Beer Better Than Music Banter 05Apr17

Music Matters but apparently MQA (master quality authentication) will not. I attended all the MQA-ladden rooms/sessions, including the streaming keynote, and while speakers were not fully competent, their arguments and comments were unconvincing. As I discussed earlier MQA is a new lossy coding/decoding scheme like MP4 or DSD but with some possible advantages. This I learned from research, not speakers. The marketing guy didn't really understand the tech and didn't have the commercial data I was interested in like # of publishers on-board, # of titles released, freeware encoder availability, royalties paid to who and how much, etc. The main panel of a Universal Music exec and a recording engineer never mentioned MQA, even when seemingly prompted with "providence" by the moderator. Oh well - it's the $$ that will drive it or not and if only Meridien, not Sony or other big houses, are making the money then CDs will remain as the standard and high def music may well languish while MQA becomes an historical footnote alongside betamax. I left pretty early. All that said, before the event I did enjoy a Dubl Belg and a nice Porter at a nearby brewery Fermaentra - I even tasted the Sideral and Sonder as well - then across the street I found an Illegal Pete's that was doing happy hour!