To bring Hi-res Audio to the masses, you need a delivery system and at this moment in time, Tidal music streaming is the main proprietor of distributing MQA music files to its subscribers. MQA was developed and founded by Bob Stuart, who has had a hand in several notable efforts in world of digital audio, work that includes the development of the lossless compression technique behind Dolby TrueHD as well as co-founding British hi-fi company Meridian Audio, who you may be familiar with from their work with LG on their true wireless earphones and soundbars. It’s a solution to a very ‘now’ problem in this era of Hi-Res Audio as to how can you deliver top-quality lossless sound without using up data allowance or having to constantly buffer. The Authenticated part means you are listening to an official MQA recording. MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated, and it is an end-to-end streaming technology that can transfer high quality audio over a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi connection to a smartphone or audio device.

One of those creative solutions is MQA, and this explainer will go through how it works, where you can get it and ultimately what benefits it provides to you, the listener.

In recent years there’s been a move by music services to offer higher quality music, but the conundrum is how can they provide that quality to the end user without impacting on the overall listening experience?īluetooth streaming is limited in what it can do, and while Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless will look to raise the bar when it arrives it’s not here yet, so there have been some creative methods of getting high quality music from the source to the end device.

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