Tidal teased this news back in April and company CEO Jesse Dorogusker has taken to Reddit once again to announce that Tidal has rolled out hi-res FLAC for Tidal’s Early Access Program (EAP) users on iOS.
HiFi Plus subscribers ($19.99/month) will see the first batch of 6 million+ hi-res tracks come August. For those paying attention to this story the question remains what’s to come of all the MQA-encoded (Master Quality Authenticated) content, the format used for delivering hi-res by Tidal to date.
As of today, Tidal’s home page still includes a dedicated section for MQA Albums and there’s no explicit mention of the future of MQA on Tidal in this recent Reddit news. But this bit from Dorogusker doesn’t bode well for the proprietary, i.e. closed source, MQA:
We’re choosing FLAC as our preferred format for high resolution audio, and we’ll continue to support multiple formats to make sure we have as much hi-res content as possible. It’s open source, allowing greater access for artists and fans, and aligns with TIDAL’s support for open platforms.
MQA, the company, entered into administration, the UK equivalent of Chapter 11 in the US, back in April so that clock is ticking—it’s my understanding that if no princess in shining armor with a bag of cash comes to MQA’s rescue, the company will cease to exist. Poof!
While I’m not a fan of music delivery formats leading us by the nose, a serious case of the tail wagging the dog, I am all for having access to the original format when it comes to file-based playback and streaming. In other words, there’s no reason to squish higher resolution music into a CD-sized container when its not being delivered on CD. That said, the majority of the music I listen to is delivered in CD-quality with some 24-bit/48kHz albums and the occasional—as in a number I can pretty much count using just my ten fingers—24-bit/96kHz. And about zero 24-bit/192kHz. Give or take a bit.
And I am perfectly fine with that because a music delivery format does not guarantee a certain level of sound quality and even if it did, but it don’t, I’m first and foremost interested in the quality of the music. Its recorded quality is what it is. Come what may.
I am of the firm opinion, firm, that if music delivery formats and recorded sound quality are a person’s main determining factors for the music they choose to listen to, their hifi is doing a shitty job.
