EXOGAL Audio announced today that they are ceasing development of MQA for inclusion in EXOGAL products.
June 22, 2018. Said Jeff Haagenstad, CEO of EXOGAL: "We have been evaluating MQA technology and watching the wider MQA ecosystem since early 2016. After much research on the fundamental technology and more importantly on the market demand for MQA, we have reached the decision to cease the pursuit of adding MQA to our products for several reasons:
- Our products by themselves exceed the performance of our products with the inclusion of MQA,
- Regardless of the breathless hype by the audio press, actual consumer demand is just not there.
- Regardless of the announced support from record labels, a suitable base of playable content is not widely available.
- As for the technical details of our evaluation of the technology vis á vis our own technology, we prefer not to violate our NDA’s with MQA and Meridian.
- Much like Wadia's technology before us, EXOGAL technology is already oriented in the time domain and does not suffer from the time-smearing effect which MQA is supposed to eliminate.
Suffice it to say we were never able to achieve the advertised level of performance using the MQA technology and thus it does not meet our standards for inclusion in our products. Many experts outside of our company have articulately made the case against MQA and we see no reason to elaborate or comment on those findings."
“We will continue to watch the market evolve but for now, we are out of the MQA game.”
