The most talked about audio advancement in years is about to be available with Meridian Audio’s MQA firmware update on February 4th. Owners of Meridian’s Explorer2 DAC, Prime headphone amplifier, 808 v6 Reference CD player, 818v3 Reference Audio Core, Special Edition loudspeakers and 40th Anniversary systems will be able to upgrade their products and hear the full benefits that MQA-encoded files can deliver.
Free firmware updates for the above Meridian Audio products will be available for download from the support page at www.meridian-audio.com on February 4. Owners of the 800 Reference Series products and SE loudspeakers can contact AHT to learn what they need to do to update their speakers with MQA technology.
Although Meridian Audio speaker owners will be the first to experience the MQA technology, there is a significant number of partners who are in various stages of planning or implementing the technology as well. These include music labels, music retailers, and manufacturers of mobile devices and hardware. While Meridian is the first to make a shipping announcement, other companies will no doubt follow when they are ready.
Commenting on the announcement, Ken Forsythe, VP of MAI, said, “The commercial availability of MQA heralds an exciting time for Meridian and our customers. We are proud to be the first to offer MQA playback at the highest level in a pure digital signal path straight from the studio to your home or pocket. Meridian has been a pioneer in the digital audio revolution for decades, and we are thrilled to add MQA as the next evolution to our reference level feature set—establishing a new benchmark in superior audio performance.”
Ryan Donaher, National Sales Manager at MAI stated that from, “the work that MQA has been undertaking with recording studios we know that many artists have been using the Explorer2 to sign off their master recordings, which makes the fact that this product is available to buy for under $300 in the US even more remarkable.”
Bob Stuart, creator of the MQA technology, had this to say when discussing the future and profitability of MQA, “The MQA enterprise is funded by very small royalties on the music, and quite low royalties on hardware. We’re talking about modest license fees for software and hardware. MQA is not about world domination; our goal is to improve the sound quality of distributed music.”
Contact AHT With Any Meridian Audio Questions