MQA is in dire straits, the company announced today that it is in receivership (essentially a bankruptcy filing) and diligently seeking an investor.
MQA was once marketed as an audio format that would make “studio quality” achievable at home. Soon, however, questionable claims were found to have been made by its inventors. For example, the format turned out not to be – as first claimed – lossless: it does compress lossy (in a different way). Admittedly much less than something like the challenged mp3 of course. But still: a lie is a lie. It also quickly became apparent that MQA has DRM capabilities. It made the whole format a bit hazy. However, it was practical to save a lot of bandwidth when streaming audio. Tidal also saw this potential and adopted MQA as its own streaming format. The disadvantage was that you needed certified MQA DACs – whether or not integrated into an amplifier – to unlock the full potential of Tidal streams.
Not known to the general public
MQA never got through to the general public. Sure, the just slightly better mainstream hi-fi sets sometimes supported it. But the vast majority of buyers didn’t care, didn’t even know what it was. We’re also talking here about a group of users who stream primarily via Spotify and to whom things like lossy and lossless mean little to nothing. From the critical audiophile market, revenues were apparently lagging as well. It remains hard to sell that a bit perfect lossless FLAC or even PCM file would sound worse than an MQA. Meanwhile, MQA’s investor apparently also sees things a bit bleak in terms of the format’s future. And so the company behind the format announced that it is diligently looking for a new investor. And while doing so they had no other option than going into receivership; the UK equivalent of (the first stage of) bankruptcy.
Uncertain future
In theory it will be possibly find an investor who sees something in the not entirely uncontroversial file format. The question then arises: what do they intend to do with it? And what if this investor turns out to be Chinese? Given the amount of equipment that supports MQA and is connected to a network, that scenario could raise serious security and privacy issues. Then there are the tight agreements with manufacturers, will they have to pay more to continue supporting the feature? Or will the reins actually be loosened? Many questions and an uncertain future lie ahead. With the main question, asked from day one: is the world really waiting for yet another new – closed – audio format?