The end of the MQA era: where QRONO, FOQUS and AIRIA landed

A brief, turbulent history worth remembering

It's easy to forget how loudly the MQA argument once echoed through the audiophile community. When Bob Stuart's team at Meridian first unveiled Master Quality Authenticated technology back in 2014, it arrived with a genuinely seductive pitch: a single file format that could carry a full-resolution studio master, fold it into a stream small enough for Tidal's bandwidth budget, and authenticate the provenance of the recording all the way from the studio to your ears. It was clever, it was controversial, and it generated more forum heat than almost any codec since the original MP3 wars.

Then, in April 2023, MQA Ltd entered administration. The reasons were multiple and well-aired: the licensing model that required hardware manufacturers to pay for MQA decoding irritated the industry, a vocal contingent of engineers publicly disputed the technical claims, and Tidal — the format's most visible champion — quietly began distancing itself. The whole edifice came down faster than most people expected.

What happened next was less widely reported. Canada's Lenbrook Group — the parent company behind NAD Electronics and Bluesound — acquired MQA's assets in September 2023. Lenbrook are, it's worth noting, not a passive IP holding company. They make products. They have engineers. They have shelf space in Australian retailers. And they had a clear commercial interest in salvaging whatever was genuinely useful from MQA's technology stack and redeploying it under new branding, stripped of the original format's political baggage.

That process has been underway for nearly two years now, and as of an October 2025 status update, it has finally started producing tangible results in shipping hardware. So let's take stock. What did Lenbrook rescue, what does it actually do, and — critically — what remains conspicuously absent?

The four technologies: a quick map

Lenbrook's MQA Labs division emerged from the acquisition with four distinct technology brands. Understanding what each one is supposed to do makes the rest of this conversation much clearer.

• QRONO — a digital-to-analogue rendering technology, aimed at the playback end of the chain.
• FOQUS — an analogue-to-digital capture technology, aimed at the recording/encoding end.
• ENDURA and INSPIRA — mixing and mastering plug-ins for professional studio use.
• AIRIA — an adaptive streaming encoding system, intended as the backbone of a new streaming service.

What's immediately notable about this lineup is that none of these four names carries the letters M, Q or A. Whether that's a pragmatic piece of brand surgery or a genuine philosophical departure is a question worth sitting with — but for now, let's follow the evidence of what's actually shipping.

QRONO: the first technology to find a home

QRONO is the most visible of the four technologies, because it has now been designed into products that Australian consumers can actually buy. As of the October 2025 update, QRONO ships inside the Bluesound Node Icon and the NAD Masters M33 V2. Lumin has also announced that QRONO will appear across several of their DAC products.

The Node Icon and the M33 V2 are both products I've had my ear close to. The Node Icon is Bluesound's flagship streamer, positioned as a significant step up from the long-running standard Node. The M33 V2 is NAD's integrated streaming amplifier at the top of the Masters series — a class-D design that has attracted serious attention since its predecessor's launch. If you want to understand the commercial logic here, it's fairly transparent: Lenbrook owns both brands, so the M33 V2 is essentially a home-turf first deployment. Lumin's adoption is more significant in some ways, because Lumin is an independent Taiwanese manufacturer with its own engineering reputation. Their willingness to integrate QRONO suggests that MQA Labs has managed at least some degree of third-party buy-in.

What does QRONO actually do at the digital-to-analogue conversion stage? MQA Labs describes it as a rendering technology that addresses temporal smearing in the digital-to-analogue conversion process — a lineage of thinking that goes directly back to Bob Stuart's original work on time-domain behaviour in PCM audio. The claim, consistent with MQA's original theoretical position, is that conventional reconstruction filters introduce pre- and post-ringing artefacts that degrade transient accuracy. QRONO is supposed to mitigate this.

I want to be precise about what I can and cannot tell you here. We don't yet have independent measurements that isolate QRONO's contribution from other elements of these products' analogue stages. What I can say is that the M33 V2 represents a genuinely compelling all-in-one proposition for those building a high-performance streaming system, and the inclusion of QRONO is at minimum a differentiator on the spec sheet. If you're shopping in this category, our roundup of the best streaming amplifiers and all-in-one systems gives useful context for where these products sit in the competitive landscape.

FOQUS: into silicon at last

While QRONO addresses playback, FOQUS is the capture-side counterpart — an analogue-to-digital encoding technology intended for use during recording. Its significance for consumers is less direct, but its significance for the professional audio supply chain is potentially quite large.

The milestone here is that FOQUS received its first silicon implementation on 12 May 2025, when ESS Technology announced the ES9823MPRO. ESS is not a peripheral player. They manufacture the Sabre DAC chips that appear in a large proportion of high-end audio products globally. Their decision to integrate FOQUS into a professional ADC chip is the clearest signal yet that MQA Labs has genuine traction in the engineering community beyond the Lenbrook family. When a chip vendor with ESS's market position commits to your technology in silicon, you are no longer vapourware.

For the technically curious: the ES9823MPRO is positioned as a professional analogue-to-digital converter chip. The integration of FOQUS at this stage means that recordings made on hardware carrying this chip would have FOQUS applied at the point of capture — before any downstream processing. This is the kind of early-in-chain integration that, if it achieves any meaningful adoption among studio hardware manufacturers, could begin to build a catalogue of FOQUS-captured recordings over the coming years.

Whether any of that will be audibly meaningful depends on factors we can't yet evaluate — not least because we don't have a mature body of recordings to listen to. But the silicon announcement is a real milestone, and it deserves acknowledgement as such. Understanding bit depth and sample rate as foundational concepts helps frame why capture-side quality matters so fundamentally to everything downstream.

