MQA is on
That’ll have the Meridian forums (where, to be clear, I am an enthusiastic participant and Meridian owner) fizzing.
Thanks for posting this. The MQA story lives!
I don’t have the technical expertise to comment about the timing issues referenced in the release, but do know a little about investing in small companies.
To me this press release reads like more smoke and mirrors, and this sentence should be particularly concerning:
“These technologies are expected to debut in a variety of licensee products before the end of calendar 2025.”
In other words, paraphrasing: We have almost no revenue now, and no prospect for revenue until the end of next year, if we hit our development goals.
I’m very glad I am not funding this effort!
In general, just IMO, whenever a company requires multiple actors to make money–in this case, the studios, the equipment manufacturers, and then consumers–that is a difficult business to build.
Thanks for posting.
I really can’t imagine how these guys are going to make a success of it. No one in their right mind would pay for licenses without a large volume of appropriately coded content. I don’t expect Lenbrook has the clout to convince the Studios/Streaming services to carry MQA content.
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Well, looks like they’ve partnered with HDTracks to launch a new Streaming service;
Is this enough to entice manufacturers to extend MQA licenses? 
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The streaming service with no high resolution provenance combines with a known lossy codec.
Caveat emptor!
MQA just seems like MP3 for Hi-Res. Bandwidth has moved on and lossy codecs seem to me to be completely unnecessary in audio streaming. I actually just checked and even Smooth Chill (my favourite DAB station in the car) is now is in 16bit/44.1, it wasn’t so long ago that all internet radio was 256kbps
This is a bit OT but as you have raised the issue, although a display may show an internet source as 16/44.1 this is not an indicator that it is not lossy using a codec.
Codecs reduce the size of the data held within a file not the file itself ( which you could think of as a sort of container). Most displays show the file type they are processing, not he size of the data contained within the file.
You can see if the source uses a codec by looking at the full screen view in Mosaic . This shows the data type received and will indicate the codec type and bit rate if used.
So Smooth Chill appears as 16/44.1 in the processor display as that is the file type. However in Mosaic the data shows as MP3:128.0 kbps.
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Thank you - I don’t use Mosaic but I did dig and while I can’t find the Codec I can see from the bit rate it’s definitely not uncompressed.
I just saw this from a member of the Roon forum;
"I received a short email today that Tidal was fully removing MQA and 360 formats.
On July 24, 2024, we’re replacing the music in TIDAL’s MQA catalog with FLAC versions. In addition to this change, we’re removing all podcasts and music available in 360 Reality Audio. Learn how these changes will impact your Collection.
Note: I replaced the emailed link with where it took me in the Tidal support
It seems they will make best efforts to replace albums and songs in playlists. Unclear what this would do to Roon playlists?"
Not surprising, given the Lenbrook press release…
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