John Darko
In March of 2023, MQA went into administration. Six months later it found a new owner in the Lenbrook Group, who also oversees NAD, PSB and Bluesound. The MQA acquisition made Lenbrook the new owner of the SCL6 Bluetooth codec (formerly known as MQAir), MQA’s end-to-end encapsulation system, its hardware licencing programme and – importantly for today’s news – its software development team.
After nine months of silence, the Lenbrook Group wants to introduce us to offshoot the Lenbrook Media Group (LMG) who in turn would like us to say hello to MQA Labs and its suite of new software products:
- AIRIA is the new name for SCL6, which “delivers high-resolution audio while seamlessly scaling from full lossless to very lossy rates”
- FOQUS (yes, with a Q) “represents an innovative approach for [sic] analogue to digital conversion”
- QRONO (again, with a Q) “brings a variety of audio processing enhancements within playback devices”
1-2-3.
Those quotes are from LMG’s press release. Furthermore, Gordon Simmonds, CEO of The Lenbrook Group, is quoted as saying “While the choice and accessibility of MQA content remains a priority for us, this was never about a single codec.” — MQA Labs will oversee the development and implementation of four codecs!
We already know that ARIA (fka SCL6) will debut in PSB’s forthcoming wireless headphones that use ultrawideband to circumvent Bluetooth’s audio bandwidth restrictions. Bluetooth Audio still cannot accommodate hi-res streams without throwing away data and, as we saw recently, lossless CD-quality audio is only intermittently delivered by Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless codec.
Details on FOQUS and QRONO remain skinny but it looks like FOQUS will take aim at reducing the ‘time smear’ generated by encoding an analogue signal to digital (with an ADC) and QRONO the ‘time smear’ introduced by the decoding process (DAC).
Time smear? From LMG’s supplemental FAQ:
“Time smear is a form of distortion that is the result of representing sound waves as 1s and 0s – think of it as translation from one language to another. Inaccurate translations can sound awkward to a native speaker just as digital audio can sound unnatural if the conversion contains inaccuracies. Time smear is a particular inaccuracy in which sound impulses are not fully aligned, meaning that if you analyze wave graphs from digital audio there is often noise surrounding sound impulses, indicating for example, that sound is being produced even before a sound actually happens in the music. Contrast this with the natural world, where a cymbal clap happens when it happens and does not start a few microseconds before. Therefore, time smear results in unnatural sounding audio, which often manifests in muddiness or a lack of clarity in the sound.”
Is this not the same conceptual language that Bob Stuart used to introduce MQA in Munich back in 2015?
Even if it is, I draw to your attention these two crucial pieces of intel, again pulled from LMG’s supplemental FAQ:
- “AIRIA, FOQUS, and QRONO are independent of the original MQA codec, meaning that they neither require nor result in MQA encoded files”
- “the MQA codec will continue as a product family within the MQA Labs portfolio”
According to LMG, these new technologies are expected to debut “in a variety of licensee products” sometime in 2025.
Crucially, whatever those licensee products turn out to be, nothing from this week’s announcement by LMG disabuses me of my crazy theory about why Lenbrook acquired MQA.
Further information: MQA Labs
