As previously announced, Tidal has begun converting to and rolling out FLAC tracks. MQA tracks remain available in parallel for now.
Meanwhile, the previously announced and initiated batch of six million FLAC hi-res tracks is readily available now for subscribers of music service Tidal. The switch from the somewhat controversial MQA to FLAC Hires is thus – as announced – in full swing. And the first large batch has been completed, but the quest is going on. Via the settings of the Tidal app, you can now set the maximum stream quality to 24 bit / 192 kHz. More and more FLAC will be used for this quality as a carrier. Tidal has promised that the MQA catalog will also remain for the time being. However, the future of MQA is becoming increasingly uncertain. Nothing has been heard from them since the bankruptcy of the underlying company. And with that, MQA seems to be slowly dying a quiet death, after a messy introduction that quickly discovered technical ambiguities in the description of the file format.