When Canada’s Lenbrook Industries purchased select assets of MQA Limited in September 2023, audiophiles had lots of questions. One question was, Why? What interest could the owner of three major audio brands—Bluesound, NAD, and PSB—have in an audio format that had been embroiled in controversy for the whole of its existence? Critics of MQA (of which there were many) had even more pointed questions, such as, How is this thing not dead yet?
MQA sure looked dead at the time. The previous April, MQA Limited had been put into administration—a form of bankruptcy protection for troubled UK companies—by its shareholders. All employees had been terminated and assets like office furniture had been sold off.
Then, on September 23, Lenbrook announced that it had purchased the defunct company’s intellectual-property portfolio. Those IPs included not only Master Quality Authenticated technology, employed by Tidal to stream hi-rez audio, but a scalable audio-transmission codec called “SCL6.” Many observers considered SCL6 the jewel in MQA’s IP portfolio. Lenbrook subsequently formed MQA Labs, which is headquartered near Cambridge, UK, staffing it with former members of MQA Limited’s engineering team.
Chapter II
Now it looks like MQA is going to have a second life. Lenbrook has formed a new division, Lenbrook Media Group, which houses MQA Labs as well as BluOS, Lenbrook’s acclaimed multiroom music-management platform. Heading up LMG is Mike Jbara, formerly CEO of MQA Limited and previously a senior executive at Warner Music Group. Al Wood, who was the head of engineering at MQA Limited, is now the director of engineering at MQA Labs.
The coming year will be a busy one for Jbara’s group. They’ll be pitching MQA Labs technology to music creators, record labels, audio manufacturers, and other interested parties. And they’ll be launching a new music-streaming service.
This isn’t the streaming service that Lenbrook announced on June 13, 2024. The plan then had been to partner with the online music store HDtracks to offer a service that would stream music in both FLAC and MQA formats. The timing seemed providential. Tidal had already begun offering FLAC-encoded hi-rez music, and on July 24, it pulled the plug on MQA.
As soon as I heard about the venture, I asked for an interview with Jbara and HDtracks cofounder David Chesky. Lenbrook was receptive, but kept postponing the interview. A meeting finally took place on December 10, in which I sat down for an exclusive 90-minute interview with Jbara at Lenbrook’s head office in Pickering, Ontario, just east of Toronto. It was just Jbara and me—David Chesky wasn’t part of the meeting.
“Because of factors that were outside the control of either party, the partnership with HDtracks did not proceed,” Jbara told me. “We love those guys and we’re continuing to look for opportunities for things we can do together. Lenbrook is proceeding with launching a service.”
The new service will offer only MQA-encoded music, and will be supported by iOS and Android apps. “Lenbrook Media Group will be announcing the brand in the new year,” Jbara said. “It won’t be our name. It will be a new brand. We’re going to be putting it out for soft use in the new year. Munich is the coming-out party.”
I had lots of questions. Assuming the service officially launches in May at the High End show in Munich, where will it be available? How quickly will it expand? What will it cost? How much content will be available? It’s a safe bet that the service will be integrated into BluOS, but what about apps for other audio brands? Will the service be supported by Roon? And most pointedly, does anyone really want a service that specializes in MQA-encoded music? Jbara had answers to most of my questions, which I’ll get to later in this piece.
Jbara also wanted to talk about other things Lenbrook is doing with MQA. These initiatives include plugins for the digital audio workstation (DAW) applications used by music creators, software libraries for analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, and the deployment of SCL6 in Lenbrook’s forthcoming streaming service. LMG will be presenting these technologies at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January; at the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show in Anaheim, CA, in late January; and at ISE (Integrated Systems Europe) in Barcelona in early February.
A matter of time
Except for SCL6, which has now been rebranded “Airia by MQA Labs,” all of these initiatives seek to ameliorate the timing disturbances that accompany digital encoding and decoding—which has been MQA’s stated goal from its beginnings.
