2L - the MQA experience
The music captured by 2L features Norwegian composers and performers and an international repertoire reflected in the Nordic atmosphere. These immersive recordings not only transform the entire listening experience, but also — more radically — these innovative recordings overturn some very basic concepts regarding how music is composed and performed. 2L emphasize immersive audio and have garnered no less than 36 American GRAMMY nominations, 28 of these in craft categories Best Engineered Album, Best Surround Sound Album and Producer of the Year. The album LUX won the award for Best Immersive Audio at the 62nd GRAMMY Awards.
MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) draws on recent research in auditory neuroscience, digital coding and in the human perception of high-quality sound. Underlying concepts target the whole system from studio to home, analog-to-analog path and leap beyond a narrow digital-domain view of high-quality sound. The “Music Origami” folding technology creates a single, compact, efficient, streamable file with no playback restrictions, that can be used for download or streaming and enjoyed in many different situations including mobile, in-car, on a PC, with a Hi-Fi and so on. The MQA file can be fully unfolded to recover the exact sound of the studio preview using a decoder. To add convenience, unfolding can proceed step by step, enabling a number of intermediate quality steps, each of which can be previewed in the studio and authenticated by the content creators. MQA will play back on any device to deliver higher than CD-quality. When paired with an MQA decoder, the file reveals the original master recording.
This collection from the 2L catalogue was initiated as a cover mount MQA-CD for the December 2020 edition of AUDIO Magazine. Each track has been "white-glove" treated from its original master source to MQA encoding by Bob Stuart and Morten Lindberg.
|