The Absolute Sound: The Most Significant Audio Technology Of My Lifetime

In The Press

The May/June 2016 edition of leading audiophile magazine The Absolute Sound includes an unprecedented 20 pages on MQA: including an editorial, a discussion of Editor Robert Harley's personal experience of the technology, an "at a glance" discussion of the system, an FAQ, an article querying how MQA can improve the sound of an original master (and concluding that indeed it can), and an MQA review.

MQA Review: Robert Harley

Harley's descriptions of his experiences of MQA are impressive. He starts off by noting that "It's not often that an audio technology comes along that has the potential to revolutionize the music industry as well as greatly improve sound quality for all listeners. But I believe that MQA may do just that." Listening to Keith Johnson's recording of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring he called it "the single most realistic reproduction of an orchestra I've heard in my life, from any format and on any playback system.".

And he didn't stop there. Commenting that "MQA doesn't tinker at the margins of digital audio with incremental improvements, but rather rethinks the entire encoding and decoding chain while maintaining compatibility with existing infrastructure and file formats", he concludes, "MQA is the most significant audio technology of my lifetime."

Read the complete set of articles for yourself here (1.9MB PDF)