At the time of writing, the only new MQA initiative that had been officially announced was Qrono (pronounced “krono,” an allusion to the Greek word for quantitative time—chronos), MQA Labs’ brand name for its digital-playback technologies. The first of these are Qrono d2a and Qrono dsd. Qrono dsd performs DSD-to-PCM conversion in real time, and Qrono d2a processing optimizes the performance of the DAC chip in the host device.
The principles behind Qrono d2a are explained in a downloadable white paper that will be a breath of fresh air to those who have previously been alienated by MQA Limited’s opaque communications style.
The paper cites recent neuroscience research stating that humans can distinguish aural events separated by as little as seven microseconds. With recorded music, those closely separated details convey texture and spatial information. The anti-aliasing filters used in digital recording and the reconstruction filters used in playback inevitably cause ringing that can blur fine temporal detail, the paper says.
Qrono d2a deals with the playback portion. The process includes customized upsampling filters and noise shaping intended to optimize the DAC’s time-domain performance while preventing aliasing distortion. Most DAC chips use the same filters for all sampling frequencies, the white paper states, but Qrono d2a applies different filters for different sampling rates. The Qrono d2a process is tuned specifically for the DAC chip in each playback device.
The white paper summarizes the benefits thusly: “QRONO d2a playback of a CD-level audio master has the time response of a conventionally played 96kHz hi-res file. A 192kHz hi-res file played with QRONO d2a can exceed the time performance of the best analogue systems. The audible improvement, while subtle, is immediate. Removing the time smear reveals textures previously obscured. Micro dynamics are improved, and instruments are clearly delineated, enhancing the stereo soundstage and image.”
These benefits are similar to those claimed for MQA sources, but Qrono d2a does not require an MQA-encoded input file. “What’s exciting about Qrono is that it works on every audio source,” Jbara stated. “While it uses some of the same principles that gave birth to MQA, it’s not dependent on MQA. It makes everything better, including PCM, which obviously is going to be the most common source of audio feeding into Qrono.”
Some DACs let users choose among different digital filters. Following our interview, I emailed Jbara to ask if that option will be available with Qrono-enabled devices. It will not, he responded. “The Lenbrook team determined that QRONO dsd and QRONO d2a are such significant and fundamental improvements to our audio pipeline that they are now core components of the audio chain of each model that will receive the upgrade. These should not be seen as effects or options.”
Qrono can be implemented in software or firmware. In many cases, it will be possible to add Qrono d2a to existing products through a software update.
Especially for MQA licensees, implementation is very straightforward, Jbara said. “It’s a couple of days’ work for an existing partner. The software necessary for Qrono d2a resides on machines that have full MQA decoding and rendering. They may not have configured it to do what Qrono does. We work with licensees to make sure that they’re opting in to the filters, and making sure that the audio pathway travels properly through the device.”
In fact, Qrono dsd and Qrono d2a have already appeared in a commercial product: Bluesound’s new flagship streaming preamplifier, the Node Icon ($999 USD), which began shipping in late December. For people like me with DSD libraries, the inclusion of Qrono dsd in a product like this is an attractive feature. Until now, BluOS hasn’t supported real-time playback of DSD files. Instead, BluOS included a utility that performed batch conversion of DSD files before playback.
Jbara said he expects Qrono-equipped hardware to appear quickly. “If the number of meetings on this that we’re taking between now and the end of January is any indication, there are going to be a lot of new products. Almost every one of our current MQA licensees is interested in this.”
Demothballed
LMG has already begun showing the DAW plugins to potential clients, and will demonstrate them publicly at the NAMM Show later this month. These tools enable creators to apply processing to PCM files that control the behavior of the digital filters used in the recording, mixing, and mastering processes. They’ll be officially released in March.
Interestingly, a family of plugins was developed early in MQA’s history, but then was mothballed. “Back in 2015, MQA had implemented a bunch of studio plugins,” Jbara related. “These tools allowed engineers to make decisions about their mastering with the ability to hear the finished MQA file in real time. The problem was the major label supply chains didn’t want the MQA file created in the studio. They wanted to receive PCM masters and control the MQA encode.
