writing " Tidal sounds better than Qobuz" also puts the Grado SR325e on first and the Sennheiser HD820 on second place of their “Best audiophile headphones 2021” ranking. lol, NOPE, i don’t think i want to trust those ears.
I actually had a couple of short dropouts on Qobuz yesterday. If by dropouts you mean like a short stutter of a few miliseconds.
Not sure what caused it, but it was happening every now and then yesterday when I was listening to Tool. Then during the night after my shift I had no issues at all.
Otherwise I’m quite pleased with Qobuz. I’ll definitely be keeping it for the time being over Tidal.
Speaking of, I can’t be the only one that thinks that Tidal seems to be clipping or simply playing the music too loud at 100% volume (or when you have exclusive control over it)? Using the Motu M2 I can see it peaking into clipping territory A LOT on a bunch of music.
Guys, dropouts is not a way to measure the quality of a streaming service. The internet between the source (Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer) and the destination, (your Computer in your home, your cell phone, your network bridge) is ENTIRELY too variable to make any real judgement of quality. I see this come up a lot and it’s just a wrong measure to use when comparing services. So dropout is just a subjective measure at best.
The other thing that I think people don’t know is the original intent of MQA. No it wasn’t to make streaming more efficient since it could deliver Hi-Res at 16/44 streaming rates. That was a nice by-product.
MQA’s original intent was to take the sonic signature of the equipment that Mastered a given track, album, artist, etc. (the chain of studio X) and algorithmically layer that sound signature into the unfolding process. A noble thought but an idea that to put into practice would require massive amounts of database management and data gathering and then on the tail end apply that to the unfolding process to assure the Quality. Unfortunately when the business model kicks in, the only thing they kept then was the Authenticated part which conveniently is only useful to the record companies and as we’ve seen in Goldeaudio’s video is absolutely manufactured and disturbing to lossless 16/44 content.
The Bob-pire Strikes Back:
On Head-Fi, GoldenSound says he is planning a response to this response.
Bob the Mqa as well as the Tidal team would simply make things easier to understand if they would just open their mouths.This would clarify most things for the most part,and at Tidal it might also keep customers from running away.
There is so much bullshit now, sorry for the expression, but it’s like that, that you don’t even know what’s true and what’s not.
Soft words - the truth lies somewhere in between - are no longer enough.
Which is only understandable from the customers’ point of view.
This is one of the worst marketing introductions in history.The marketing department should be fired and the subscription should be made 3-5$ cheaper.And in the future they should do it themselves.Everyone would benefit from it.
I personally doubt the video and the stories that are told, because I know that no normal consumer has high-quality equipment at home to measure this.
Maybe that’s a point that goes straight to Bob, but only because he knows that’s the case.
Everything else really needs to be made clear that an end is being put to this.
It also harms the audio industry because customers are unsure.
The mobile dac I bought the other day was a Nuprime hi mdac instead of an Ify Hip dac.
Also only because nothing has been clarified until today.
What do you do automatically you go for old things that have proven themselves instead of the latest thing on the market.
Among other things, because the manufacturers have to pay for such things and pass it on to the customer.
I didn’t see the point of paying more for something if I didn’t know what it was for, even though the Ify was my first thought.
It is also becoming so ridiculous that it is embarrassing for the entire industry and annoying for the customers.
It’s already relatively late that they’re showing some insight, because the train is already on fire.
The clarification should take place soon and not only with covert behaviour - this does not create trust.
They may have made mistakes because they didn’t know any better, or they may have been on the right track and now they are being discredited for marketing reasons.
Which wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened.
I’m personally enjoying the burning train-wreck that is MQA bullshit. Schadenfreude is alive and well.
The blogger displayed a lack of integrity, violating agreements and Terms of Use with multiple parties within the chain. He claimed to be unbiased, yet from the outset, the narrative pursued an agenda – a libellous manifesto that was unscientific, illogical and inaccurate.
When you’re attacking someone personally, it’s because you don’t have a leg to stand on in the argument. He handed them a 16/44 file and they magically upgraded it to MQA without asking for the master or approval. So they’re contradicting themselves in their very defense of the process. I’d call that smoke and mirrors indeed.
has anyone seen / heard / read anything about people fleeing from Tidal because of the whole MQA shenanigans?
In my free moments today I’ve been trying to comb through Stuart’s counter-argument. Without getting into the nitty-gritty of whether each individual point is correct/in-correct, I have a few initial impressions:
Stuart writes this post as a series of dots and doesn’t connect them very well. He provides lots of data and graphs and figures, but doesn’t connect them together to paint a clear picture of what he’s trying to say. It looks impressive with all those facts and figures, but until I can really dive in and figure it out (which, is gonna be awhile…I have a busy week incoming) it just looks like a connect-the -dot on the page with no lines connecting the dots.
Gish galloping - it’s a real term! - Stuart drops a ton of info in this response. It might all be good (doubt it). But it’s A LOT. The layperson audiophile who just wants to get to the bottom line is going to be overwhelmed by all the data and citations to academic papers and so forth in that post.
Stuarts point #11: " 1. Finally, the title of the video is illogical. [4]" - Really? We’re gonna complain about a title when you title your response “All That Glitters is Not Gold(en)”?
Let’s say Bob Stuart’s argument here is 100% correct, just for the sake of argument. GoldenSound still wins this round. He got MQA folk to talk about their tech in more detail publicly. Applause.
