The MQA Master Class

I turned up at Mike Jbara's Master Class presentation Friday afternoon, "Achieving Authentic Studio Quality Sound," expecting fireworks. Jbara is the chief executive of MQA and many internet denizens had declared that they would be attending his presentation to oppose what he would be saying. But all was quiet during Jbara's 45-minute talk on what he regards as the benefits of the controversial codec to both the music industry and to audiophiles. Another MQA-related Master Class takes place at AXPONA Saturday April 13 at 12 noon. Moderated by Besflores Nievara Jr., Brand Ambassador for Music Direct, Mike Jbara will join MQA partner NAD's CTO, Greg Stidsen, and other panelists to discuss "The Future of High Resolution Audio." Perhaps the fireworks will be in evidence tomorrow!

COMMENTS
crenca's picture

This particular bit of Audiophile voodoo has probably run its course. 1) New codec shows up promising the moon 2) Consumers (and not publications such as this one) ask the hard questions 3) Consumers (and not publications such as this one) disambiguate the technical realities and prove that lack of substance within MQA 4) Forums light up with "MQA is Vaporware" threads and the like that indicate that music lovers reject MQA 5) Publications and "the industry" push back, but reveal at RMAF 2017 and elsewhere they are just plain mad that consumers did not buy into the MQA sales effort, and do not acknowledge the music lovers real interests *at all* 6) Where we are now, which is with "the industry" still trying to act as if MQA was a viable product.

So the time for fireworks is past. MQA ends with a whimper of trade publication writers and the odd old timer audiophile who does not know better showing up at sells presentations like this one...

Charles E Flynn's picture

From https://www.whathifi.com/features/making-chord-mojo :

With many DAC purveyors such as AudioQuest, Audiolab, Meridian and dCS supporting MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) – essentially a technology that can package hi-res music into files small enough to stream and download, could this be the next feature for Chord's products?

“Fundamentally, we’ve looked at MQA, and it’s not for us," says John. "It’s a clever idea as a packing system. But you don’t need to pack your audio down. It solves a problem that’s not there now. We looked at it and we thought it was inferior to what we were doing, so we haven’t touched it."

“We’d have to undo 20 or 30 year's-worth of work to produce a product to meet the requirements of the format," says Matt. "We’ve been quite open and said we would happily integrate MQA into our products if there was a proven benefit to do it, but as yet no-one can prove that benefit in a simple way that’s clear, so it’s not worth pursuing. We’ve taken technologies from every aspect of the industry to benefit customers' listening, but this just isn’t one of them.”

AJ's picture

Well, was there any fireworks at the Master Quality Aliasing class today?
So far, the only "Trust ears", "Just listening" tests have been a bit of a bust
https://secure.aes.org/forum/pubs/ebriefs/?ID=685
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=19396
Entirely as predicted by Dr Lesurf
http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/MQA/origami/ThereAndBack.html
Of course, if one neither trusts their ears nor just listens, this matters scant ;-).

AJ
Soundfield Audio

Solarophile's picture

Whether many people attended or not doesn't matter to me.

What I want to know is whether anything new was discussed and if there's really any new information? Based on this 1 paragraph blurb, it appears nothing new was revealed.

After something like 4+ years since it has been announced with plenty of negative opnion both objective and subjective, it looks like MQA is basically done with no excitement left and little relevance to consumer audio other than those Tidal subscribers maybe. Time to move on.

JMW's picture

http://www.b-audio.com/

crenca's picture

Though the site does not mention MQA, so perhaps he/she/they signed a contract but have yet to put out MQAdulterated product?? just speculating here...

Indydan's picture

I know who he is. I may just dox him if he doesn't identify himself. Think of a city in California...

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