Strategy in TECH...
MQA Limited has notified Companies House, the U.K. government agency that is roughly equivalent to our Securities and Exchange Commission, that it has changed its name. After nine years as MQA Limited, the company will now be known as Wave Realisations Limited.
Lenbrook Corporation, a Canadian company that holds a portfolio of premium specialty brands, announced this morning it has acquired the assets of MQA, ltd., the U.K.-based company behind the Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) high-resolution audio encoding system in a transaction it hopes will breathe new life into the technology that had fallen into a form of receivership upon the loss of its major financial backer. Terms of the deal were not disclosed as part of this announcement.
MQA Limited, the company that invented and markets the Master Quality Authenticated digital music system said to deliver lossless high-res streaming music, has entered “administration” in the U.K. Administration is a form of bankruptcy or protection from creditors similar to Chapter 11 bankruptcy here in the U.S. In the U.K., administration offers an insolvent company time to reorganize, develop a new plan, and – with stakeholder and government approval – an opportunity to exit bankruptcy.
STRATA-GEE – This is the fourth and final installment of our contemplation on the controversy swirling around MQA. I want to start by thanking Bill Leebens for the many, many…MANY hours he spent interviewing, speaking with his editor (me), writing, and rewriting these pieces. It was a lot of work that for him, I’m afraid, will largely be thankless, as one side or the other will decry his work. At the same time, Bill and I end up in a slightly different place and you can see some of my thoughts at the end of his piece. But none of that takes away from the herculean effort this topic represented and I am eternally grateful to Bill Leebens for his thoughtful approach.
STRATA-GEE: This is the third installment of our series on the controversy engulfing MQA conducted in partnership with guest poster Bill Leebens. You can see Part 1 introduction, MQA Controversy – A True Audio Breakthrough? Or a Marketing Scam?; and Part 2, MQA – Voices Arise in Harmony with a Video Critique from ‘GoldenSound.’ In this post, we hear from proponents of MQA, most of whom remain steadfast in their support for the technology or the company (or both) – even in the face of often blistering criticism. Leebens scored an interview with no less than MQA founder Bob Stuart who calmly answered all of his questions in an interview that lasted more than two hours.
STRATA-GEE: This is the second installment of our series on the controversy engulfing MQA, conducted in partnership with guest poster Bill Leebens. In this post, you will learn more about those who are critical of MQA, with some going on the record for the first time for this story. MQA has been controversial almost from the beginning – with an intense opposition that ebbs and flows over time. But as we told you in our introductory installment (see MQA Controversy – A True Audio Breakthrough? Or a Marketing Scam?), a recent YouTube video critique from an audiophile not involved in the audio industry, has spurred a huge resurgence of interest (that video had over 267,000 views!), in part because of the perhaps naive but seemingly earnest reasonableness of “GoldenSound” and the heavy-handed backslap from MQA.
STRATA-GEE: For some time now, I have been hearing rumbles throughout the audio community, particularly the high-end audio community, about controversy surrounding MQA (Master Quality Authentication) – a U.K. company that claims to have created a proprietary technology that allows for the delivery of “better than lossless” audio via certain streaming services. At first, it seemed like the Holy Grail of audio – delivering music that is identical to the original master recording into your earbuds via streaming services such as Tidal. Then the whispers started – “It sounds like it is too good to be true because it IS too good to be true.“
Recently, a YouTube video appeared that blew the doors of MQA dissent wide open and seems to show that MQA technology is NOT doing what the company claims and leaves many to conclude that MQA is little more than a thinly veiled marketing scam. The company pushed back…hard. I asked Bill Leebens to investigate the swirling whirlwind of controversy now engulfing MQA.
