Hi-res audio is in trouble
NewsMQA Ltd, the company behind MQA digital music technology, is going into administration.
Major labels had invested heavily in this venture.
Watch this space.
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Hi-Res audio isn’t in trouble in the least. A handful of users on the Tidal streaming platform and MQA’s investors are the only people who will take any notice of this. It’s an irrelevance to the wider Hi-Res / audiophile market.
Many experts in the field have little time for MQA and looked upon it as a marketing exercise with dubious technology promoted by easily led journalists.
The manufacturing company I worked for in the 80’s had such an efficient I.T. department that they went into data processing administration. I assume this a different kind of “administration”?
It may be that pursuing ultra-high fidelity for music that most people will be listening to on earbuds was excessive.
MQA is not High Resolent ution Audio. It is a marketing scheme to licence a compression algorithm to, at best, make it more efficient to stream High Resolution Audio.
Hi-Res Audio is doing very well.
MQA was always a racket and never about Hi-Res. It was a capitalist and fascist wet dream, where every single playing of an MQA file/stream/disk could be controlled by a digital encryption handshake and charged by the distributers.
Great news that they are now bancrupt. Nobody needed nor wanted them.
Warner, Universal and Sony have (or had) between them 20% of the shareholding in MQA Ltd..
The crash came within days of US tech. company “Blue Spike” being granted a jury hearing of a claim against Warner for breach of several patents. Chances are Universal and Sony will be next in court after Warner.
Messy. Tidal Music included MQA encoded tracks, and yesterday they announced they will offer lossless. This is good news for music lovers who want sound quality better than mp3 and aac.
Hi Res will be just fine with or without MQA. I’m sure Qobuz is jumping up and down celebrating the news. MQA technology is here to stay because it’s prime value is to deliver a “hi res” stream that requires less bandwidth.
MQA going under isn’t particularly surprising when one notes that audiophiles and professionals have almost consistently disapproved of their supposedly high-quality audio technology when they examined it in detail.
The basic proposition is certainly admirable, delivering high-quality audio without requiring the tonnes of space usually needed for lossless audio files, but MQA’s been scuppered on both fronts. The audio tech has been criticised by engineers and listeners aplenty, and the storage benefits are now minimal because user devices will have more and more storage for those proper high-quality sound files once thought to be too large for regular use.
The last nail in MQA’s coffin has been Apple et al finally taking a side on this MQA vs. lossless debate, and Apple’s landed firmly on the lossless side. Apple’s using ALAC, their own lossless audio encoding so they have more control over the process, and other services tend to prefer Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) over the proprietary (and costly) MQA.
It is a shame to see them go, the core idea of MQA is certainly marvellous and had it been implemented properly, it would rightfully be a watershed moment for the audio industry, but it wasn’t, so it isn’t.
MQA is not responsible for Hi-Res audio. It is simply a proprietary way of selling high end audio files. Similarly if Dolby went out if business, there would be a plethora of formats, including open source, to take its place.
It would be a net boon to the industry, as everyone would have to buy new equipment with the new proprietary tech.
Quite the opposite: hi-res audio is exploding. Apple is making positive moves on te hi-res front. Qobuz already offers lossless streaming sans MQA – at this time it is my go-to streaming service. Tidal is moving toward lossless FLAC format.
Moreover, many openly question how effective (and “lossless”) MQA actually is without (and even with) their proprietary decoding devices. Digital Trends has an interesting perspective: https://www.digitaltrends.com/home-theater/tidal-hi-res-lossless/
MQA is NOT anywhere near a sole equivalent to “Hi-Res audio”. Qobuz and Apple Music offer hi-rez without MQA, and have no problems delivering it. Tidal are pretty much the only ones going for MQA, and they are going to switch to Flac based 24 bit audio, like everyone else, which they should’ve done from the beginning. There were a very few CDs produced with MQA, but the bigger issue are the DAC manufacturers, who paid the licensing fee to MQA. Presumably, this was passed on to the consumer. This all goes to show that proprietary audio compression schemes will never make it, and there was definitely more BS associated with this particular variety than anything I can remember. The good news is that there won’t be DACs which can’t play Tidal’s “new” 24 bit format, whereas there were a number of them before who refused to pay MQA’s licensing fee. The consumer wins, except for the fact that they probably got charged more for their equipment that WAS licensed for MQA capability.
Your headline is inaccurate and misleading.
Could’t have said it better, if MQA dies, good riddance, it was a “solution” for a non existing problem from the get go.
Hi-res audio will be fine. MQA was just another gimmick.
MQA does not have a monopoly on hi res audio streaming. For example FLAC will do just fine.
MQA was never explained to the general public…it was not related to a specific device… the sound benefits were contested… Japan released some MQA cds , i got some and was not convinced over SACD or Blu ray audio…
I wish I could say I understood this post.
A little background might be in order?
Has gone the same way as Meridian’s MLP, – anything that involves royalties, is heading down a rabbit hole.
However let’s just say 99% of all recordings are horrible compressed rubbish.
The 1% that are any good scarcely ever get noticed, while a few get hyped to craziness…
Ever tired of J-D-P Elgar cello concerto on classic FM et al c/w compression and tape noise?
so:-
The main music diffusion medium has always been stereo FM radio, (and even worse DAB!)
Forget it at your peril!
It covers the hours spent in Europe’s traffic jams, and makes a fat lot of difference in a car what resolution it has.
(eg. Radio Classique Paris has practically ALL radio + archives inc on the internet from horrible 128kb, Mp3)
Meridian MLP is still living as Dolby TrueHD. It is an excellent technology from when Bob Stuart and Peter Craven had genius ideas.
MQA always was a strange thing. If you want “Hi-Res”, go for a lossless format like FLAC.
I can see how the sound would profit from a higher bitrate. But frequencies beyond, let’s be generous here, 30 kHz are non-sense. If you cannot hear the CRTs in an old recording (15.625 kHz (PAL) or 15.750 (NTSC)), then you probably won’t hear anything about 20 kHz either. 😀
MQA disappearing, finally as the listeners “intended” (to use an abused verb…), good news for everyone.
No mention of MQA at all at the AXPONA hi-fi show this weekend.
In a controlled double-blind test no human has ever been able to reliably and repeatedly hear a difference between CD and “hires”. Audiophiles who claim they can are imagining a difference.