ENDURA and INSPIRA: the studio tools

The two mixing and mastering plug-ins, Endura and Inspira, represent MQA Labs' direct pitch to recording engineers and mastering houses. Here the situation is actually quite clean compared to the streaming side, and I say that with some relief.

The key fact is this: Endura and Inspira output standard PCM files. There is no MQA file label, no proprietary container, no licensing implication for anyone downstream receiving a file produced with these tools. If a mastering engineer uses Inspira on a project, the resulting file lands in your DAW — or eventually on a streaming platform — as ordinary PCM audio, indistinguishable in format terms from any other high-resolution file.

This is a meaningful philosophical shift from MQA's original model, which required the file itself to carry authentication metadata, which in turn required licensed hardware to fully decode. The criticism that MQA created a proprietary tollgate in the distribution chain was one of the loudest and most persistent objections from the professional community. The plug-in approach sidesteps that entirely. Whatever these tools do to the audio during processing, they don't lock the output into a proprietary format.

What they actually do to the sound — whether their processing genuinely improves the listening experience versus other mastering tools — is a question that will take years of real-world deployment to answer properly. I'm not prepared to make strong claims here without substantially more evidence. But the format-agnostic output is, structurally, the right call.

AIRIA and the streaming service: still waiting

And here we arrive at the most conspicuous gap in the story. One of MQA's unfulfilled ambitions was always a streaming service that used its own adaptive encoding to deliver variable-quality streams tuned to available bandwidth — the idea being that the same master could be served at different bitrates without the quality degradation you'd expect from a conventional lossy codec. That concept lives on under the AIRIA brand.

The problem is that the AIRIA-powered streaming service did not launch in 2025. It was intended to launch. It did not. As of the October 2025 update, it remains in the future tense — a service that is intended to use AIRIA adaptive encoding, rather than one that does.

I want to be careful not to be dismissive here, because the technical concept underlying AIRIA is interesting and the need it addresses is real. High-resolution audio streaming remains genuinely bandwidth-hungry, and an adaptive codec that degrades more gracefully than conventional approaches would have genuine value for listeners in regional Australia, or anyone connecting over mobile data. The problem is that until a service actually launches, AIRIA is a promise rather than a product.

What would it take to compete in the streaming landscape? Tidal, Apple Music and Amazon Music now all offer lossless or high-resolution tiers at price points that would have seemed wildly optimistic five years ago. A new entrant would need catalogue, it would need device support, and it would need to offer something meaningfully different to justify a subscription alongside — or instead of — one of those established services. None of that is impossible, but none of it is easy either. The longer the launch window stretches, the steeper the hill becomes.

What this means for Australian buyers right now

Let me be direct about the practical implications, because that's ultimately what matters for readers deciding where to spend their money.

If you're shopping for a streaming DAC or an all-in-one streaming amplifier, QRONO is now a real variable in the comparison. It ships in products you can audition at Australian retailers. Whether QRONO's presence in a product is worth a premium over an alternative without it is something you should evaluate on the listening evidence — I'd encourage you to ask for a demo specifically of streaming high-resolution material, because that's the domain where the claimed benefits would be most salient. Our guide to the best DACs and network streamers is a useful starting point for that research.

If you're a recording musician or a producer working at home, the Endura and Inspira plug-ins warrant a look once they're broadly available. The format-agnostic PCM output means there's no format lock-in risk, which was the objection that rightly made professional users wary of MQA-adjacent tools in the past. Standard PCM is standard PCM — your distributor, your mastering engineer and your streaming platform don't need to know or care what tools you used.

If you're waiting for the AIRIA streaming service: keep waiting, but perhaps don't hold your breath. There's no announced Australian launch date, and the global streaming market is not getting more hospitable to new entrants. I genuinely hope MQA Labs manages to get this to market, because the underlying technology case for better adaptive streaming is sound. But hope isn't a product recommendation.

What survived, and what it tells us

Stepping back, the shape of what Lenbrook rescued from MQA's collapse is instructive. The parts that survived — QRONO, FOQUS in silicon, the studio plug-ins — are all technologies that can be embedded inside existing, conventional products and workflows. They don't require a proprietary file format. They don't demand that a streaming service adopt them. They can ride along inside a Bluesound Node or an ESS chip and add value without asking the rest of the ecosystem to reorganise around them.

The part that hasn't yet materialised — the streaming service — is the piece that would require the ecosystem to reorganise. It would require a catalogue, a licensing arrangement with record labels, a content delivery infrastructure, and a subscriber base willing to pay for it. That's a fundamentally different challenge from shipping a DAC chip with a new rendering algorithm baked in.

MQA's original collapse was, in part, a story about a technology that asked too much of the industry at once. It wanted to control the file format, the streaming tier, the hardware certification, and the mastering chain simultaneously. That ambition outran its execution, and the result was an adversarial relationship with engineers, hardware manufacturers and streaming platforms who felt they were being asked to pay tolls on a road they hadn't agreed to build.

What MQA Labs under Lenbrook appears to be building is more modest, more modular, and — honestly — more likely to succeed for precisely those reasons. The technologies are real. The first hardware deployments are real. The silicon is real. The streaming service remains the question mark.

For those of us who remember the MQA debates with a mix of technical fascination and political exhaustion, this is a genuinely interesting inflection point. The era of MQA as a format religion is over. What replaces it is a set of engineering tools, some of which are already working their way into the products on your shortlist. That's a quieter story — but it might, in the end, be a more durable one.