Re: Invite: MQA Core vs. Hi-Res Blind Test
Reply #21 –
Agreed. DRM is the obvious goal of MQA.
I also thought so when it arrived, but it seems to me that it offers no DRM opportunity, i.e., no way of locking down the content to prevent copying? That looks like about no more DRM than HDCD or like Dolby-encoded retail music cassettes were back in the day before they were reverse-engineered and implemented in free-of-charge software: Playing it on non-[MQA|HDCD|Dolby]-aware gear would give you the music (unlike DTS-CD, mind you!), and a certain fidelity that is not outrageous - take that as "relatively speaking", for the cassettes. MQA'ed CDs - yes they exist already - can be ripped and copied.
So it looks more like a "premium" business model to me. Of course, it was about selling encoder and decoder licenses. But that is nothing unique (the CD format was also licensed, of course). And it looks like creating an excuse for yet-another-remastering-round in order to sell the same music over again - now if we get some decent stuff out of that, I even think it is worth the idiocy.
(But "nobody" knows about everything that the MQA chips can really do? Is it conspiranoia to consider the thought that there is indeed some decryption in the chip, in case MQA catches on well enough to start delivering encrypted signal?
And what about fingerprinting ... )