Lenbrooke acquires MQA

[Timcognito]

I will say I was an MQA hater because they tried like Sony to lock up a market with a single standard technology they controlled. The bigeest objection by most seemed to be against claims of superior sound and clarity. That said I was intrigued by the folding scheme stacking parts of the digital signal in unused portions of the bit and word portions of the file but that never seemed to get much attention as "storage was cheap and available". Maybe for small sized devices say watches that could be valuable. Sorry if I described wrong, I'm an ME (my usual excuse)

 

[SKBubba]

I hope they start an MQA streaming service. That would quarantine MQA and protect the general population from it.

 

[TonyJZX]

i think the difference is Sony's past technologies were at least superior to the accepted standard.

 

[Timcognito]

i think the difference is Sony's past technologies were at least superior to the accepted standard.

Respectfully, then why were they not successful? TV Trinitron was accepted.

 

[pablolie]

i think the difference is Sony's past technologies were at least superior to the accepted standard.

I however remember their disastrous "innovation" in CD copyright protection... :-D

Any company loves to be "de facto" standard for obvious reasons... But MQA was basically an intellectual property game. They tried to make it with licensing (which clearly wasn't commercially viable even though it was quite visible), so my assumption is a company like Lenbrook bought it for patents, and perhaps they'll make money out of patent/copyright infringements (as Apple often does) to stifle competition. It's a simply cost/benefit analysis if you can buy something at a bargain price.

 

[TonyJZX]

surely you guys know all the parables about VHS vs Beta and SACD etc.?

just because a new standard is technically superior doesnt mean it will gain market acceptance

 

[Timcognito]

It's a simply cost/benefit analysis if you can buy something at a bargain price.

There has to be a there, there and nobody can say what it is. What did they have of value other than access to content masters?

 

[Timcognito]

just because a new standard is technically superior doesnt mean it will gain market acceptance

So you are saying that MQA may be a superior technology like Sony had.

 

[pablolie]

surely you guys know all the parables about VHS vs Beta and SACD etc.?

just because a new standard is technically superior doesnt mean it will gain market acceptance

But was MQA superior in any way? To me from the very start it seemed a flawed premise, kinda like "we're better than MP3 but nearly as good as FLAC while saving you 5% in bandwidth" or something around those lines (I never researched the actual measured BW savings), which in an era of an average of 80Mbps to the home seems a silly value proposition. Kind of like those 2c savings on gas coupons they try to pitch.

 

[Timcognito]

which in an era of an average of 80Mbps to the home seems a silly value proposition

But maybe not for a wrist watch or IEM with onboard giant music collection.

 

[Timcognito]

I worked in very early stage start-ups, saw this done a few times and as @pablolie suggests sometimes patents are obtained for cross-licensing purposes. That is say Lenbrook has problem with a Sonos patent and Sonos has problem with a MQA patent by aquiring MQA they have something to trade.

 

[pablolie]

But maybe not for a wrist watch or IEM with onboard giant music collection.

I don't have a single 16/44 FLAC album that is much over 900kbps. I think BT is around 1 or 2Mbps depending on the version. As I just checked, MQA averages around 1.2Mbps. So can't really make sense of it, but that is Lenbrooke's job now. :-D

 

[Zensō]

There has to be a there, there and nobody can say what it is. What did they have of value other than access to content masters?

MQA never owned any masters. Regardless of the delivery format, those remain the sole property of the labels.

 

[Timcognito]

MQA never owned any masters. Regardless of the delivery format, those remain the sole property of the labels.

But owning and having a license to is not the same. A license may have some value but that said I brought it up because that is the only value I saw. Maybe Lenbrook is starting a streaming service of master quality titles for example.

 

[Zensō]

But owning and having a license to is not the same. A license may have some value but that said I brought it up because that is the only value I saw. Maybe Lenbrook is starting a streaming service of master quality titles for example.

My point is that whatever Lenbrook does with MQA music distribution will require buy-in/permission from the labels, just as it did the first time around with Bob & Co. Think of a distributor like Distrokid who does MQA conversions; they have no more rights to the masters than anyone, they're just providing a conversion and delivery service. MQA under Lenbrook would be no different. All that said, I believe they bought MQA to use in their hardware. I suspect Lenbrook has enough customers who are still interested in MQA to continue offering it in their hardware products as a differentiator: "MQA, exclusively on Bluesound!" (ick).

All wild guesses of course...

 

[kemmler3D]

Respectfully, then why were they not successful?

The success of a new format / standard often depends more on business partnerships, equipment costs, authoring costs, licensing, distribution agreements, and even politics as much as it does technical superiority. Betamax didn't pan out for various reasons, even though it was superior.

 

[Timcognito]

Betamax didn't pan out for various reasons, even though it was superior.

In all of those cases the lack of a shared standard was there their downfall. Even Tesla shares their batteries. Apple has on far fewer apps than its competitors. It took the EU to make them change the charging port on the iPhone.

 

[amirm]

Companies hate to license technology from their competitors. So this acquisition will make things harder for MQA, not easier. They could compensate by marketing it better at audio shows and such but it will be nah uphill battle (which was already so).

 

[Timcognito]

Companies hate to license technology from their competitors. So this acquisition will make things harder for MQA, not easier. They could compensate by marketing it better at audio shows and such but it will be nah uphill battle (which was already so).

Agree. Got any theory Amir? What could they want from a failed technology?

 

[kemmler3D]

My point is that whatever Lenbrook does with MQA music distribution will require buy-in/permission from the labels, just as it did the first time around with Bob & Co. Think of a distributor like Distrokid who does MQA conversions; they have no more rights to the masters than anyone, they're just providing a conversion and delivery service. MQA under Lenbrook would be no different. All that said, I believe they bought MQA to use in their hardware. I suspect Lenbrook has enough customers who are still interested in MQA to continue offering it in their hardware products as a differentiator: "MQA, exclusively on Bluesound!" (ick).

All wild guesses of course...

This seems like a reasonable idea.

What could they want from a failed technology?

There is a built-in audience of people out there with MQA libraries. If Lenbrook becomes the only vendor with MQA-decoding hardware going forward, then the people with lots of investment in MQA are more likely to buy their stuff.

Depending on how many MQA recordings were sold and how much they paid for MQA, it could be a fairly no-brainer business move. Classic vendor lock-in, basically. If you have the MQA but none of the debt, it might be possible to actually turn a small but reasonable profit on those customers for several years to come.