What Happened to MQA and Is It Dead? The Full Story (September 2026) Trusted Reviews

MQA is not completely dead, but it is a shell of what it once was. The company behind the format, MQA Ltd., entered administration in April 2023, was acquired by Canadian firm Lenbrook in September 2023, and lost its biggest streaming partner when Tidal replaced MQA with FLAC in July 2024.

So if you are wondering what happened to MQA, the short answer is this: the technology still exists, the patents are still owned, and some hardware still supports it. But the format that promised to revolutionize high-resolution streaming has been quietly sidelined by the industry it was meant to lead.

For those of us who follow classical music and high-fidelity audio, the MQA story matters because it was supposed to deliver studio-master quality over a standard streaming connection. Recordings of orchestral works, solo piano, and chamber music were supposed to sound exactly as the engineer intended. Instead, MQA became one of the most divisive technologies in modern audio history.

In this article, I will walk you through exactly what happened to MQA from its founding to its current state in 2026. I will cover the bankruptcy, the Lenbrook acquisition, why Tidal abandoned it, what SCL6 is, and what all of this means for audiophiles and classical music listeners who invested in MQA-certified equipment.

What Is MQA (Master Quality Authenticated)?

MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated, a proprietary audio codec and delivery system created by Bob Stuart, the co-founder of Meridian Audio. It launched commercially in 2014 with a bold promise: to deliver studio-quality, high-resolution audio through file sizes small enough to stream efficiently.

The technology worked in two parts. First, MQA used what it called “de-blur” processing, which claimed to correct time-domain errors introduced during analog-to-digital conversion. The theory was that standard digital audio suffers from time smearing, where tiny timing inaccuracies blur transients and rob music of clarity. MQA said its encoding fixed this at the mastering stage.

Second, MQA packaged high-resolution audio, up to 24-bit/352.8kHz or 24-bit/384kHz, into a file small enough to fit inside a standard FLAC container. The format used a process called “origami folding” to compress the high-frequency data into the least significant bits of a smaller file. When played back on MQA-certified hardware, the decoder would “unfold” the file to its full resolution.

For classical music, the pitch was especially appealing. The format promised to preserve the air around a violin, the attack of a piano hammer, and the reverberant tail of a concert hall, all at streaming bitrates. Major labels including Warner Music Group signed on, and the technology gained support from high-end audio manufacturers.

The catch was that MQA was never truly lossless. The folding process discarded audio data, and the final “unfold” was a reconstruction, not a full restoration. This distinction would become the center of a bitter controversy that ultimately contributed to the company’s downfall.

The Rise of MQA: From Meridian to Tidal Masters

MQA’s rise was remarkably fast by audio industry standards. Bob Stuart and his team at Meridian had deep credibility in the high-end audio world, and when MQA was presented as the next evolution of digital audio, the industry paid attention.

The turning point came in 2016, when Tidal launched its “Tidal Masters” tier, powered by MQA. This brought the format to mainstream streaming audiences. For the first time, subscribers could access high-resolution audio without buying downloads from specialty stores. The catalog grew quickly, with millions of tracks encoded in MQA.

Hardware support followed. Companies like AudioQuest, Cambridge Audio, Bluesound, NAD, and others built MQA decoders into their DACs, streamers, and integrated amplifiers. If you wanted the full MQA unfold, you needed MQA-certified hardware, and that created a closed ecosystem. Buy an MQA DAC, subscribe to Tidal, and you were in.

For several years, the model worked. Tidal marketed MQA heavily, audiophile publications gave it positive coverage, and the format seemed positioned to become the standard for high-resolution streaming. But underneath the marketing, engineers and audio scientists were raising questions that would eventually undermine the entire enterprise.

The MQA Controversy Explained

If you want to understand what happened to MQA, you have to understand the controversy that eroded its credibility long before the bankruptcy. The debate was not just about sound quality. It was about transparency, trust, and whether a proprietary format was being sold on claims it could not back up.

The core accusation from critics was simple: MQA marketed itself as delivering lossless, studio-master quality, but the underlying technology was lossy. The origami folding process threw away audio data. The “unfold” reconstructed an approximation of the original, not an exact copy. To many engineers, this was not a technical debate. It was a truth-in-advertising problem.

