MQA Declares Bankruptcy

IMO MQA always sounded inferior.  I did a A/B in my listening room Qobuz vs Tidal and FLAC via Qobuz almost always sounded better.  This was playing on a good and very revealing system not a boom box.  

The best thing that could happen for music consumers that care about quality is for MQA to sunset.  Then development and investments can be made to further the other formats or new alternatives.  If MQA goes away I won't miss it.

@dinov 

Aren’t all the HiRez services flac down loads to save bandwidth??

@curiousjim

No, until now FLAC wasn’t the center of their hi-rez tier, MQA was. That was MQAs thing with the “unfolds” to save bandwidth. I’m sure somebody else could elaborate on the technical specifics but that’s how I understand it. Check out the Sound and Vision Article

It's a compression schema that has no future relevance, so not surprised. Hi-Res digital audio has now gone beyond the need for the specific capability. As others have said, it was never accepted as a viable choice by many, and called a scam by others. In any case there are better solutions out there now. Sorry for the haters, but Hi-Res audio is the next step in quality beyond the CD, and we will continue to see technology evolve and get better. 

Not sure how in tune some of you guys are w/ the economic situation going on right now.

Someone mentioned that their investor's funds dried up.

This kind of sounds, to me, like MQA got caught up in the liquidity crisis.

I'm certainly not an economist, but I actually began informally studying economics about the time the pandemic started to unfold because I am a small business owner.

Would love to hear if anyone else smells something similar ...