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You can't tell if you have a close representation of the master without having the master to compare to. So your ears are only part of the equation.
For example, I have a CD release of LZII which has the channels reversed, if you've never compared it to the original you wouldn't know, these sold in huge quantities. Kate Bush's first album became more and more compressed until all the tracks started to have the same dynamic range, again you wouldn't know without the original to compare to. Abbey road released a half speed remaster of OMD's first three albums which have a channel imbalance of more than a few DB but how do you confirm whether the original tapes had this too?
I'm not advocating lossy compression but I don't think MQA is either. It works as a wrapper for high bit rate music too.
Checking that a file is as it was intended to be, well, see the examples of bad mastering. Of course there's no checking going on in the file sharing world, there is no ordinary part of information technology as it refers to mastering being applied here.
Stopping piracy will only happen if individuals decide that stealing music from artists is wrong and stop doing it on an individual level. If governments or the industry were capable of convincing the public to do that they could achieve a lot more stuff besides. Piracy of music is rife because it's easy to steal music and there don't appear to be any consequences.
Airhead-
your ears are only part of the equation
Your ears are everything. If you don't like how music sounds, stop listening to it.
I'm not advocating lossy compression but I don't think MQA is either
They started by saying it was lossless, then backtracked when people proved it wasn't.
They do however compensate for the DAC the studio use and the DAC you play it back on
This is more snake oil, once you get beyond the most basic toy-level DAC, the errors in conversion are the least part of your problem. If you persist with the delusion that you can hear what the artist heard when they signed off the release, you have to compensate far more for the mechanical part of the reproduction, i.e. room and speakers.
gbj_tester
Well, there's always ears.
I don't get why anybody is still using any kind of lossy compression, that seems like it should be a thing which died out when we all got ADSL, since you can download 16bit/44kHz linear PCM as fast as you can listen to it once your data rate goes over about 1.5Mbps
Checking that a file is as it was intended to be is just an ordinary part of information technology and doesn't need proprietary methods.
Stopping piracy is basically impossible, anything which can be rendered to the human senses can be copied.