The controversy exploded in 2021 when a reviewer known as GoldenSound published a series of rigorous tests showing that MQA files did not match their original sources. By converting MQA files and comparing them bit-for-bit with the original masters, GoldenSound demonstrated that the format was altering the audio signal in measurable ways, and not always for the better.

GoldenSound’s tests showed that MQA could introduce artifacts, particularly in the high frequencies, and that the “authentication” process did not guarantee that what you heard matched the original master. The testing was thorough, transparent, and reproducible. MQA’s responses were seen by many as evasive.

The audio engineering community was equally skeptical. Legendary recording engineer George Massenberg publicly criticized MQA, questioning both its technical claims and its business model. Morten Lindberg, a Grammy-winning classical music engineer and producer from 2L Records, also raised concerns about how the format handled delicate acoustic recordings where every microsecond of timing matters.

For classical music specifically, the stakes were higher than for pop or rock. A symphony orchestra recorded in a natural acoustic depends on preserving spatial cues, reverberation tails, and the precise transient of each instrument. If MQA’s lossy processing altered these elements even slightly, it undermined the very thing classical listeners care about most.

The licensing model added fuel to the fire. DAC manufacturers had to pay licensing fees to include MQA decoding in their products. Those costs were passed to consumers in the form of higher prices. Critics argued that buyers were paying extra for a format that was, in their view, inferior to standard FLAC.

The term “snake oil” became closely associated with MQA in audiophile forums. On Reddit’s r/audiophile and Audio Science Review’s forums, users debated whether the format delivered any real benefit. Many concluded that good mastering mattered far more than whether a file was MQA-encoded, and that a well-mastered FLAC sounded at least as good as, if not better than, its MQA counterpart.

This erosion of trust was slow but relentless. By the time MQA Ltd. faced financial trouble, the audiophile community had largely turned against the format. The controversy did not cause the bankruptcy on its own, but it certainly removed any goodwill that might have saved the company.

Timeline: What Happened to MQA

Understanding what happened to MQA requires seeing the full arc from launch to near-extinction. Here is the year-by-year breakdown.

2014: MQA is officially launched by Bob Stuart and his team, spun off from Meridian Audio. The format debuts at CES with promises of delivering studio-master quality at streaming-friendly file sizes.

2015 to 2016: Major labels including Warner Music Group sign on. Tidal announces Tidal Masters, powered by MQA, bringing the format to mainstream streaming. Hardware manufacturers begin building MQA decoders into DACs and network streamers.

2017 to 2020: MQA expands its catalog and hardware ecosystem. The format gains coverage in audiophile publications. Tidal Masters becomes the de facto high-resolution streaming tier. Momentum appears strong.

2021: GoldenSound publishes detailed testing that exposes MQA’s lossy nature and contradicts its marketing claims. The audiophile community erupts in debate. MQA’s credibility takes a significant hit. Engineers like George Massenberg add their voices to the criticism.

April 2023: MQA Ltd. enters administration, the UK equivalent of bankruptcy. The company had been unable to secure sufficient funding to continue operations. Licensing revenue was declining, and the controversy had damaged the brand beyond repair.

September 2023: Canadian company Lenbrook, parent of NAD, PSB, and Bluesound, acquires the full assets of MQA Ltd. This includes both the MQA codec and the newer SCL6 technology. Lenbrook pledges continued support for existing licensees.

July 2024: Tidal officially drops MQA and Sony 360 Reality Audio from its platform, replacing them with standard high-resolution FLAC. Tidal’s HiRes FLAC tier now uses open, royalty-free compression. This removes MQA’s largest distribution channel.

2025 to 2026: MQA technology continues to exist under Lenbrook ownership. Some hardware still supports it. SCL6 is being developed for wireless audio applications. However, as a mainstream streaming format, MQA has effectively been replaced by FLAC.

Why Did Tidal Drop MQA?

Tidal’s decision to drop MQA in July 2024 was the final nail in the coffin for the format as a mainstream technology. The move made strategic sense on multiple levels, and it reflected broader shifts in the streaming industry.

The most obvious factor was cost. MQA required licensing fees. Every track encoded in MQA, every device with an MQA decoder, involved payments back to the format owner. FLAC, by contrast, is free and open-source. For a streaming service operating on thin margins, eliminating licensing costs is a straightforward financial decision.

