News

Today, January 4, at "CES Unveiled" in Las Vegas, MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) launched major partnerships with Morten Lindberg's multiple Grammy Award-nominated, audiophile record label/download store 2L and playback partners Auralic, Aurender, and Bluesound. The entire 2L download catalog, starting with one of Lindberg's first recordings, made in 1993, and extending through his latest DXD (352.8kHz) recordings, has been scrubbed clean and born anew with MQA.

On the playback front, MQA also announced the first MQA-equipped smartphone, HTC's One A9 (above). HTC smartphone demonstrations, as well as music playback of recordings by Lindberg, Peter McGrath, and others on Wilson and Meridian loudspeakers, are promised throughout CES, January 6–9, in the MQA Suite (30-335) in the Venetian Towers in Las Vegas. Mytek's Brooklyn DAC, as well as MQA-equipped portable players from Pioneer and Onkyo, will also be on display. Stay tuned for first-hand reports from members of the Stereophile CES 2016 blogging team, which consists of John Atkinson, Larry Greenhill, Robert Deutsch, Jon Iverson, Herb Reichert, and yours truly.

MQA's announcement, which follows just three months after Mytek's Rocky Mountain Audio Fest launch of its MQA-equipped Brooklyn D/A converter and Tidal's press demo of wireless streaming of ultra high-resolution, MQA-encoded files, doesn't stop there. Bluesound's range of MQA-compatible products, which will be demoed in Bluesound's Venetian Suite (34-204) at CES, will comprise the Node 2, Powervault 2, Pulse 2, Pulse Flex, Pulse Mini, Vault 2, and all legacy Bluesound components (above). Auralic and Aurender will also demonstrate their MQA-enabled products, with Auralic demoing MQA streaming on its Aries (below) and Aries LE models in the Venetian (29-122), before making available the necessary firmware updates for Auralic’s Lightning DS software platform soon after the show. Yet another demo will comprise the Mytek and MQA playing on the recently announced Pioneer and Onkyo players.

And then there are the other companies poised to launch MQA in 2016. How about Berkeley Audio, dCS, Ixion and Kripton joining a list that already includes Meridian Audio, Mytek, Onkyo, Pioneer, and those mentioned above? Expect, as well, a fairly imminent, long-awaited announcement of MQA-encoded streaming from Tidal. Down the road, expect announcements from HDTracks and more.

MQA has already signed on, in addition to 2L, labels Camerata in Japan and HQM. "Each label will want to make their own announcement," MQA creator Bob Stuart told Stereophile by Skype on December 31, 2015. "The major labels are close. Let's see what happens by the end of CES. As far as hardware, by Easter, we think there will be over 100 products on the market that can encode and decode MQA."

By all appearances, the MQA revolution is poised to do for the music industry what the latest Star Wars blockbuster is doing for movies. MQA may not be the final frontier, but it is scrubbing clean decades worth of digital files beset with temporal blur (timing errors) and quantization distortion and computational-induced noise. MQA promises to let us hear, for the first time, what recording engineers and artists have confirmed they heard as they recorded their music. And MQA will also enable us to stream better-than-ever-sounding high-resolution files with ease.

Okay, you may be saying to yourself. Serinus and Stereophile have drunk the Kool-Aid, and are now writing ad copy. But it's not just me and John Atkinson and Alan Silverman (Judy Collins' long-time Grammy Award-winning sound engineer) and Morten Lindberg and Peter McGrath (whose recording legacy for Harmonia Mundi is the stuff of legend) and the folks at Tidal and all the above-mentioned companies who have heard the demos and been wowed by MQA. It's also all the folks at companies and labels not yet ready to announce who are hearing to the call, and responding accordingly.

Here is how Bob Stuart (above) describes what the MQA process has done for Lindberg's first digital recording:

"This album is the first example of a "white-glove" process utilizing the MQA technology. If we play the old CD, the music is in there—but also all the problems of early digital converters: the sound is indistinct, brittle, and grainy. Morten is a great recording engineer, as can be heard in this earliest work; he is also a careful archivist with the original equipment in the cupboard. We used special signals to capture the characteristics of the [original] digital converter [Morten recorded with] so that the MQA encoder could remove its 'fingerprint' and reveal the original sound. This isn't changing the music in any way; it's more like cleaning an old painting that had been stained with smoke. Done carefully, it doesn't change the picture, it reveals the artist's intent by removing an obscuring film."

For Lindberg's take on his pre-MQA master and what MQA has wrought, see www.2l.no/pages/album/120.html. Note that the recording's MQA-encoding was achieved with direct input from pianist Christian Eggan, and made use of the original DAT converter which Lindberg preserved in his equipment archives. In this case, MQA's "Master Quality Authenticated" means exactly that.

In his Skype interview, Stuart reiterated the importance of MQA.

"MQA is a very, very big concept. It's not just the technology, which is about accurately capturing and delivering the actual sound of the original. MQA opens a new opportunity for the music industry that they haven't had in a long time.

"The music industry has reduced the quality of its product over the last 50 years. Every time the consumer was offered convenience or quality, they picked convenience. But with MQA, you don't have to give up quality for convenience. MQA recognizes that the world of hi-fi is sustained by the content we can play. There's a tightly bridged relationship between content quality and how much we enjoy the music.

"MQA can encode any piece of audio that exists. The technology will automatically work out how to de-blur it, but it can do an even better job if we have access to the original equipment used to record the music. We measure the original equipment, encode recordings to remove blur, glare, and computational errors, and end up with beautiful, crystal clear sound. It's astonishing how close we can get to the original performance with something that, bound by the limitations of old technology, does not sound natural.

"MQA is not only very transparent; it is also highly efficient. You need a much smaller file to deliver higher quality sound. And the MQA process sounds better than any other digital that can be delivered today. Morten Lindberg, who strives for extreme quality, was astonished when we put the MQA process on top of a 352.8kHz DXD file.

"My ultimate motivation is, let's get the music right. When all is said and done, MQA is a disruptive technology because it runs contrary to the current philosophy that Hi-Res is, by itself, the end-all. It isn't about how high the numbers are; it's about eliminating the blurring so you can truly hear the music."