Monday5 August 2019 ★† FINANCIAL TIMES 9COMPANIES & MARKETS
A British engineer is making waves with a new
audio format that promises ‘musical origami’
Like Heinz’s famous range of
condiments, there are some 57
varieties of digital music format
currently available. Most are open-
source and free for music companies
and fans to use. They run from highly-
compressed and dull-sounding MP3 to
huge WAV files, bulging with juicy
music data.
A new and widely, though not
universally, acclaimed digital format
developed by a 70-year-old British
electronics engineer might not then
seem to stand a chance of capturing a
slice of the market — not least since it is
a paid-for software.
But the invention of Bob Stuart and a
29-strong team is gaining remarkable
traction. Mr Stuart’sMQA(Master
Quality Authenticated) format has just
been adopted by Alibaba’s Xiami
music-streaming service, with its 14m
subscribers in China.
That deal, Mr Stuart says, could earn
MQA “several millions” a year in
royalties. It would enable the company
to start recouping the £25m that went
into developing MQA, which was
funded in part by selling the HiFi
company, Meridian Audio, in 2014.
MQA promises to replicate the
“emotion” of a live performance or
studio master-recording, even when
listened to on a mobile phone. Extra
audio quality, Mr Stuart claims, can
even be teased from old magnetic
tapes, 78rpm records and music
cylinders.
Additionally, MQA files are “folded”
in such a way — he calls it “music
origami” — that they are under half the
size of rival high-resolution audio
formats. This means, when
downloaded, you can get more, and
arguably better, music on a device.
M Q A’sXiami contract follows
agreements with Warner Brothers and
Universal Music in the US to apply the
format to their back catalogue as well
as new music. Tidal, the high-quality
streaming service partly owned by the
rapper Jay-Z newly features MQA.
The software is popular in Japan,
especially when encoded into CDs,
which are still well liked in the market.
Elsewhere, Mr Stuart says some
broadcasters are considering using a
version of the software, MQA Live, totransmit concerts. But is MQA better
than the competition?
Most people probably cannot hear
the difference between one HiFi
product and another. Leading scientific
sceptic James Randi once offered $1m
for a journalist to submit to a blind test
of speaker cables.No one accepted the
challenge.
Yet I think one can tell the
difference. I pay £19.99 a month to
Tidal for their highest quality Masters
version, because it streams MQA. To
me, it has a clean, rich quality I enjoy. I
probably would not pass a blind test of
MQA against another fancy format.
Similarly, I prefer more expensive wine
without being able to explain quite
why.I like to believe I’m experiencing
the best.
Audiophiles are notoriously
discordant.For all those endorsing
MQA, there are some online angrily
decrying it. Yet others post passionate
arguments that all high-resolution
audio is nonsense and only a dog or a
scientific instrument could tell the
difference.
“Human perception is complex,” Mr
Stuart told me.
“There are ways neuroscientists can
convince people they’re drinking coffee
when they’re drinking tea. But we love
the art of what we do, the bringing of
pleasure through high quality to
millions of people. For those millions
of people to translate into millions
of dollars of revenue is almost
secondary.”
“The jury is still out,” says Thomas
Steffens, founder of Primephonic, a
new Netherlands-based, classical-
music, streaming service. “When you
listen to MQA against the best format
we use, I would almost say it’s a matter
of taste... I like MQA’s vision, I hope
they will be successful producing the
highest audio-quality possible, but it
would be a big technical overhaul for
us to adopt it.”
It seems that the new digital music
format MQA could yet become a
valuable, invisible, supply chain-free
export for the new-format, post-Brexit
UK. But like post-Brexit Britain, it is
not yet clear who is going to like it.[email protected]MQA promises to
replicate the ‘emotion’ of alive performance or studio
recording, even whenheard on amobile phone
‘
Jonathan Margolis
Technology
’
The biggest barrier, Mr Snyder claims,
wasthe way it taught its degree pro-
grammes. MBA classes were formed in
what was called an “integrated curricu-
lum”, which made it hard for those out-
side the business school to come in and
share lectures for specific parts of the
course they might be interested in, such
as entrepreneurship or marketing.
My Snyder changed this so that indi-
vidual MBA courses were offered as
electives available to other Yale stu-
dents.
“It started a dynamic where the
number of people coming in to register
for our classes, not our students or even
joint degree students, grew dramati-
cally,” Mr Snyder says, adding that there
weremore than 1,300 such registrations
made by Yale students from outside the
School of Management last year.
Integration was also helpful for the
MBA students, who now study alongside
Yale students from the school of global
affairs, the law school or the divinity
school.These changes have borne fruit. One
way of measuring this is the number of
Yale students from other faculties tak-
ing classes at the School of Manage-
ment, which has more than tripled dur-
ing Mr Snyder’s tenure from 499 to
1,584 course registrations.