“That had two outcomes,” he continued. “By having encoding in the hands of the labels, MQA Limited was able to put more content in the marketplace more quickly than expected. But this frustrated some members of the creator community who wanted the final word on how their records sounded. So, we decided to deconstruct the platform into its components and make it available upstream so that engineers and artists could apply as much or as little of the audio improvements themselves.”
Initially, there will be two products. Intended for recording, overdubs, and mixing, the MQA Labs Input plugin lets users adjust the impulse response of the A-to-D filter and add low-level noise (dither) that helps uncover fine detail. Applied as the last step on the DAW’s output bus after the master fader, and immediately before exporting the track as a WAV or FLAC file, the MQA Labs Output plugin also allows noise-shaping and impulse-response adjustments.
These plugins output standard PCM audio, not an MQA file. “The plugins create an interesting ecosystem because people will be essentially creating MQA-sounding PCM audio,” Jbara explained. “That’s going to be on every service. You’ll be able to go into Amazon and get something that’s not called an MQA master, but has the benefit of somebody using MQA in the studio.”
Digitizing
A more recent development is Foqus, MQA Labs’ brand for its forthcoming analog-to-digital technologies. Foqus processing could be used in digital recording to optimize the anti-aliasing filters of the A-to-D converter. “Foqus has a certain filter design that you would recognize from some of the ways that MQA works, and certainly the way that Qrono works,” Jbara noted. “It prevents the digital file from containing many of the errors that result from conventional analog-to-digital converters.”
Foqus also has applications in consumer audio, where it could be used with the A-to-D converters that enable components like preamps and integrated amps to digitize signals from their analog inputs. “For that we want chip partners,” Jbara added, “and we have a partner who’s launching and feels like it performs beyond any chip they’ve ever had. You’ll definitely be seeing announcements in the first quarter. You might even see products in the first quarter.”
Transmission
LMG’s other technology rollout in early 2025 will be Airia, as the SCL6 codec is now called. Airia can be used to send CD-resolution and hi-rez music over public data networks, as well as through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and UWB (ultra-wideband) connections. It’s an encode-decode technology, so it must be supported by both the transmitting and receiving devices.
Airia dynamically adjusts data rate to deliver the best possible sound quality without rebuffering. Over a robust, high-bandwidth connection, Airia can send full lossless hi-rez audio. With a poorer connection, Airia can scale back to data rates as low as 200kbps and apply lossy compression.
“Airia will provide the most transparent codec at all data rates,” Jbara stated; “perfect sound when the connection allows and lossless-sounding audio even at very lossy data rates. A streaming service could stream at a lower data rate and deliver a better-sounding audio experience, thus reducing cost while upgrading quality. Because of its versatility, Airia is the only codec that would be required within a service’s infrastructure. It can be used both for lossless and lossy playback.”
The applications go beyond streaming. Airia could be used with active speaker systems to send hi-rez PCM from the primary to the secondary speaker. It could be used to send audio from a mobile device to wireless headphones. It could be used by a multiroom music system to transmit audio to different zones via Wi-Fi.
Airia is very close to commercial implementation, Jbara told me. “The codec is done. We haven’t put a date on when it gets rolled out for speaker-to-speaker communications. Where you’ll see this first will be our streaming service and then a couple of third-party deployments, including some wireless-microphone applications, and mobile-phone applications for audio playback through earphones or speakers.”
Streaming
As mentioned, Lenbrook Media Group will begin a soft launch of its streaming service in January, with full rollout scheduled for May. LMG will also roll out Android and iOS apps for the service.
One reason LMG can bring the service to market so quickly is that it’s contracted out content management, data storage, and streaming services to a third-party service provider. “We explored doing a full build-out ourselves,” Jbara said. “But with a third party, all the ingest pipelines, all the infrastructure, all the operations are in place. This allowed us to focus on what we do really well, which is audio quality. I was very up front with the partner, saying, ‘We’re going to ask you to do a bit of surgery and introduce our technology right in the belly of your operation.’ They didn’t just embrace it; they implemented it in a really brilliant way.”