FLAC is also universally supported. Every modern DAC, phone, computer, and streaming device can play FLAC files without any special hardware or software. MQA required certified decoders for full-resolution playback. By switching to FLAC, Tidal made high-resolution audio accessible to every subscriber, regardless of their equipment.

Consumer demand played a role too. The audiophile community had been asking for FLAC for years. The controversy around MQA had created a segment of users who actively avoided the format. Tidal’s own subscriber forums were filled with requests for a FLAC alternative. When Tidal finally delivered HiRes FLAC, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Tidal also dropped Sony 360 Reality Audio at the same time, another proprietary format that had failed to gain meaningful traction. The message was clear: Tidal was moving away from closed, proprietary audio technologies in favor of open standards that benefited both the company and its listeners.

For classical music listeners, the switch was largely positive. FLAC preserves the full resolution of the original recording without any lossy processing. A 24-bit/96kHz FLAC of a Beethoven symphony is exactly that, bit-for-bit. No folding, no unfolding, no approximation.

The Lenbrook Acquisition: What It Really Means

When Lenbrook acquired MQA’s assets in September 2023, the audio industry reacted with cautious optimism. Lenbrook is a respected Canadian company that owns NAD Electronics, PSB Speakers, and Bluesound. These are brands with strong reputations in the hi-fi world, and the acquisition gave MQA a stable home.

But Lenbrook’s interest was not primarily about saving MQA as a streaming format. The real prize was SCL6, a newer technology that MQA Ltd. had been developing. SCL6 was designed for wireless audio transmission, a completely different application from the original MQA codec. Lenbrook saw potential in using SCL6 across its product lines, particularly for wireless speakers and headphones.

Lenbrook did pledge continued support for existing MQA licensees. If you owned MQA-certified hardware, the company confirmed that your device would continue to work. The MQA encoder and decoder technology remains available for companies that want to license it. But new adoption has been minimal since the acquisition.

The acquisition also brought MQA’s patent portfolio under Lenbrook’s control. This gives Lenbrook intellectual property in the audio codec space, which could be valuable for future product development or even licensing deals. Whether MQA as a consumer-facing format ever resurfaces in a meaningful way is uncertain, but the technology and patents are not going anywhere.

For existing MQA equipment owners, the acquisition was reassuring news. Your hardware was not going to stop working overnight. But it also meant that MQA’s future was now in the hands of a hardware company focused on its own product ecosystem, not a format company trying to win over the entire streaming industry.

SCL6: The Technology Lenbrook Actually Wanted

SCL6 is the technology that Lenbrook was really after when it bought MQA. Unlike the original MQA codec, which was designed for streaming and file delivery, SCL6 is built for wireless audio transmission between devices. Think of it as a potential successor to Bluetooth for high-resolution audio.

The codec uses scalable, time-domain-optimized processing to deliver high-quality audio over wireless connections with low latency. SCL6 was designed to work with Ultra-wideband (UWB) radio technology, which offers far greater bandwidth than traditional Bluetooth. This could enable uncompressed or lightly compressed high-resolution audio to be transmitted wirelessly without the limitations that Bluetooth imposes.

Lenbrook has been integrating SCL6 into its product development roadmap. The company has mentioned CosmOS, its platform for connected audio products, as a natural home for SCL6 technology. PSB has indicated interest in SCL6 for future headphone products. The vision is wireless audio that does not compromise on quality the way Bluetooth does.

Whether SCL6 succeeds where MQA failed remains to be seen. The wireless audio space is crowded with competing technologies, including aptX Adaptive, LDAC, and LC3. But SCL6’s focus on time-domain accuracy and UWB gives it a technical angle that could differentiate it, assuming Lenbrook can convince other manufacturers to adopt it.

MQA vs FLAC: Where Things Stand Now

The MQA versus FLAC debate is effectively over, and FLAC won. But understanding why requires looking at the technical and practical differences between the two formats.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. It is open-source, royalty-free, and universally supported. When you play a FLAC file, you hear exactly what was encoded, bit for bit, with no data loss. A 24-bit/96kHz FLAC file contains the exact same audio data as the original master recording at that resolution. This is why FLAC has become the standard for high-resolution audio distribution.

MQA, as we have established, was lossy. The origami folding process discarded data, and the unfold was a reconstruction. MQA’s defenders argued that the discarded data was inaudible and that the time-domain corrections improved perceived sound quality. But the fundamental claim of losslessness was not supported by independent testing.

