Agreed, it was "Fixed". The only question..and surely you would have to agree with this as well...is whether Peter McGrath believed for one second that the whole demo was somehow 'fixed'!
I would prefer to believe that Peter and Alex both were so impressed by the SQ difference between the standard file and the MQA file that they wanted to show the audience this major ( and don't think it was not )
difference! The ramifications of how MQA adjusted the files was not ( at least I choose to believe) so high on their priority list.
What does concern me now is the impact on the artist, the consumer and the manufacturer by the closed source aspect of MQA. OTOH, I'm not so sure this is any different than what Apple has been doing for ever, and in audio what was done when HDCD was introduced or what Dolby tried to do as well ( and still does). ( Not that this is much of a justification). However, the biggest concern ( at least to me) is that the whole thing ( MQA) is nothing more than a simple upsample that any consumer could accomplish with an up sampling DAC.
There are many similarities to HDCD, and other closed proprietary technologies.
You keep repeating this notion of "upsampling". That is just part of it. I have posted here numerous times they also apply a proprietary
filter Stuart CLAIMS compensates for issues with the original ADC and fixes "temporal blur", and his based on his studies of "psycho-acoustics".
It is so far fetched and beyond the pale, that many very important figures in the industry immediately looked behind the curtain.
That is how Merdian's financial statements came to light, and other nasty facts about MQA.
No time to go into it here, but if MQA was so superior, why not have public demonstrations with WIDELY KNOWN recordings?
This has not happened once, ever. A small cabal of reviewers have done this on a very small scale in their homes without any outside
verification what so ever.
I strongly suggest you go on Computer Audiophile and Audio Asylum and search posts by luminaries who have uncovered MQA's
so called technology and show it to be lossy, 13 bits average, with tremendous inaccuracies in the frequency domain. Plus it
is DRM, and it forget sampling rates over 96Khz.