Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion MQA - Related technology, products and music Re: MQA status?

MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) has announced it is to launch major new partnerships at CES 2016, including agreements with music download store 2L and playback partners Bluesound and AURALiC, plus they will reveal a smartphone first from HTC.
CES Unveiled, later today on January 4th, and the MQA Suite within the Venetian are the places to experience a world first: the MQA demonstration on the HTC One A9. HTC has equipped its latest smartphone with MQA technology in a ‘proof of concept’ exclusive for CES.

www.2L.no/shop claims the honour of first label to offer fans the chance to buy their music in MQA. Founded by Morten Lindberg – a highly respected figure in the world of digital music recording and a GRAMMY multi-nominee, including three selections in the 2016 list – the Scandinavian music label is revered for its pristine-quality recordings. Morten commented on MQA and said: “Meeting Bob Stuart and discovering MQA has been a total revelation. I have spent many hours with Bob listening to original recordings and being constantly amazed by the incredible sense of space and clarity brought by MQA. The end-to-end process allows us to more accurately capture the original sound and to deliver it perfectly all the way through to music lovers.”

The library of MQA music is set to expand further during 2016 with 7digital, Onkyo Music, HQM (Japan) and Jay Z-led TIDAL all aiming to bring MQA music to the masses.

CES 2016 will also see the announcement of new playback partners including AURALiC, Bluesound and Aurender. The Bluesound range of MQA-compatible products will compromise the Node 2, Powervault 2, Pulse 2, Pulse Flex, Pulse Mini, Vault 2, and all legacy Bluesound components. MQA demonstrations will take place in Bluesound’s CES Venetian suite 34-204. AURALiC and Aurender will also be demonstrating new MQA-enabled products. MQA will be available on all three of AURALiC’s streamer models: ARIES, ARIES LE and ARIES MINI, with MQA demonstrations taking place in AURALiC’s suite within the Venetian (29-122).

MQA support grows further with Berkeley Audio, dCS, Kripton and Ixion joining the official MQA supplier list. All of these brands are actively planning MQA-enabled product lines, adding to previously announced MQA-ready product announcements from Meridian Audio, Mytek, Onkyo, and Pioneer.

Commenting on these announcements Bob Stuart, MQA creator, said: “It’s truly gratifying to see such widespread levels of industry support for MQA. We are especially delighted to partner with 2L, MQA’s debut content retailer, and we look forward to welcoming aboard many more partners during 2016. We are also honoured to work with HTC at CES 2016, enabling the opportunity for the show visitors to hear MQA on today’s portable music device of choice, the smartphone.

I’m a product manufacturer, do I need to buy a specific chip from a specific supplier to decode MQA?

Not necessarily. The engineers at MQA have been porting the technology in-house to a variety of popular platforms, a list of which can be found here. In these cases, the chips you buy will not come with MQA firmware from your supplier. Instead you will receive object code for the MQA technology directly from MQA. Moving forward, you will also be able to buy solutions from licensed implementation suppliers. These will be shipped to you with MQA firmware. When it comes to selecting a specific chip from a supplier, or finding out whether your chosen platform can run MQA, then we suggest you contact us to see whether the technology can run on a given platform. Whilst the chip you have selected may be capable of running the MQA technology, it is also a case of ensuring it will run alongside everything else you are asking the chip to do.

So, unlike my previous posts (based on hearing nothing about encryption), it now appears that protection of the decoded digital is of paramount importance.