The practical implications are significant. With FLAC, you can verify that your file matches the original master using checksums and bit-comparison tools. With MQA, you cannot, because the format deliberately alters the signal. For classical music, where listeners often care deeply about hearing exactly what the engineer captured, this transparency matters.

FLAC files are larger than MQA files, which was one of MQA’s original selling points. But improvements in streaming infrastructure and storage have made larger files much less of a burden. Most broadband connections can handle 24-bit/96kHz FLAC without buffering, and storage costs have plummeted. The bandwidth advantage that made MQA attractive in 2014 is far less relevant in 2026.

Tidal’s HiRes FLAC tier, Qobuz, Apple Music Classical with ALAC, and Amazon Music HD all deliver high-resolution audio using open or standard codecs. The industry has moved on. MQA’s remaining presence is limited to legacy hardware and a shrinking catalog of previously encoded content.

For classical music listeners, the lesson is clear. If you want the best possible streaming quality, look for services that offer standard high-resolution FLAC or ALAC. These formats deliver exactly what was mastered, with no proprietary processing in between.

What MQA Equipment Owners Should Do Now

If you own MQA-certified hardware, you do not need to panic. Your equipment still works, and it will continue to work. MQA decoding is a hardware function that does not require ongoing support from the format owner. Your DAC, streamer, or amplifier will still decode MQA files for the foreseeable future.

That said, the practical reality is that you will encounter fewer MQA files going forward. Tidal has switched to FLAC, and no major streaming service is adding MQA support. The catalog of MQA-encoded content is static or shrinking. If you specifically subscribed to Tidal Masters for MQA content, that tier no longer exists.

The good news is that your MQA-certified hardware almost certainly plays FLAC as well. Every MQA DAC on the market also handles standard PCM formats, including FLAC. So your equipment is not obsolete. It simply means that the MQA-specific feature is becoming less relevant.

If you are buying new audio equipment in 2026, my recommendation is straightforward: do not make MQA support a purchasing priority. Look instead for hardware that handles high-resolution FLAC up to at least 24-bit/192kHz, supports standard streaming protocols like UPnP and AirPlay, and has robust Bluetooth codec support if you listen wirelessly.

For classical music specifically, pay attention to DACs that handle DSD as well as PCM. Some high-resolution classical recordings are distributed in DSD format, and having a DAC that supports both gives you maximum flexibility. Also consider whether your streamer supports Roon, which has become the preferred platform for many classical music collectors managing large libraries.

If you are choosing a streaming service, Qobuz currently offers the largest catalog of high-resolution classical music in FLAC format. Tidal HiRes FLAC is also strong. Apple Music Classical delivers lossless ALAC with an interface specifically designed for classical repertoire. None of these services use MQA, and none of them are worse off for it.

One thing to watch is whether any of your existing MQA-encoded downloads become difficult to play in the future. Local MQA files stored on your computer or NAS will continue to play through MQA-certified hardware. But if you relied on streaming for MQA content, that source is effectively gone. Consider downloading FLAC versions of any critical recordings you want to keep permanently.

FAQs

Conclusion

So, what happened to MQA? The format that promised to revolutionize high-resolution streaming went bankrupt, was acquired by Lenbrook, lost its biggest streaming partner, and has been effectively replaced by FLAC across the industry. The technology still exists, the patents are still owned, and your MQA hardware still works. But as a force shaping how we listen to music, MQA is done.

The story of MQA is a cautionary tale about what happens when marketing outpaces technical reality. The format made ambitious claims, charged licensing premiums, and asked consumers to invest in a closed ecosystem. When independent testing revealed that the claims did not hold up, trust collapsed. And when trust collapses in a niche, enthusiast-driven market, recovery is nearly impossible.

For classical music listeners and audiophiles, the takeaway is simple. Open, lossless formats like FLAC and ALAC deliver exactly what the engineer mastered, with no proprietary processing and no licensing fees. That is the standard now, and it is a better outcome for everyone who cares about hearing music as it was meant to be heard.

If you own MQA equipment, keep using it. If you are shopping for new gear, look for FLAC and DSD support instead. And if you want the best available streaming quality for classical music, services like Qobuz, Tidal HiRes FLAC, and Apple Music Classical will serve you far better than MQA ever did.