Tidal and MQA..two questions.

It's hard to see Tidal succeeding in the long term. There just isn't a strong enough value prop over Spotify for most users. All of my friends at work (tech millennials) have Spotify, I'm not aware of a single Tidal user except the fringe audiophiles.

Re: what will happen to MQA, everyone does realize that MQA is just lossy compression + DRM of high-res content into a roughly standard-res stream, yes? We won't be losing anything SQ wise if the format goes away, just convenience. A service could easily come along and stream 24/96 FLAC, for instance. Whether there's a business case for that (or MQA for that matter) is another question.

@grannyring right, MQA does certainly sound better than Spotify’s highest quality (320kbps MP3). We would lose the only practical "audiophile-quality" streaming service if Tidal goes away. Will enough people care, at least from a business perspective? I doubt it - our niche isn’t nearly big enough to support a music service at the scale needed for it to have market value.

Has anyone else found 16/44 Tidal on Roon doesn't sound as good as the same track ripped and served locally by Roon? My wife actually noticed this - we were playing an orchestral piece and she commented the sound was anemic and lacking, "something's wrong." I realized she had clicked on it in Tidal, and when I switched to the ripped local copy she said it was better again. They were both 16/44, so no MQA involved.