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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-
Your ears are not everything when the question is the quality of reference that the copy of music you are listening to is, especially in terms of authenticity.
Then there's the industry that want's to continue to get paid for it's legal owned rights.
Like I said, I'm not an advocate of it. It's another sort of DRM because the industry is worried once the DSD masters are available and widely shared freely they will be unable to keep selling it.
However I'm also interested in authenticity and I pay for the music I listen to because I respect musicians as artists and feel they deserve to be paid for the music they are making.
Airhead
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.