MQA Ltd, the UK company that recently filed for bankruptcy and restructuring , has found a new owner in Canada’s Lenbrook, the parent company of Bluesound, NAD and PSB Speakers.
Financial details have not been disclosed, but Lenbrook says it will purchase all of MQA’s assets, including two of the company’s key intellectual properties, the MQA and SCL-6 audio codecs.
“We view this acquisition as an opportunity to ensure that the technologies developed by MQA’s scientists and engineers continue to serve the interests of the industry and are not limited to any one brand or company,” Gordon Simmonds, Lenbrook’s CEO, said in a press release.
Some consider MQA to have many of the benefits of high-resolution audio codecs like FLAC, but with smaller file sizes, improved audio quality, and some additional features, such as the ability to visually confirm that the song you’re listening to is the version its creator intended so you can hear. However, unlike FLAC, which is open source and royalty-free, MQA is proprietary, and any organization (from streaming services to record labels to audio equipment manufacturers) that wants to use MQA must pay a license fee.