So many questions about MQA and hi-res audio. I hope we don’t spend all our time on audio format details, but it’s an AMA and you’re asking for it.
TIDAL has been concerned with high-quality and even experimental audio formats long before it was cool or mainstream among music streamers. Because? Because artists take care when making their art and want/hope to present their work in the best possible light (whatever they think it is exactly). We also live in a mobile-dominated world and mobile phones have memory limitations, data plans, coverage maps, so the customer’s need between more quality and more bandwidth/storage efficiency is always considered .
Breaking news for my reddit peeps: We will soon introduce high resolution FLAC for our HiFi Plus subscribers. It is an open and lossless standard. It’s a big file, but we’ll give you controls to dial it up and down based on what’s going on.
This news comes just days after MQA announced it was entering administration and is comparable to Chapter 11 in the US.
Here is MQA’s full public statement:
Following the recent positive reception to MQA’s latest technology (SCL6), there has been growing international interest in purchasing MQA Ltd. At the same time, MQA’s main financial backer is looking for an exit. In order to be in the best position to pursue market opportunities and expedite this process, the company has undergone a restructuring initiative, which includes entering administration and is comparable to Chapter 11 in the US.
While it’s pure speculation at this point, it’s hard not to see these two announcements as related. For those who have been living under a rock or purposely ignoring what to some is a demon spawned from the fires of hell, MQA stands for Master Quality Authenticated, a proprietary lossy compression codec that requires certified hardware (license) to play encoded content. in what MQA described as “origami”, folding and unfolding the original audio file. It seems likely that if this news pans out, Tidal could replace MQA-encoded content with FLAC.
Unfortunately, all of my reporting on MQA, including an in-depth review, disappeared from the Internet, talk of losses, when Stereophile’s parent company, AV Tech Media, decided to pull the plug on all AudioStream content a year ago.
I will be watching for developing news.
To remove a rumor (from the same Reddit thread):
