dCS Rossini APEX Review at HiFi Clube

I respect that you have a lot of experience with MQA and also take a balanced approach to its assessment @miguelito. This topic is also likely going to be moot, as it seems unlikely that MQA will survive without Tidal’s backing.

The only statement I disagree with is this:

For your consideration, I am including a link to the original issue of The Absolute Sound in which MQA was introduced (May, 2016). On the cover, TAS declares MQA (in all caps): “BETTER THAN HI-RES” and “MQA Revolutionizes Digital Audio”.

The article goes on in this effusive manner for no less than 22 pages, in which TAS’s editor declares: “MQA is the most significant audio technology of my lifetime.”

The same article of course includes the introduction of Meridian’s 808v6 DAC, described by the same editor as: “But the $22,000 808 v6 is so much more than a CD player—it is the first disc player and AC to offer decoding of Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) sources. As described in the accompanying feature, MQA delivers better-than-hi-res sound with a bit rate low enough to stream. This extremely sophisticated new technology was conceptualized and created by Bob Stuart with British mathematician Peter Craven. The 808v6 is thus not just the most sophisticated CD player in Meredian’s history, but the progenitor of an entirely new class of digital-playback systems based on the revolutionary MQA.”

I don’t think I have ever seen a more coordinated effort by a magazine to push an technology and product.