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Exactly what did Bob Stuart (above) say at that press event earlier this month at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest (RMAF)? Stuart—CEO of the company MQA, short for Master Quality Authenticated—made an announcement about the Warner Music Group's (WMG's) transcoding of their catalog into MQA format, a project announced last May.

But what exactly did he say? I didn't attend RMAF and accounts I found in the audiophile press were incomplete and contradictory. Is WMG finished with the project? Has the catalog been converted? All of it or just some? What exactly did they do and how did they do it? There was also some announcement at the press conference about the other major labels, Sony and Universal—what's the status of those projects?

Eager for answers, I arranged a conference call. Over the course of about half an hour, Stuart (with an occasional assist from Lisa Sullivan, MQA's Director of Marketing) answered all my questions and more. That call left me more enthusiastic than ever about the future of MQA, digital downloads, and—especially—high-quality music streaming. Here's what you need to know.

Has Warner Music Group really transcoded their whole vast catalog?
No, they're not finished. So far they've only completed the part of their catalog for which 24-bit masters already exist. That's a lot of music. It includes all their digital transfers from analog tape—think, for example, of all those 1950s and '60s jazz titles—and most of their recent recordings. But it's not everything. In fact, that part was relatively easy. Early digital recordings—the ones made before the introduction of CD, and recordings made for CD through about 1987—require more time and attention. They also haven't yet converted the analog masters that weren't already digitized.

So when will they be finished?
They expect to have completed everything—the whole WMG catalog—by next spring.

What about the other major labels?
There's currently no agreement with the other two majors, Universal and Sony. However, "our aspiration is that the majority of their catalogs will be encoded by next spring," Sullivan wrote in a follow-up email. With no agreement in place, that may sound ambitious, but Stuart seems confident, and the rapid progress of the Warner project is cause for optimism.

Wow, that was fast. They must have cut corners.
You'd think so, but I didn't find any evidence of corner-cutting. Read on.

MQA promises "master quality;" it's right there in the name. So what masters are they using?
The best available, which varies from recording to recording. As I've already written, they've already converted their catalog of recordings with 24-bit masters. Those master files have a range of sampling frequencies, but all their previous analog-tape conversions are 24/192. "There's still something like 100,000 really important analog tapes that still haven't been digitized," Stuart said. In that case, they start with the analog tape and create a 192/24 digital master; MQA has worked with Warner to develop the most MQA-friendly approach.

What about other digital formats? "We haven't done the DSD yet, but that should be easy to do," Stuart said. All those early digital recordings "regrettably are only in quite primitive digital formats like DASH tape or PCM-F1, or that sort of thing: 16-bit. In the early CD era, a lot of music was recorded directly to 16-bit formats that will no longer play. And with bad converters." Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms—the first CD I ever bought—was "made to DAT and then brought through an analog equalization process and then put back to DAT, so it had got terrific problems with the converters, and we had been working on that one for a few years with different versions." Cases like that take a lot of work, but with MQA's (the company's) help, the label is getting it done.

Sometimes even a CD rip might indeed be used as a master, but that only happens when it's the best recording available. Let's say a label has gone out of business and the master recordings have been lost, but the artist still wants her music converted to MQA. More relevant to the Warner project is when early digital master tapes are unusable, or when the proprietary machine they were recorded on is beyond repair.

CD-quality masters? That's hardly high-resolution.
Sure, but it's about the music, right? Stuart indicates that MQA is not about high resolution in the usual sense; it's about authenticity. "As far as we're concerned, anything from a cylinder forward is legitimate as long as it's the definitive statement about a recording," Stuart told me. "If a recording is important enough, and all there is is a 78, that's where we start. . . We're really concerned about producing the definitive thing," not the thing with the highest bit depth or sampling rate.

