TIDAL relies on Hi-res FLAC for TIDAL HiFi Plus

It can be clearly stated that the company MQA Ltd. has its most important partner in the music streaming service TIDAL, because without TIDAL, MQA Ltd. would certainly not have succeeded in assuming a comparatively significant role on the market within a very short time or in generating such great interest.

In fact, it was only TIDAL that relied on MQA-encoded content from the very beginning in order to offer its subscribers hi-res audio content.

TIDAL HiFi Plus now with Hi-res FLAC?

So far, anyone who wanted to consume content in hi-res audio on TIDAL had to rely on hardware or software that could process content encoded in MQA, because only then was the full resolution actually available.

This should now be an end, as a posting on the social media platform reddit now suggests.

And this posting does not come from just anyone, but from the very highest authority when it comes to TIDAL. The posting was published by Jesse Dorogusker, the CEO of TIDAL, and its content really makes you sit up and take notice.

Foto © TIDAL | Square Inc. Acquires Majority of TIDAL

“Breaking news for my Reddit friends: we will soon be launching hires FLAC for our HiFi Plus subscribers. It’s lossless and an open standard. It’s a big file, but we’re giving you the ability to hires it up or down depending on the situation.”

Jesse Dorogusker, CEO of TIDAL

And what about MQA?

Well, given the ambiguous situation surrounding MQA that arose from MQA Ltd’s bankruptcy filing these days, the question was naturally brought to the attention of TIDAL’s CEO, though he didn’t really answer it. At least he avoided actually answering specifically about MQA and the continued use of this format on his service.

Instead, he pointed out that TIDAL has always endeavoured to focus on innovation and will continue to do so, that it is of course a big issue how to transfer high-quality content to different devices without any problems…

Getting to the point

It remains to be seen what will happen with MQA at TIDAL and the technology of MQA Ltd. in general. However, the fact that none other than the CEO of TIDAL announced via social media that they will soon be using hi-res audio in the form of FLAC is quite revealing, especially because Jesse Dorogusker did so with the indication that FLAC is an open standard and works loss-free as a data format. Exactly the opposite of MQA…