Tidal has begun rolling out hi-res FLAC streams, a move designed to future-proof the platform.
When it was announced in April that MQA was being put into receivership and the future of MQA has been unclear ever since, Tidal has been working hard behind the scenes. The obvious alternative for them is FLAC, a truly lossless compressed and moreover, secure open-source format. The fact that this eliminates the advantages of the lower MQA bandwidth is not really problematic these days. Almost everyone has (broadband) internet with more than enough capacity for streaming at higher bitrates. Tidal has now started the previously announced rollout of FLAC tracks. Initially for beta testers, but they will be available for everyone very soon. This is a first batch of 6 million hi-res FLACs, which can be added to the existing more than 100 million CD-quality FLACs that the music service already has in its catalog.
Support for MQA
Tidal doesn’t waste many words on MQA anymore. As far as is known, all ‘old’ file formats will continue to be supported for the time being, including MQA. The only question is what will happen to MQA-tracks if MQA disappears from the market and thus essentially becomes an orphaned file format. Since April, MQA has been silent, so the chance of this happening grows with each passing day.