Tidal now displays “MASTER” - does SONOS now support MQA?

Couple of things:

1- I am not a fan of MQA, I don’t see the point other than a money grab

2- What you are talking about is not as you portray to be honest: The filter is a minimum phase filter which yes lets more high frequencies through, but can sound better and more natural in many circumstances - this has nothing to do with MQA per-se

3- In the standard MQA encoding (ie 24bit/44KHz or 24bit/48KHz) the redbook component is untouched, so this should sound as good as CD if not decoded - the 8 LSB bits amount to noise below the 16bit DR. MQA CDs are a different scam, there I agree with you. But why not simply use hi-res??? Argument was bandwidth when streaming, which is of course a moot point these days

4- What I find most disturbing about the scheme is statements like “as the artist intended” which are patently false - in fact this is why recording engineers DON’T like MQA: the encoding changes the sound of what they produced!

Having said all of the above, I don’t think the “sound quality” is bad at all, but most of the improvements in my experience come from careful remastering rather than anything MQA-related. A few examples are Aretha Franklin and Amy Winehouse - the best sounding versions of some of those albums are the MQA versions, almost surely because they went back to the master and did the job carefully. Again, nothing MQA-specific about that.

For the record, when I listen to MQA files I use a dCS Rossini DAC, Kondo Ongaku amp, and Avantgarde speakers. I do not think you can possibly distinguish MQA from just about any other CD or better format on a SONOS system.

Agree with Miguelito!

In real life you will probably not notice any difference.  I ‘m having a hard time to hear the difference between Spotify and Tidal when playing music on a Play1.
But now when Sonos have support for 24-bits flac/alac Tidal could do the MQA decoding within the app and then send It as a 24-bit stream to Sonos.
So I actually think it is on Tidal to make the MQA decoding rather than Sonos (this is whats is happening today on a IOS device when you use Tidal).

BTW: Does anyone know if Roon is decoding the MQA stream to 24-bit on Sonos S2. I ended my subscription on Roon and can not test this.

Replying to myself, it seems like Roon is not supporting Sonos S2 yet. https://community.roonlabs.com/t/hi-res-with-sonos-s2/109799

As far as I can tell, the maximum resolution SONOS S2 is supporting is 48KHz/24bit. However, in MQA there is no information past 16 bit. For example, a 48KHz/24bit file has 16 bits of true data, and the extra 8 bits are used to reconstruct information up to 96KHz (this is done in the first unfold).

So the extra resolution which S2 is claiming to have, namely 24 bits instead of 16 bits, is not useful for MQA.

Actually playback on non-MQA devices is effectively limited to 13-bit, though it’s claimed that additional processing in some way compensates...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Quality_Authenticated#Codec_description

I’m not sure SONOS S2 supports anything higher than 24bit/48KHz:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/79?language=en_US

There is some confusion here… 

There is the “standard” MQA, which is either 24bit/44KHz or 24bit/48KHz. The vast majority of MQA files, certainly any file I have seen on TIDAL Masters, is of this type. In this file type, the top 16 bits are true to source, and the remaining 8 bits encode the necessary info to unfold (lossy) information to reconstruct information up to 88KHz (if original is 44KHz) or 96KHz (if original is 48KHz).

Then there is the “major scam” which is MQA CD. This is a 16bit/44KHz stream that can be written to standard CD format, and in this case there is 13 bits of true data and 3 bits of MQA encoding.

Having said all of this, I don’t see how TIDAL can do any better with MQA in the case of SONOS: The only improvement is resolution on S2 is in the 24bit depth at 44KHz or 48KHz, which an MQA stream does not have:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/79?language=en_US

I concur with the observation about MQA CD.

Nevertheless with the full 24-bit version various commentators, some referencing the patents and, if I recall, some based on actual tests, have noted that the ‘baseband’ content does suffer some loss of resolution from the original 16-bits.

That’s possible.

However, I will say that I own a BUNCH of SONOS speakers, ports, and amps. One of the amps is connected to fairly nice Klipsch speakers + sub. I don’t think the resolution of SONOS systems is good enough to be able to distinguish any resolution higher than CD or thereabouts.

Nor are humans. The latest interesting study which evidently confirms this is being conducted by Mark Waldrep. Go here for his “HD-Audio Challenge II” posts. And Waldrep is the founder of AIX Records, a specialist in high resolution recordings. 

From https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6928

After the first HD-Audio Challenge seem to indicate that people even trained listeners with above average systems — couldn’t pick out an HD file from a Redbook CD, I began to have serious doubts about my previously held position. The hundreds of people that have participated in the second round of the HD-Audio Survey, have confirmed the results of the previous project. It is no longer possible to claim that “hi-res audio” is an important next step in the evolution of audio. HD-Audio is completely unnecessary for the reproduction of hi-fidelity. It is a very good thing to record using 96/24 PCM audio but for the distribution of music, it’s nothing more than a sales slogan.