Japanese pay TV broadcaster WOWOW has adopted advanced master Quality Authenticated (MQA) audio technology to showcase High-Definition video playback with what it says is the “highest quality sound” ever heard.
The technology was showcased during a demonstration at a press event at WOWOW’s Tokyo headquarters this week, and will be followed by a full demonstration of a live concert performance at the Inter BEE trade show on November 15th, also in Tokyo.
MQA is a method of digitally storing recorded music as a file that’s small and convenient enough to download or stream, without making sacrifices to the sound quality that are necessary with compressed files. Traditionally, most audio is recorded on MP3 files that lose up to 90% of the original recording data, WOWOW said.
The technology relies on a process called “music origami”, and involves folding a 192/4 file into a smaller file of 48-kHz / 24-bits, which is the standard for broadcast video.
WOWOW teamed up with three companies for its live concert demo. They include Acousting Field, which has developed a technology called HPL for binaural rendering of 3D audio. This was combined with MPEG-4 ALS lossless coding technology provided by NTT SmartConnect to support the “bit-perfect PCM data” that’s necessary to transmit MQA.
“With our partners at WOWOW we’ve been exploring the feasibility of delivering video with MQA audio and our experiments have succeeded,” said MQA founder Bob Stuart in a statement. “We’re bringing the unique aspects of MQA — clarity, smaller file sizes, and backward compatibility — to deliver the best quality audio alongside HD video. This development holds exciting possibilities for the international broadcasting sector.”
WOWOW said it was trying to harness MQA technology because, while mainstream consumers are used to a constantly improving visual experience, the audio element in video is often left behind as an afterthought. The company believes MQA’s technology is able to support the highest quality playback of the original recording on all kinds of devices, including smartphones, TVs, high-end home audio systems and even cars.
“It makes no sense that audio quality still lags behind, while video is achieving higher definition with 4K and 8K resolution display,” said WOWOW engineer Hideo Irimajiri. “Due to transmission bandwidth limitations, the audio element has until now been problematic, however MQA’s technology — which achieves high-resolution transmission with normal 48k sampling audio — solves this problem.”
