TIDAL to support HiRes FLAC was the surprise announcement from Jesse Dorogusker, CEO of TIDAL in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on reddit at the beginning of the week. When asked about MQA he gave the following reply:
“So many questions about MQA and hi-resolution audio. I hope we don’t spend all of our time on audio format details, but it’s an AMA and you’re asking.
TIDAL has cared about high quality and even experimental audio formats long before it was cool or common among music streamers. Why? Because artists take care when making their art and they want/hope to present their work in the best light (whatever they think that is exactly). We also live in a world that is mobile-dominated and mobile phones have constraints in memory, data plans, coverage maps – so there’s always a consideration for the customer’s need between more quality and more bandwidth/storage efficiency.
Breaking news for my reddit peeps: we will be introducing hi-res FLAC for our HiFi Plus subscribers soon. It’s lossless and an open standard. It’s a big file, but we’ll give you controls to dial this up and down based on what’s going on.”
When asked why they adopted MQA he continued, “TIDAL added MQA when others were streaming low bitrate AAC (and some still do). It was a balance of quality and bandwidth. Cell networks are better now. Hi-res FLAC files will be big, but we think the infra[structure] is ready, even on mobile.”
No timescale was given for when we might expect to see HiRes FLAC files being served but he intimidated that they had HiRes originals available which suggests that this should not take too long to implement.
Regarding the recent announcement by MQA that they had gone into administration, the streamer did come back to various magazines during the week with the assurance that TIDAL would continue to support MQA ‘Master Quality’ streaming. How long that support might last if MQA found no one to buy the company is anyone’s guess.