The number of joint-degree students
in the MBA class has also increased from
8 per cent in the academic year Mr Sny-
der arrived, to 11 per cent for the
2018-19 intake.
Mr Snyder measures his success by
another change — the clothing of stu-
dents in the business school.
“After moving into this wonderful
building, I was walking up the stairs and
I saw these young people who looked
like they had just gotten out of bed in
pyjamas,” he recalls.
“They were Yale undergraduates
from other parts of the university com-
ing in for an 8.30am class and I thought
to myself this is really cool.”How to Lead.Ted Snyder, dean of the Yale School of Management
at Yale,” Mr Snyder says.
When Mr Snyder took on the dean-
ship, the School of Management was
relocating to a Norman Foster designed
curved glass building on the edge of the
campus.
“I had faculty saying we are moving
one block in the wrong direction,” Mr
Snyder admits. “Business schools are
the bow of the boat for universities
when it comes to globalisation. But Yale
School of Management was not.”
He started looking for other ways to
build bridges. “I had two core objectives
in mind: Becoming the school most inte-
grated with its home university and
becoming more distinctively global,” Mr
Snyder says.
“I worked on getting buy-in to that
from students, faculty, staff, people
around the university. That led to, I
think, a wonderful response which was
not top down because this was some-
thing people could relate to.”plines on university campuses. At Yale
this was particularly pronounced — the
business school had fewlinks with other
parts of the university when Mr Snyder
arrived.
“It just felt like a cabin or a cocoon,” he
recalls, adding that he was particularly
aware of this because Yale’s president at
the time, Rick Levin, had hired him with
the express request to bring the school
closer to the rest of the university.
“The economics faculty here had a
strong relationship with the university
economics department but I just didn’t
see the coming and going and focus on
the other departments that I expected
given the broad scope of subjects taughtgramme at a time when many US
schools have faced declining demand.
His fundraising skills have enabled
Yale to grow its endowment fund from
$536m to $861m, making it the sixth
largest among business schools world-
wide and the second largest per faculty
member.
“When I was working for Joe White
for six years at Michigan, I really learned
so much, including how to follow, to be a
good number two.”
“That carries over even after you are
the ‘number one’ dean because you’re
still a middle manager below the univer-
sity president.”
Mr Snyder believes his greatest
achievement at Yale has been to inte-
grate the business school into the rest of
the much older institution. Founded in
1701, Yale is the third oldest higher edu-
cation establishment in the US.
Business schools have a reputation for
sitting apart from other academic disci-A
fter 23 years in leadership
positions at some of the
world’s most highly-ranked
business schools, Ted Sny-
der is one of the industry’s
few “serial deans”. He was repeatedly
lured awayby rival institutions that
wanted him to improve their global
standing.
But the dean of Yale School of Man-
agement, who is now entering the next
phase in his career, admits he would
neverhave considered such a leadership
position — running institutions created
to teach others to lead — if it had not
been for his economics PhD adviser at
the University of Chicago back in 1984.
He was thenstarting out in academia, to
which he is now returning in order to
teach, but his adviser told him tocon-
sider a leadership role.
“There probably are a lot of people
who have it in them [to be a dean] but
they don’t really think about it,” Mr Sny-
der says, adding that he was helped fur-
ther in his first tenured job at the Uni-
versity of Michigan’sRoss School of
Business, where the then dean Joe White
offered to be his mentor.
“I was such a lucky person,” Mr Sny-
der says.
The 66-year-old has several ground-
breaking achievements to his name. In
1999, during his first deanship, at the
University of Virginia’sDarden School
of Business, Mr Snyder secured a $60m
donation from Frank Batten, founder of
the Weather Channel. At the time this
was the largest everdonationto a busi-
ness school.
Mr Snyder then moved to Chicago’s
Booth School of Business, where he was
in charge when it received another
record-setting gift to a business school —
$300m from the investor David Booth.
For the past eight years, Mr Snyder
has been atYale, where he has
overseen a 28 per cent growth in appli-
cations for the core two-year MBA pro-US ‘super dean’ offers lesson in integration
The school head’s career
may have taken a verydifferent path if he had
not had wise mentors,writesJonathan Moules
Ted Snyder has
helped build
bridges across
departments at
Yale— Mary Beth
Koeth/FT‘When I was working for
Joe White for six years,Ireally learned how to be a
good number two’Career
1978-1982Economist, DoJ (antitrust)1995-1998Senior associate dean,
University of Michigan, Ross School of
Business1998-2001Dean and professor of
business administration, University of
Virginia, Darden School of Business2001-2011Dean and professor of
economics, University of Chicago,
Booth School of Business2011-2019Dean and professor of
economics and management, Yale
School of ManagementLeadership
More interviews illuminating
the personalities of high-profile
leaders by focusing on the
issues they faced
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