Should I give a fuck about Hi-Res audio?

Should I give a fuck about Hi-Res audio?
And what's this about a "new" Hi-Res format called MQA that essentially removes the biggest pitfall of Hi-Res audio before, that being filesize? How the fuck does that work?
My entire collection is in 44.1/16 and it would be a giant pain in the ass to redo all of that in Hi-Res OR especially if I did that in Hi-Res and MQA turns out to be "so much better" etc etc

Asking here and not /mu/ since it's more about the format and less about the music. I'm ready to tear my hair out thinking about all of this.

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get some flacs, cd quality whatever, and convert to 128kbps opus
all u need senpai

"no"

MQA is normal lossless masquerading as hi-resolution, gimmick

>2018
>Not just streaming all your music

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MQA uses dither residuals to essentially encode something similar to reduced-precision floating point that looks like integer when decoded by someone who doesn't take extra (patented) steps to decode it from the lossless-compressed stream. Compare to Microsoft's earlier (and actually superior) HDCD.

MQA has been shown in double-blind ABX differentiation and ABC-HR quality testing to have audible loss compared to a 24-bit master, and to have a lower SNR than other, better, ATH-weighted noise-shaped 16-bit dither techniques.

So, yeah. It is inferior to 1990s technology, actually worse than placebo. It wastes space, and is actually inferior to traditional DDD-mastered CDs encoded with a good dithering technique.

A properly-mastered CD (ripped with secure mode and encoded to FLAC, because the error protection on CDs is worse than you think) or digital encoding from a digital master is as good as you can hear.

A well-encoded lossy encoding such as current LAME -V2 or Opus 1.2 with default settings will probably be transparent with everything you throw at it (Opus 1.2 --bitrate 140 even passes ABX with the eternal bane of frequency-domain transform codecs, harpsichord - because Opus has per-frequency-bucket long/short block selection).

Worry more about the loudness race and lack of dynamic range in the mastering of the recordings you're listening to.

>MQA has been shown in double-blind ABX differentiation and ABC-HR quality testing to have audible loss compared to a 24-bit master, and to have a lower SNR than other, better, ATH-weighted noise-shaped 16-bit dither techniques.
Do you have a link to this? I have people I need to troll hard about it

Pure bullshit. >12 bits is inaudible and 44.1khz is more than enough anyway.

HA did some of the listening test research, as usual (they have a longstanding ABX || GTFO rule there).

The reverse-engineering was done in a more private forüm because Meridian threatened to sue the first set of researchers for breaking their "Hyper-Secure Module" sekurity (lol - yes, they really called it that).

Needless to say with that and the dubious nature of Meridian's "technology", the shitty IIR resampling with aliasing, the audible watermarking, the patents and the DRM, MQA didn't even remotely get off the ground and most of the outlets Meridian shilled to try to get people to sell it have pulled out.

You'd have much, much, much better quality with a Opus 1.2 --bitrate 256 file - or, of course, with FLAC.

So, where's the link my guy