MQA Declares Bankruptcy

@OP and Tuenefuldude - regarding MQA's financial situation...

MQA is essentially a software company whose success is dependent on licencing its technology to third parties, whether they be streaming services or hardware manufacturers.

MQA has had significant ongoing costs in software development, and remuneration of its staff, incuding its executive directors.

The key difficulty for MQA is that demand for high resolution streaming is in itself a niche and MQA faces a fundamental strategic difficulty in promoting a product whose attractiveness is essentially premised on the need to conserve bandwidth.

As such, the technology is being eclipsed by the easy availability of fast broadband connections and with 5g mobile telecommunications.

MQA's difficulties, I believe, are less to do with the general economic situation than with the fact that it's technology is becoming obsolete.

@yoyoyaya Sounds like you are correct.

Would be interesting to hear people's thoughts around here, on how our current economic situation has and is affecting companies involved in providing both the equipment and the (streaming) services that are so intimately tied to our hobby.

The MQA lossy standard reeked with control motivation from the very beginning. While they amped up some selective recordings pleasing some, on the whole it was considered a product for control more than improvement in sound. 

Good riddance. This should help Qobuz which is also good news. 

@tunefuldude. I think one way in which tighter economic circumstances would have impacted on MQA relates to the fact that hardware manufacturers are less likely to be buying licences for a technology that appears to be losing traction.

What’s the point of Hi-res anyway, when most music is compressed to less than 10dB of dynamic range anyway!! It’s appalling how even vintage recordings are treated. And as for new music.... much of it that I like very much, is crushed and clipped and compressed so that little breath remains between the peaks. Just import the audio into any waveform editor and what you’ll see does NOT look like real music.  I never found MQA to sound any better, only mildly different.