But do we really need another hi-rez streaming service? I’m happy with Qobuz. Other users are happy with Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, and Tidal, all of which offer FLAC-encoded hi-rez music. Why would I switch? Why would anyone?
“There are a lot of MQA fans out there that are hungry for content,” Jbara responded. “What you’ll see from the service is particularly appealing to somebody who likes what MQA was attempting to do with audio. It’s different than Qobuz, because it’s going to be using technology that Qobuz doesn’t have today.”
Jbara wasn’t just referring to sound quality, but also to data efficiency, user experience, and cost. That’s a big reason why Lenbrook opted not to offer both FLAC and MQA content. “If we were going to replicate the industry’s catalog in both MQA and PCM, that was going to be a lot more expensive for us, and we’d have to pass that cost along,” Jbara explained.
That leads to my other questions about the service, and Jbara’s answers:
GB: How will the variety and amount of content compare to the established services?
MJ: We’re not going to wait until we have the 50 million or 100 million tracks people think we need to have, because we see this as serving a customer who’s looking for a really great audio experience. There are certain labels that are moving quickly because they see this as a showcase for their content.
GB: How much will the service cost?
MJ: We’ll let you know as it’s finalized, but it’s going to be really competitive for a premium audio service.
GB: Where will the service be available at launch?
MJ: Given that we are in licensing discussions, we don’t really dictate that. But it’s going to be in some of the most important markets.
GB: What languages will the service support?
MJ: As a company, we are confident about this issue because of our experience with BluOS. We’re in 25 languages today in BluOS.
GB: Will the iOS app support CarPlay, and will the Android app support Android Auto?
MJ: It’s on the road map, but probably not for day one.
GB: What about desktop apps?
MJ: Stay tuned, because we’re going to have some fun with the web experience.
GB: So on the desktop, the service will work from a browser?
MJ: I should just leave it as a desktop experience, okay? It’s a great place to deliver a slightly more metadata-driven, editorial, immersive experience. If you were to see a custom editorial voice from our service, it’ll show up more on the desktop than anywhere else.
GB: Will your service be supported by Roon?
MJ: We love those guys. They’ve always worked closely with us. I can’t announce anything for either of us at this point, but there’s always been a great level of collaboration between the companies.
GB: Do you view Roon support as important?
MJ: Yes. They’re awesome partners and they give great feedback. So no matter what we’re doing, we would always throw it past those guys.
GB: I assume the new service will be part of BluOS from day one.
MJ: Good assumption.
GB: What about other brands who have their own companion apps? Any idea of how many other hardware partners you’ll be announcing at Munich?
MJ: I can’t give you a number, but it’s going to be a very good reach relative to the licensee base we’ve got today.
GB: Is there an endpoint strategy like Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect?
MJ: Yes.
GB: Day one?
MJ: Likely.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Lenbrook’s new streaming service takes shape. At the beginning of this piece, I mentioned the hostile reception MQA received in its original incarnation. I was never a hater, but never a fanboy either. Instead, my approach to MQA was practical. I subscribed to Tidal in 2015 because it was the only way to stream hi-rez music; and I enjoyed using it.
Before Qobuz arrived in North America in 2019, I compared the two services for a feature on Simplifi. I found Qobuz’s FLAC streams a little more incisive, Tidal’s MQA streams a little more rounded and organic. But the differences were small. I ended up using Qobuz because I preferred its apps and the variety of music available on the service. I’ll take the same practical approach to Lenbrook’s new service when it launches.
A second life
We can draw three conclusions from the foregoing. First, MQA clearly isn’t dead yet. Second, Lenbrook acquired a lot of interesting IP when it made that 2023 deal with the administrator overseeing the disposition of MQA’s assets. And third, Lenbrook is taking MQA’s technology in some fascinating new directions.
“By bringing MQA’s technology and engineering team into this company, a lot of things got unblocked,” Jbara said. “It was liberating. The moment you put yourself inside a company that’s a going commercial concern, that thinks about what consumers are doing right now, that accelerates things. It clarifies things. It reprioritizes things.”
. . . Gordon Brockhouse