I’m sure I read somewhere, several years back, that Apple had made Lossless/AIFF into an open source format.
ALAC has been opensourced
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THIS is audiophile format.
MQA could be interesting because it’s an exta gimmick one has to add to its stereo, but otherwise doesn’t get the point.
Does anyone remember HDCD? One could propose a bit better CD format, but given the sheer abundance of older disc and players it’s difficult to win a rather good format.
Even SACD and DVD audio that have extra features didn’t have a big success.
Sounds like the Keurig K-cup of audio formats. Convenient sound that only works from their proprietary packaging in their proprietary machines even if it’s a worse product as a result. And when everyone starts using it, switch to DRM in 2.0.
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Broken in cables, no less.
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Came here to ask what this offered over FLAC, gratified to see this addressed in very first comment. Thank you.
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Patents expire, and they require a clear statement of what and how the process is done. This is about trade secrets.
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It isn’t. Mp3 is still a patent mess. Use Ogg-Vorbis. Sounds slightly better at the same filesize to boot.
in practice you are more or less right as the licensing of MP3 is unenforcable. So I wouldn’t go re-encoding my MP3’s to Ogg-Vorbis. But for new encodes why even bother with MP3, Ogg-Vorbis is better anyway.
maybe they found a way to make the spectrum of the added MQA signal the same as a vinyl record. 
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I think algorithms to remove vocal tracks for karaoke, spatially manipulate sound for stereo-to-surround conversion, or isolate particular sounds for assistive reasons – anything that involves domain transforms – could potentially benefit from having excess samples to work with. But if you’re listening to anything that heavily processed, it would be fairly absurd to make princess-and-the-pea complaints about the sampling rate.
From the sounds of it, this MQA business is part of a long tradition of audiophile technology that is only desirable because it costs money. The same applies to lossless 196kHz audio in general; the giant files require a more expensive setup, and the expense makes the music sound better.
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The last MP3 patent relevant to FOSS encoders like LAME expired last year.
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/lame_legal_issues.html
As much as I love Vorbis, the decoding is not energy efficient and will shorten the battery life of any portable device you play them on.
I encode to FLAC, then I can choose what lossy format I encode to later, using what is most useful for that particular case.
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harmonically tuned and ionically aligned, with diamond gold platinum connectors.
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I stopped caring about lossy formats long ago, hard drives are cheap enough.
The best ones are also directional :-/
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The cables really open up after the 30 day return period.
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a dr greater than 13 is kind of rare.
I think I wrote this review
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Measuring dynamic range in equivalent-bits is a strange convention. Why not dB?
This is new to me. I didn’t know this, from the wiki:
"Without dither, the dynamic range correlates to the quantization noise floor. For example, 16-bit integer resolution allows for a dynamic range of about 96 dB. "
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One of the “features” of SACD was that it was DRMed to the hilt. An SACD player will only play signed discs - and only the pressing plants have signing keys. That’s right, you can’t make your own SACDs even if you have a DSD recorder.
At least the DRM was optional in DVD-Audio, but I’d rather just buy FLACs or high-rate MP3s online if I’m going to buy music.
back in the days when DVDA and SACD were the subject of great debate, some wag declared it as an audio format designed around copy protection.
My Sony SACD changer no longer plays hybrid SACD layers, and the firmware predates the auto recalibration routines found in later incarnations of that hardware. Oh well, I think I had a couple dozen-- mostly classical.
I did like the super jewel boxes-- the ones made for CDs always seemed to break on me.
That depends a bit on the device, but it is a consideration indeed. There’s nothing inherently energy hungry in Ogg-Vorbis by the way, it’s just that lots of devices have specialized mp3 decoder chips. But I have had devices with ogg support in the past, and my Moto G5 doesn’t really seem to drain any faster with ogg. But don’t take my word for it, because I hardly ever listen music on my phone. For my home audio system ogg is fine.
Good to hear that the MP3 patents expired, I didn’t know expiration was still a thing 
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