MQA Confirms It's Working With Bluesound, Promises Other Partner News This Year

MQA Ltd. confirmed it's working with Bluesound to incorporate MQA decoding into the Lenbrook brand’s product road map. Bluesound disclosed at a press event in New York Tuesday (see 1508250067) that it will have MQA decoding in its latest series of multiroom hi-res audio products, and it will likely be this year. The six products comprising Bluesound Gen 2 are due to ship next month, but MQA can be added in a firmware upgrade, said Greg Stidsen, director-technology and product planning, Lenbrook America. “MQA continues to work with many hardware and service partners to ensure MQA will be widely available for music fans,” the company said by email. “There will be additional partner announcements coming this year and we continue to target 2015 for MQA content to be available," it said. MQA, developed by Meridian co-founder Bob Stuart, was promised for early 2015 but hasn't been released. The company didn’t comment on the reason for the delay. According to the MQA website, the MQA encoding process involves going back to the original master recording to capture “the missing timing detail.” The codec uses advanced digital processing to deliver music in a form that’s “small enough to download or stream,” said the company, calling it “better-than-high-resolution music” that can be streamed to any device. Comparing MQA with MP3, the company said MP3 delivers a tenth of what was recorded in the studio in order to fit into a compressed file. MQA also delivers the missing 90 percent, it said, “without any loss of convenience.” MQA-encoded content can be streamed or downloaded in any lossless format, said MQA. Supporters of MQA listed on the website include Arcam, Meridian, Onkyo, Onkyo Music, Roon, Tidal and 2L.