Tidal "master" and MQA in general

Stumbled upon this Tidal mqa

Seems that every track tagged master does not steam lossless anymore. :thinking:

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Masters of a track are rarely released and are always kept locked somewhere.

NI stems never really took off because nobody wanted to release the master files.

I never release the master version of my my tracks and nobody else wants to either.

If someone has the wallet and faith than it is good for those who want to use these services.

I don’t mind that much that they are trying to sell the “masters experience” with mqa. But I do mind when you pay for lossless and you get mqa.

Flac and apple codecs can do lossless at high reso too but do it uncompressed and actually can be the exact copy of the original masters nowadays.

My argument is not about if mqa is good or not because it is purpose built for streaming.

I wanna know the economic ecosystem of mqa to gauge if it has any value compared to something like flac or buying cds or off iTunes or anything that vs live-streaming. And it doesn’t

It’s value is trying to give everyone a good experience based on bandwidth rates relative to what people around the world might experience. It tackles the cost issues people with low bandwidth and limited internet data plans were facing at the time and it does it good.

Spotify paved the way for the live-streaming frenzy that we witness today as it was a successful platform but wants nothing to do with the dj scene now so everybody is demanding a Spotify clone as a replacement.

So introduce drm, where with flac and apple codecs can offer exact digital copies of the masters, now the privilege of paying royalties to compartmentalized systems to where you need to rent with with a subscription is here just like Spotify but higher quality minus the massive library. So now you have a pie that every big playing investing Tom, Dick and Harry wants to dip there hands into.

I am absolutely all for this by the way cause everybody who asked for it are willing to put their money where their mouths are and statistics verifies this. So now I hope get what they deserve.

Btw anything can be up converted or compressed to any resolution or format you want that you need to package and sell.

Enjoy :wink:

MQA has no value.

It is a more expensive way to get worse quality music.

Bandwidth isn’t an issue. And 44.1/16 FLAC actually uses LESS bandwidth than MQA.

The company behind it is also morally bankrupt and cares not about music but making sure they get money at whatever point in the process they can.