MQA files for bankruptcy protection

"Earlier this week MQA filed paperwork with the UK courts for the Appointment of Administrators. This is the British equivalent of filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under United States law. There is a twist to this though as MQA may be able to survive and re-emerge but will likely have to sell off SCL6 (formerly MQAir) to do so."

https://www.ecoustics.com/news/mqa-bankruptcy/
https://www.whathifi.com/news/mqa-is-going-into-administration


I will wait with bated breath for Schiit to come out with an official apology

 

Will someone buy mqa for the wireless compression algorithm?

 

As a Tidal user, I'm a teeny worried about how this might affect the service. But if MQA goes away entirely, it will likely be a net benefit. Just give us everything in true lossless - bandwidth is just not a limiting factor for music applications.

 

Good riddance

 

And the boomers will find another format to rebuy Brothers in Arms for the 20th time.

 

Mr BS will remain true to his name.

 

Just missed april fools...

 

MQA was a blight on audio.

 

There's a lot of unjustified speculation about Mqa formats disappearing soon because the Mqa company is in trouble. Mqa the company has always been close to insolvency, and kept alive by speculative capital. The latest development is not a surprise. In liquidation, there will be efforts to sell the technology. It is less likely that the development staff will find a new home.

I'm thinking through the logic for Tidal as the main user of Mqa...

Around 5 million subscribers is a common guesstimate for the Tidal user base.

Say 10% pay for the top tier to access Mqa content. That would be around 0.5 million x $10 per month, or $5M per month in revenue from the top tier who get the Mqa light on their DAC.

The cost for Tidal to buy the Mqa tech including patents might be a few million. That's such an easy option I can't see Tidal refusing. It would mean minimal short term disruption to their business and an asset that can be depreciated over years, so no short term hit to finnancial reporting.

If Tidal let Mqa disappear, suddenly they have to worry about support for their Mqa encoded music databases and loss of revenue from their top tier customers walking away. That means millions in tech spend to rework systems + big fall in revenue, and a dreadful looking financial report. The executive team would look awful. And the Mqa replacement would be a massive distraction from their own efforts to expand / stay afloat.

So the next step seems likely to be a Tidal acquisition of Mqa or someone else stepping up to buy the intellectual property and support Tidal. It's hard to see any other Mqa customers on the horizon, at least until the tech has a secure new home.

 

MQA can get shit on. If MQA goes away I would consider going from Qobuz back to Tidal because Tidal seems to have a better library. I explicitly avoided Tidal because of their adoption of MQA so I think this could be a good thing for Tidal.

 

Rust in peace, MQA!

 

Same here, but I've got to wonder how much MQA-dependency is now baked into the Tidal backend.

 

Rest in piss!

 

Tidal made its bed with MQA, Tidal can probably survive for a while without MQA but the opposite can't be said for MQA who is pretty reliant on Tidal to keep them relevant. The ecoustics article is nice in how it was detailing that Richemont held a 24% and he resigned his seat last month. Article also suggests maybe Tidal/Block Inc could buy up MQA but who knows if Block Inc wants to buy a shady company like MQA since the Cash App side of Block Inc was just accused of inflating its numbers/helping in illegal activities:
https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/

MQA for years on my end from my time at Questyle/TSAV/Headphones.com has been interesting. Seemed like there were always people that wanted MQA but didn't know really what MQA even did. Realistically speaking, MQA is complicated and one probably has to be rather invested in audio to really actually care about MQA. Most folks will probably buy into the market that "MQA is better"

So many companies ended up adopting MQA that it felt basically like a checkbox especially if you were making a portable product, does it work with MQA.

From that RMAF panel years back to their response to Golden's video, MQA hadn't acted in good faith arguments about its product, they weren't transparent, and they honestly just seemed like bullies. Talking with some partners, they did also seem at least a little jubilant at the MQA news from the past few days.

 

They’re selling a perceptual lossy encoder and tried to market it as BETTER than hi-res. They always knew it was bullshit. If they had been upfront and said yes it’s lossy but it’s far more advanced than MP3 or AAC and it’s great for situations where bandwidth or storage space is limited, I think they would have found a place in the market for it. It would be a niche but it would be an honest niche.

Instead they claimed they had proprietary algorithms that better reconstructed the music than redbook or hi-res and it was just obviously such bullshit. All honest attempts to investigate were met with mafia-like tactics. Everyone involved in pushing MQA can go fuck themselves.

 

2L records and such demos sounded pretty interesting to me on a meridian explorer^2 and a pro ject - but I had no way to A/B with, say, a FLAC and Yggdrasil. Some of my audiophile friends could tell them apart and MQA files sounded worse to them. Records I know very well sounded (to me) as if you had the ol’ “LOUDNESS” switch on - but then again, impossible to A/B test for me.

The licensing, overhead, and odd options on catalog seems to have made the business insolvent. I think it’s fair to say that we still don’t know for sure what MQA actually does, and whether that truly translates to improved enjoyment. Seems the burden of repurchasing stuff and having a dedicated new set of gear was just too much to ask for most of us.

If there is a good idea in the tech, may it emerge in the future as a implementable improvement for the good of all Kree….

 

MQA was a waste of everybody’s time. It may have made some sense when bandwidth was scarce but people stream 4k movies now. What we need isn’t a better audio format but a better way of discovering and curating the kajillion audio tracks available from the streaming services.

 

I know a few DSP engineers who have told me that the method behind MQA's filtering is interesting, however, the marketing guy in me has always known that the actual money printer behind MQA was DRM. File format-based sound improvements are like the bottom tier in audibility.

Another BT audio codec is the last thing the industry needs. It's a circus as it is now.