Originally Posted by ChrisLayerUK
Jeff, that all seems a little 'Glass Half Empty' in tone to me, which is ok.

In the very short term you have some good points, let's face it, it's not available yet but it is coming, so there is a lot of fun and perhaps frustrated speculation.

As you say, plenty of people are not bothered, but they will benefit anyway as the decoding will be everywhere. It will be interesting to see what might happen if you try to take it away from them once they are used to it. CRT B&W TV anyone?

Studios will use it, once it is built into the equipment and they understand it.
Hi res streaming requires it and streamers will only need one inventory for all markets.

Archive quality is finally sorted.

Of course, as always the High End will have to pay if the want the very best which is pretty good now anyway, so diminishing returns kick in.

Interesting times. Just thoughts, Chris smile (Hard Hat On)
Hi Chris,

Yes, I definitely am skeptical. It's not for lack of want, as expressed by my last paragraph, but rather because we've seen attempts made before at getting higher res solutions that just didn't gain much traction. Over time, consumer demand has gone the way of lower cost and ease and breadth of access at the expense of quality. Many of us here want higher quality, but the industry doesn't generally seem to think that business model makes sense for them.

I really hope that changes and I would love if MQA facilitated that change, but I can easily see it not working out. Perhaps as consumer bandwidth increases globally and high quality video content streaming further pushes out data caps (eventually toward extinction - we can dream, can't we? smile ), the landscape will look fertile enough to the industry to make it viable. After all, 4K video streaming is a huge bandwidth hog and the latest Codec advancements are giving us something like 6 - 10 Mbps streams for 4K. Comapre that to 1.1 for MQA and it doesn't look too bad at a all.

In the end I really hope we get there, but I know that so many pieces have to come together for it to be a reality that it seems unlikely. I think 2 decades worth of seeing so many standards failures on the audio and video side have made me pessimistic. But hey, I'm still rooting for it!

Various