MQA Lossless from Meridian

Friday, 05 December 2014 12:40

MQA Lossless from Meridian

Written by Karl Erik Sylthe

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Yesterday Meridian audio launched their new audio format MQA Lossless. It can prove to be a milestone for parts of music distribution.

Meridian is a well reputable player in the audio industry. Robert (Bob) Stuart is a name with at least equal significance, not only as co-founder of Meridian, but also as the creator of lsound codec with influence.

At the beginning of this century, when DVD-Audio fought against SACD for what they believed would be the CD-kryptonite, was MLP an important piece of DVD-Audio. MLP stands for Meridian Lossless Packing - A lossless codec that was an important part of the technical basis for the disc format DVD-Audio. Later MLP also had a role in the format Dolby TrueHD.

Now Robert Stuart on the court, in what goes on December 4 was named MQA Lossless, where MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated. This is a codec in mischief point carries HD quality, up to 32 bit / 384kHz. This is then compressed and Encoded for a completely new method, which takes a similar decoding to be lossless. The file size should however be on par with common Redbook CD. MQA launched under a slogan we can recognize the Apple's launch of the iPod - Music will never be the same again .

One of the sort of clever properties with MQA is that one is not dependent on decoder to be played, only to achieve lossless HD quality. In the latter case, you are dependent decoding, which either require that HW has this, or possibly an app for iOS or else have MQA decoding. If the files are played without MQA decoding will be played with a quality that is claimed to be equivalent to CD quality.

One of the interesting areas of priority for MQA will be streaming. WIMP and TIDAL has already provided streaming with CD quality. And if MQA be adopted will not HD streaming require more compared to bandwidth. But it will of course be an extensive job in encoding.

It remains to be seen to what extent the market adopts MQA. But there is no doubt that the codec has a potential that may prove to be interesting for streaming providers.

See video interview with Robert Stuart Meridian.