MQA now in administration

The Administrator's 2 November progress report to the High Court revealed the price paid in full by Lenbrook for MQA's IP, trade name, and plant assets was a paltry £100,000, with £30,000 of that total set aside to satisfy a patent claim and ensure good title was passed to the purchaser:

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After tens of millions of pounds invested since 2014, that is a rather pathetic ending for MQA's investors. The company will dissolve after a small distribution is made to the largest secured creditor, and unsecured creditors get zilch.
 
Skye said:
Large portion of the catalog is MQA so I believe they will not abandon it. In my opinion, with the right system, MQA sounds superior. FLAC and MQA will be delivered side by side.
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Nope, they are abandoning it. It will be a very neat trick if Lenbrook (or anyone) were able to reverse that.

Skye said:
irellevent :poop:
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True, TIDAL is irrelevant by market share and losing tons of money every quarter. Perhaps this marked turn away from MQA in realization that it was never the revenue differentiator they hoped it would be will now help save them.

The trade press BS campaign about MQA superiority needs to be taken with a grain of salt, don't convince yourself that is the true story because it is and always was a complete fantasy designed to impose licensing fees on the consumer, sell hardware (and magazine ads), and get people to sign up for Trojan Horse DRM.
 
Smartplug said:
So MQA is history?
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It will be if they don't find a new streaming service partner, or resurrect the relationship with TIDAL.

MQA's IP and assets were purchased in mid-September by Lenbrook (owner of Bluesound, NAD, PSB, etc...) at the fire sale price shown above. Some have suggested this was done simply to protect an existing Lenbrook investment/sunken costs in two nearly ready for market products, a PSB headphone developed in collaboration with Sonical, and a forthcoming wireless powered speaker that is rumored to use the SCL6 ultra wideband technology.

Many also think the only bit that will survive in some form is SCL6, which does not require the use of an MQA encoded stream though it does support it, but if there is no streaming partner in the future then there would be no encoded content anyway.

Perhaps a Warner Music or even a consortium of record labels will rescue TIDAL who are also in dire financial straits, if so there could be more albums encoded in MQA in the future, though that seems far fetched given what a dismal failure MQA has been already, losing tens of millions of pounds and failing to produce any appreciable market share/differentiation from their competitors for TIDAL. It seems unlikely that anyone will sink money into it ever again.
 
Achim1811 said:
There are so many hints on SLC6 that I guess it is all about that. The next "far superior" cow will be driven through the village 😉
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At £19,999 Lenbrook doesn't have very much into it, and I doubt they can make a strong case for further development/investment even in SCL6, unless they can resubmit an application to the Bluetooth SIG and gain acceptance there. Bluetooth is at this point ubiquitous in the wireless realm, I have a hard time imagining SCL6 ever supplanting it in any way, so unless SCL6 can become a part of the Bluetooth specification, it too will likely just fade away.
 
During the time when internet was on its infancy and low speed mqa make sense where you stream a music on small size. Given the time have passed that internet speed have matured and improved its speed so in this day and age it don’t make sense anymore. It’s a music that was compress to reduce its size much like zip and then decompress for playback. I don’t see an advantage using mqa since you need a chip or software to do the unfolding. Flac is universal standard that every streamer services need to use. Anyway, I did comparison by converting CD music into wav and flac and to my surprise this is just my ear and not measuring device that wav sound a bit better despite being both loseless, It maybe just placebo effect or just in my head as there should be no difference.
 
Theres alot of hardware; IFI, Wiim, Fiio, etc that are/were invested in the technology....now those options will be useless unless in some form its continued. I never subscribed to it so never heard any differences but my ears are not young.
 
Achim1811 said:
Isn't it all about feeling good when listening to music? And feeling even better with HiFi one likes? And feeling even more better when owning high quality gear? Who has to judge when I prefer the sound of vinyl more than the sound of CDs and the sound of CDs more than the sound of every streaming service?
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Vinyl sounds different. Yes.
CD should sound the same as a FLAC stream so if there is a difference it’s hardware related or bias.
 
Achim1811 said:
I insist in bias! 😉 And of course hardware related things. Every part of the chains "do something". And also the streaming services will "do something" with their hardware.
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That's true but it's also a case that can be easily verified.
Given the same edition and release of a song, possibly one natively studio mastered at 44,1 16bit, it's possible to extract and compare the file contents from CD with any streaming or download services, just before the same DAC process.
It should clarify any doubt about bias or what the streamer services decided to do, but only in that specific case, not generally, since nobody guarantees that producers act always the same way... Otherwise, what could we possibly discuss about?
 
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when I think of the energy-time devoted by the wiim team to tidal and mqa for more than a year..it saddens me.... :eek:


(it's actually a bit the same thing with amazon hd but mainly for a strong grip marketing)
 
Mike in NY said:
MQA was declared insolvent on April 3rd. The high court appointed two administrators who have 8 weeks to submit a plan to creditors.

Partners should really think hard about cutting bait, no reason for a company like WiiM to spend another dime/minute on developing anything more for MQA playback at this juncture.
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No surprise. It's BS.
 
Skye said:
believe everything you read online
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Pot calling the kettle black? The bulk of the audio trade press have misinformed their readers on MQA. Their clients are actually the advertisers and not the readers, they make their money from advertising in the publications (including online), their stance on MQA therefore needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Take a strong look at the verified evidence surrounding MQA, including the McGill University blind listening study, given you are so willing to play the "MQA sounds fabulous" subjective card.

Don't worry man, MQA is vanishing from TIDAL very quickly, it won't take much longer for it to fade from memory entirely unless the Lenbrook business development folks are proficient in performing miracles.
 
Brantome said:
Well, here’s something you read on the internet which I agree with due to the pedigree and reputation of the company who penned it

MQA is Bad For Music. Here's Why. | Linn UK

www.linn.co.uk www.linn.co.uk
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The article, points the problems that afflicted MQA since beginning. They aren't on technical side but on the commercial and presentation one. They claimed was an esoteric and mysterious way to get miracles.
In reality it's a very effective way to get practically same reproduction results of hi-res sources at half size and bitrate. At presentation time it made sense.
MQA is not bit perfect compared to original file but it's not lossy in the way usually we think about mp3 or related.
MQA takes some of less and unused significant bits of signal, those lying in the obscure depth of 24bit and use them to carry ultrasonic info of original sampled signal. Consider that those info, are wery few even in 192khz standard hi-res flac. This ultrasonic part is the only really lossy compressed in traditional terms, while the sonic (and audible) part of signal loses some not significant bits that usually lie at the background noise.
Over this process there are a list of self claiming "miracle upsampling processes" that contribuited, with royalties fees, in the bad name of system.
A other "commercial" aspect, was the licensed D/A process, that following the thinking of MQA creators, being the same for everyone regardless the DAC used, gives reference results.
All those aspect are obviously "opinabile" and surely non sense when the files carrying MQA are 44.1 16bit, instead of 48 24bit, just to light some little bulbs.
MQA was not evil, it was just bad depicted...
 
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