Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music MQA Limited in Administration (Chapter 11)

Crikey….post that in the wrong forum and you’d start a war !!!

I was surprised, too - given the physical size of the Atom HE alongside the comparatively diminutive form factor of the Prime/PSU: the former could easily consume the latter for lunch.

Neither did the Focal Stellia sound anywhere near as good when hooked-up to the Atom HE compared to the wonderful performance of the Focal Stellia when paired with Meridian Prime/PSU.

Haha, this whole thread (MQA being a good thing) would be like lighting a fuse on most audio forums!

Having heard the Atom HE, I can understand that impression. I thought it sounded quite “old” Naim - PRaT, but surprisingly unrefined/a bit blunt by today’s standards, perhaps? And that was through HD650s which are super-smooth, I wouldnt want to hear it through Focals. Compelling in its own way if you like that kind of house soubd, but 180 degrees from Meridian.

The Meridian Prime/PSU and Focal Stellia can turn the proverbial Sow’s Ear into a Silk Purse.

Take, for example, Pat Metheny’s ‘One Quiet Night’ album. It’s entirely focussed on his playing Acoustic Guitar, recorded at 16/44. Played via Tidal or Qobuz, it’s a quality recording that could easily be mistaken for the best 24/192 offering.

What sounds quite ordinary and nothing special via Focal Celestee becomes magically emotional and sublime via Focal Stellia. The varied resonance and tonality of each and every string being played effortlessly transforms your listening space into that of the recoding studio - with the listener sat right beside the musician.

Hey everyone. At the risk of repetition, I wanted to add my (personal) tuppence worth here.

It’s clear that TIDAL is not currently going to give us a choice when it comes to the priority of MAX formats streamed when they have *both* PCM and MQA. In other words, it’s:

"HiRes" FLAC -> MQA (of any kind) -> CD quality FLAC -> Lossy

It appears that they *are* monitoring demand for MQA vs. FLAC preference (and vice-versa -- there are those who would prefer CD quality FLAC to MQA of any kind).

So if you have a preference for MQA, please email them at support@tidal.com (or submit a request at https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/requests/new) simply saying that you consider MQA to be the higher quality format and you would like to be able to prefer MQA over HiRes FLAC.

The more people who do this, the more likely we’ll actually get a choice.

Thx.

Since this is a relatively small forum, it might be worth repeating that request on any other forums we frequent also…

Feel free to do that

But also, please don't think that this forum is too small to make a difference. It probably has the highest concentration of MQA listeners and, frankly, every request TIDAL gets counts.

I intend to!

That’s interesting, is it really true that it is Meridian users who represent the core of MQA listeners? If so, with that and the, I think unprecedented, level of vitriol aimed at the format, I’m not surprised it’s struggled to the point of potential non-existence.

Before I start threads on a couple of other forums, can I be clear about what Roon does in terms of this new preference structure? My current understanding is that the Tidal native apps will automatically treat Hi-res FLAC > MQA. However, in Roon, we have a preference tab to prefer MQA or not. This was to prefer it over CD quality FLAC, though, does anyone yet know whether Roon will still be able to prefer any MQA version over the new Hi-res Flacs?

At present, no. If TIDAL has HiRes FLAC and MQA for the same release, you'll get FLAC... in Roon and everywhere else.

If there is a separate, MQA-only release, you'll be able to get that in Roon.

I suspect that we are collectively a reasonable chunk of the MQA user base. We were one of the first brands to have hardware that handled it.

However, there may be vast silent majority (across all MQA enabled brands) who use it. Maybe they just didn't engage in the vitriolic BS on forums about it. So, you cannot really know how many people using the not-small number of MQA enabled brands are actually in favour of MQA. The haters took up most of the bandwidth so it's impossible to tell. In fact it (the BS) is the main reason why I have barely used certain forums in the last few years.

Comment submitted to Tidal per request.