Besides, excellent results are possible even from early 16-bit masters, as demonstrated by Christian Eggen's recording, Carl Nielsen Piano Music, on the 2L label (2L-120), which was recorded direct to DAT in 1993. 2L's Morten Lindberg and the MQA crew worked hard on restoring those recordings—it's what Stuart calls a "white-glove reclamation"—and the result is superb. "It was an important recording because of the performer and the era and the instrument," Stuart told me during our conversation, "but it was recorded to DAT. Morten wanted to bring it out if he could. In this case we were spectacularly lucky because he's a great archivist. I said, 'what was the A/D converter?' and he said, 'I've got it in the cupboard.' We were able to fingerprint and reverse-engineer the A/D out of the recording."

The result was so good that they released a track from that album in the first batch of MQA demonstration tracks. As soon as I heard it, I downloaded the album from 2L and listened to the whole thing. I've listened to it quite a few times since then, always with pleasure. In the conversion to MQA, "it changes from a kind of splashy, muddy CD sound to really quite open," Stuart told me. "And when you listen to that Nielson, some of the shorter tracks around 10, 11, and 12, it's astonishing how much reverberation was captured."

Please explain this notion of authenticity, or, as Stuart put it, "the definitive thing."
"Say I can go to a store and buy a 192 of this album," Stuart said. The file you end up with may not be—in fact probably isn't—the "flat" master the label signed off on. "We could go to stores today and find a lot of 96k content, and this is often or usually not the original master, because what labels are inclined to do is to produce a real master, and then they'll produce something from that from which they cut vinyl and then they'll make a separate deliverable for iTunes." A record company may ultimately deliver up to 50 different formats, Stuart said. "The iTunes spec means that a lot of the 96k [files] around that are at least one generation away from the masters."

Files may also be manipulated after they're released. "You can go to stores like HDTracks or High-Res Audio and you say, I'd like this bit of music, and you find it's available in DSD, quad DSD, DXD, 192, 96, or 48. And you think, 'OK, I'll buy the one with the biggest number.' But what we go for is the authentic one. Because typically what's happening is these retailers are sent a file, they could be sent an [88.2kHz version], and then they make all the DSD out of it because they can charge more for it." With MQA you can have confidence that the file was produced from the master the label or artist prefers. If the file is manipulated post-release, the MQA light won't shine.

In all that music, is there anything new?
Yes. For one thing, Warner is digitizing all those analog masters that were never digitized before. "And in the archives, there's a lot of what everybody would agree is high-resolution digital that has never been released."

So, once this project is finished and Sony and Universal have done their thing as planned, the bulk of the world's music catalog will be encoded and ready for streaming or download, in definitive versions, in just a few months.

When will I be able to stream or download it?
Aye, there's the rub: No one knows, not even Stuart. MQA's focus is on feeding MQA files back into the supply chain, he told me. It's up to the labels to decide whether and when to make them available for download or provide them to streaming services. So far, none of the major labels have announced their distribution plans.

You wrote streaming "services"—plural. So far as I know, Tidal is the only streaming service that has announced MQA support, right?
Right—but in future, other services are likely to start streaming MQA. "We sincerely hope there's going to be more than [just Tidal]," Stuart said. He seemed quite confident about this. "We're talking to many [streaming companies]."

Are they really transcoding all the music?
Yes, all of it, including what Stuart calls recorded music's "long tail," that big chunk of the catalog that's rarely played. "Spotify says they've got 40, 50 million songs and about 4 million have never been played, and another 4–5 million have only been played once," Stuart told me. He thinks it's important to make all those songs—and more—available even if no one's listening to them, because he thinks completeness is important. Streaming services are key to the industry's future because they can make the "long tail" available even if it's not practical or profitable to distribute in any other way. "In order to have it an effective streaming service, we really have to fill in the whole thing, particularly as MQA brings sound quality benefits with all music, and it brings the authenticity to all music, and it brings really practical benefits to the streamers in MQA format," Stuart told me.

"It's practical to think that we would have broken the back of all the music in the world by next spring."