MQA - A True Revolution In Digital Audio Playback

Having written previously about the licensing and connection between MQA and Bluesound,we felt it was time to talk about MQA in more depth as it truly is a revolution in the reproduction of digital music.MQA stands for Master Quality Authentication and could potentially be the greatest innovation of the digital music era.And that is not said lightly.To recap,MQA is a technology that simultaneously improves sound quality whilst dramatically lowering the bit-rate.It's an encode-decode system meaning that for maximum fidelity the music must be encoded with MQA,and played back through a device with MQA decoding.MQA however,is backward compatible with all existing distribution channels and playback hardware.If you don't have an MQA decoder,you still get slightly better than CD sound.If you have a MQA DAC (like Bluesound),the file "unfolds" in the high resolution format.

It's not quite accurate to call MQA a "technology",because it's more than a set of hardware and software techniques.Rather,MQA  is a nearly ground-up rethinking of how to best deliver to the listener as close a facsimile as possible of the original music event.MQA starts with the analogue signal in the studio and ends with the analogue signal on playback.It ties together every element in that chain into essentially a single analogue to analogue system. 

A look at the brief history of Digital Audio and how that development path led us to the current situation.In the late 1970's the first digital recorders were commercially introduced and became the standard a decade later.These machines based on Pulse Code Modulation and operating at 44.1 Khz and 16 bit word length,became the standard for distributing digital audio to consumers.

This switch from purely analogue technology to digital had it's advantages but also some significant disadvantages.The penalty for the convenience and power of digital was paid at the interfaces between the analogue and the digital worlds.,specifically the analogue to digital converter used to make the recording and the digital to analogue converter used to convert the series of numbers back into an analogue signal.The two ends of the chain exacted a significant sonic penalty.In part because of the steep low-pass filters  used to make digital audio work.

Moving into the 2000's,the internet provided a cheap and easy way to provide digital audio.MQA is part of the answer to redressing digital's steps toward taking all the emotion out of the sound.It addresses the issue of the DAC's taking out the upper harmonics in the digital transfer thus providing a reproduction closer to the analogue original whilst providing a minimum download file size.Having heard MQA files and being very impressed,we await streaming services like Tidal to announce their licensing agreement with MQA.....Game on!The signing of Warner Music in June to MQA their catalogue  was a quantum leap and I would be surprised to not see other record labels not coming onboard.

P.S. NAD (sister company to Bluesound) has just announced that some of it's products will come with Bluesound and therefore MQA onboard and this is only the beginning....the game is getting hotter!