I agree. Good read. Although I'm less interested in the measurements. But let me just say that I'm not the only one that says it sounds better. In fact, I think everyone on this thread that has actually heard a full decode says it sounds better. In fact, Archimago says he was able to discern differences in an ABX blind test 70% of the time. That's statistically much better than "no difference". And I suppose you can say that all the muiltitude of professional reviews that are saying it sounds better is "puffery" too, but then you might as well say that any opinion is "puffery" and that wouldn't be very fair.
That's not what Archimago said, or showed. Go back and re-read it again (I'll copy/paste here):
"As for the sound itself, having both the MQA decoded files and an original 24/96 "Studio Master", I have been able to do A/B comparisons easily with the
foobar ABX plugin. For me (and my 45 year old ears!), I was not able to score >70% when blinded using
AKG 701 headphones with my
ASUS Xonar Essence One DAC/amp for any of the 4 "mainstream music" samples I examined. This is corroborated by the "correlation null depth" measured with
Audio Diffmaker where I'm seeing 70-85dB; much better than the typical 60-65dB null depths with MP3 320kbps using recent
LAME encoder versions. The only exception to the high correlation null measurement was the Joni Mitchell track which sounds like it's the same mix, but I suspect it comes from a different transfer compared to the 2013 HDtracks version I have. Even with that one I was not able to ABX with impressive result. Sure, maybe if I sat down and meticulously listened for subtle differences, maybe did a bunch more A/B switching one very quiet night, nuances in certain passages may be evident... By the way, based on the findings, one would probably try to listen for slightly more high frequency "presence". I tried this with my wife in the main system downstairs for around 15 minutes before she got really bored. She was not able to consistently choose either."
He talks about how it's easier to ABX between MP3 and non-MP3, how that's due to the measured "correlation null depth" being so low. Between a known HDTracks and the MQA, that number isn't in the same range. Further, with ABX, he wasn't able to discern a difference. Whether or not you like spectral plots and other measurements, he did an excellent job of showing that the MQA was nearly the same as the known HDTracks file, just with stunted highs, due to the lossy compression/folding they do. Whether or not you could hear that difference.... If you can hear a difference, that's fine. *Should* you be able to hear a difference? The point here is that this is another view of the same format. It's good to have more than one opinion on this. That doesn't nullify your opinion OR archimago's. It's great that we can discuss this and it hasn't gotten heated, etc. Why can't cables/cords/whatever discussions in the main section ever go this smoothly? THIS is the type of experience on AK that I used to be a subscriber for. If there were more of this I'd really consider supporting the site again.
What, to me, would be more interesting, would be if Archimago or someone else with the tools, did a proper dither/downsample on the HDTracks file to redbook, made sure all levels were equal, then did an ABX. THAT would be a better comparison than "I listened to Tidal MQA and compared to my CD and it was much better." I'm a strong believer that redbook can be more than adequate for great sound, if given the proper master to begin with. My point, I guess, would be that I'm glad that MQA is here, in that it finally gives (by all reports) great sounding streams, but why couldn't they have just done this with redbook all along?