This just in:
MQA’s main financial backer is seeking an exit. In order to be in the best position to pursue market opportunities and expedite this process, the company has undergone a restructuring initiative, which includes entering into administration and is comparable to Chapter 11 in the US.
Let’s keep on topic here, which is MQA possible financial troubles.
And not is MQA good, bad, evil etc.
That’s a surefire recipe to getting the thread closed!
Thank you.
If MQA goes bankrupt where does that leave Tidal? As they have invested into MQA. From what I have been gathering Tidal isn’t doing that great financially themselves either.
AirPlay isn’t a codec, and it isn’t just wireless.
AirPlay 2 is only lossy via Apple Music I believe other services are still lossless up to 44.1.
Is this the thing where only Apple device can transmit it and it’s all closed and proprietary 
(So unlike modern Apple)
It was and the original name for SCL6 was MQAir but they recently changed it. Looks like they’re going to strip themselves from MQA and focus on this new bluetooth compression.
I thought I had read that a few weeks ago.
It’s already a fairly crowded market with AptX owned by Qualcomm (If I remember that correctly) and Sony having contributed LDAC to the Linux kernel and SBD and AAC already being in almost everything.
It is hard to see a large market for it, but competition is good (if there really is any with Apple and Qualcomm owning so much of the market between them)
Tidal can probably just flip a switch and disable MQA.
No they just seem to have limited Apple Music to aac over AirPlay for some reason if it’s streaming from them but apparently it’s lossless 44.1 for downloaded content on the device an odd choice but that’s how it is. All other apps will send lossless.
Just proofs that the whole MQA master studio stuff was a scam to begin with.
Just a shame since we have all these new DAC chips now like the AKM4499EX and ESS3039pro that wasted resources to support mqa.
Sometimes they are a planned pre-pack Administration. Not in this case. The press release is the ultimate in spin. “Everything is great except we’re bust.” Last year they were given until end of March 2023 to get their act together, clearly nothing has changed, so no more money. Enormous losses (£40m), almost trivial revenues (£600k) and IP that has long been viewed as a DRM scam.
Plenty of companies saw MQA as a scam and did not implement it, like Devialet and Linn. I’ve been hifi streaming for ages and never bothered with MQA or ever had MQA capability. I only ever saw it as a DRM scam.
Not a fan, but we will see. Crazy deals have happened before in history
It seems like the writing is on the wall for MQA certainly if they don’t find a buyer/investors, but even if they do, how can their business model be sustainable? I don’t think it ever was.
As we expected, folks are patently incapable of discussing MQA based on the factual information provided rather than interjecting biased, highly opinionated rants. The thread is now locked, if you guys need to spew toxicity and opinion as fact, take your discussion elsewhere.
Spotted this , today …
@Mike_O_Neill - moved your post into the existing (closed) thread…
unclear about what this all means…