MQA Acquired By Lenbrook Of Canada
All Image Credit: Lenbrook
MQA, a British audio technology company founded by Bob Stuart, has been mired in financial problems since one of its major investors exited the company, declaring bankruptcy in April of 2023. Now, Canada-based and privately owned Lenbrook, the parent company of Bluesound (the maker of the BluOS music operating software), NAD, PSB Speakers and DALI has just announced (September 19 at 8am EDT) that they have completed the purchase of MQA giving the company and its CODECS a potential new lease on life. Lenbrook have now acquired all MQA assets, including the company’s two key pieces of intellectual property; the MQA and SCL-6 (MQair) audio codecs.
According to Gordon Simmonds, Chief Executive Officer of Lenbrook; “Lenbrook’s vision is of a thriving hi-fi industry where technologies that promote both consumer choice and the pursuit of the highest sound quality are deserving of investment and nurture”, and “We view this acquisition as an opportunity to ensure the technologies developed by the scientists and engineers at MQA continue to serve the industry’s interests rather than be confined to any single brand or company.”
Several professional recording engineers consider the MQA CODEC to offer many of the benefits of lossless, hi-res audio codecs like FLAC, but with smaller file sizes, improved audio quality and the ability to trace the version of the song from studio to replay. Unfortunately, unlike FLAC which is open-source and royalty-free, MQA is proprietary and any persons wanting to use it from studios, record labels and equipment manufacturers to streaming companies, must pay a licensing fee.
My question is why did Lenbrook buy MQA? Are they thinking of adding it as a feature to Bluesound, and/or with TIDAL removing all MQA content are they going to step up and create their own MQA streaming service to support their Bluesound infrastructure?
It will be very interesting to see where Lenbrook take these MQA technologies and the associated 120+ licensees and several content partnerships and how they deploy them.
Editors Note: While I have to agree that for a given file size, bit rate and word size MQA certainly offers some audible advantages, my experience with it when file size and network bandwidth is not constrained showed absolutely no audible benefits when compared to LPCM, SACD and of course vinyl. Read the section entitled “Listening Observations” in my post “MQA Hi Res Audio – Streaming’s Holy Grail” for more details.
