How do you primarily consume your music?

[AudiocRaver]

Can you hear a difference between the $10 and $20 options? (or have you done an A/B)?

With Dennis's Vapor Audio mains pair (Sundog?) with RAAL tweeters, I could hear the diff way off-axis sitting to the side as Dennis switched back and forth between CD and MP3 quality.

I always have a fair amount of "offline content" downloaded from Tidal on my phone for listening away from Wi-Fi - occasionally switching to MP3 quality for variety. It is usually only a matter of moments before I hear a hashy cymbal or ratty-sounding sibilant, and then I go straight back to lossless.

It is not hard to hear with

• right source
• right speaker/tweeter

 

[JBrax]

Can you hear a difference between the $10 and $20 options? (or have you done an A/B)?

I can hear a difference. Or at least I think I can? This would make a great blind listening experiment to include in the upcoming speaker shootout. Now, when trying to discern between the HiFi and MQA version it gets less noticeable to my ears anyway.

 

[Todd Anderson]

Im curious to see how this poll shakes out over time.

Interesting that we haven't had a single vote for Vinyl yet!

 

[JBrax]

A side note to anyone interested in Tidal is they offer the HiFi membership to veterans for $11.99/month.

 

[Mluc8]

I'm not too familiar with MQA, but I'm curious what the benefit would be in your case. What type of network connection are you using and do you have a data or bandwidth limitation? Looks like most of the MQA compatible devices are handheld media players/streamers.

The benefit would be for streamingmusic listening, not for movies.

 

[Peter Loeser]

I can hear a difference. Or at least I think I can? This would make a great blind listening experiment to include in the upcoming speaker shootout. Now, when trying to discern between the HiFi and MQA version it gets less noticeable to my ears anyway.

I think it was during the initial TIDAL marketing period they had a blind listening test setup online. Something along the lines of playing a selection of tracks and choosing which ones you thought were higher quality vs lower quality. I forget the exact format, but I think you could do blind A-B comparisons. I guessed most of them correctly with cheap in-ear headphones, so I think the difference should be pretty perceivable to the common man.

 

[Peter Loeser]

The benefit would be for streamingmusic listening, not for movies.

Correct, but MQA capability is not required for streaming the max resolution audio, just a way of compressing the file for easier streaming on limited bandwidth connections, or saving on devices with limited storage. If you're limited by bandwidth but not storage space, I'd say your best bet is to download as much hi-res content as you can, then streaming/compression won't be an issue. Especially since it looks like MQA is not readily available in current pre/pros.

Unless you can afford this, I guess https://www.meridian-audio.com/en/a...-the-meridian-ultra-dac-setting-the-standard/

 

[JBrax]

I think it was during the initial TIDAL marketing period they had a blind listening test setup online. Something along the lines of playing a selection of tracks and choosing which ones you thought were higher quality vs lower quality. I forget the exact format, but I think you could do blind A-B comparisons. I guessed most of them correctly with cheap in-ear headphones, so I think the difference should be pretty perceivable to the common man.

Yes, it's pretty easy to tell the difference between the lower quality versus the HiFi/MQA content. The difference between HiFi and MQA is a bit more challenging. That is the blind test I'd like to see done with enthusiasts like us. I think it would be interesting to see how many could actually identify the difference.

 

[Mluc8]

The Audioquest Dragonfly Red is $200 but I'm not sure if the price will change when it is updated with MQA.

 

[JBrax]

The Audioquest Dragonfly Red is $200 but I'm not sure if the price will change when it is updated with MQA.

Fairly confident it will go up.