While waiting for Qobuz

Decided to finally give Tidal HiFi a try.
Give me flac or give Spotify.
Everything is great. No MQA for me, not now, not ever. Qobuz, hurry down the streaming chimney tonight.

Not ever? The good thing is you don’t have to.

True. In the remote possibility that MQA sounded better than flac alone, it would be already crossing into the esoterically subjective realm of diminished returns. Can’t hear it. I’ll happily forgo MQA and anything else after.

Here is what I don’t understand, you have Tidal with access to 16/44 and MQA. No extra cost to do the first unfold, why not listen.
The possibly one good thing about MQA is that it came from the master, where the older file may have come from a second or even third generation tape or file.
I don’t like MQAs business model, but as long as there is no extra fee, I will sometimes choose the MQA file.
It is not like you will be tagged an MQA user, if you use it.

The reason for not giving it a listen is because I don’t have (nor will purchase) any device that can will do the unfolding or rendering to reveal it. I don’t even own a desktop or laptop. I have cheap streamers and an iPhone. I see the Tidal Masters playlists, the Onkyo receiver shows 48/24 bit on those, but no MQA magic. Been around this rodeo before, with the DTS, Dolby and SACD horses.

We do not know the provenance of the source file. MQA is slippery in this respect. The blue light means only the file is MQA and playing back as MQA intended. What MQA intended is unknown for a specific file. For example, it can mean only the the copyright holder signed off and is happy for additional sales.

We discussed this in a good amount of detail here.