As a longtime Roon/TIDAL subscriber, this is the biggest news since, well since I can’t remember when. Hopefully we can all be respectful of the impact this will no doubt have on the many folks who invested time, energy and resources into supporting MQA. This will undoubtedly have a major impact on the livelihoods of many who saw MQA as the future of hi-res streaming. So, please let’s be respectful AND rejoice for open-standards!
Direct from TIDAL CEO…. Hi-res lossless if coming…
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.
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
11
I am not using Tidal.
Is the big news that:
“… 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.”
There are obviously no further details at this point, including whether they’re adding FLAC, or replacing MQA with FLAC.
That they seem to have thought it out (the selectable quality thing) does lead to interpreting there could be hints that this has been planned for a while.
Great news for everyone with ultrasonic hearing. Unfortunately I’m not one of them, but I sure hope the 4-letter acronym will completely replace the 3-letter one.
Great news for the bat subscribers. As I cannot complain about Redbook, this for the paranoids maybe. Still would like to meet one who could tell hi-res from standard res in a proper blind test with 98+ % precision
Only that Tidal’s highest res tier prior to MQA was CD resolution so that might be what they default back to. I think people are making assumptions that it will be higher than CD resolution.
Why would they need to make any changes. Roon already streams FLAC from Tidal.
I, for one, am hoping that Tidal do not dump MQA and that a way forward is found for that format. I’m a fan of hi-res and particularly MQA.
Firstly, I’ve always liked the sound quality.
Secondly, it’s a great way to stream hi-res content without using so much bandwidth.
The second is more important than most acknowledge, not just from a mobile speed point of view, but because bandwidth means energy.
The planet is in deep do-do, we have an energy crisis, and anything which intelligently mitigates any of this, is very much needed.
I’ve been a Tidal and MQA user for many years now and if MQA were lost from that service I wouldn’t necessarily stay - I’d immediately look at alternative providers these days.
Need to think long and hard before pulling the plug on that one, with so many users heavily invested in the format, including in hardware.
It is, I believe, the main repository of MQA content, so this is a big thing for its fans and user base…
When you stream MQA, you are streaming a FLAC file. Flac as a container format can hold high res PCM or MQA. The streaming of which is the same. What changes is the post streaming processing. So, the change of FLAC contents would make no difference to the Tidal infrastructure in terms of streaming.
Yes, that’s my understanding too. MQA is PCM, so FLAC can carry it transparently. The way I read the announcement, they’re planning to stream actual - i.e. non-MQA - hi-res FLAC.
I absolutely agree with the need to rationalize resources, but to me, the best way to reduce bandwidth is to stream red book. Hi-res is the unnecessary part, so anything that tries to address hi-res issues is also unnecessary. I don’t think that will happen though, as they want to compete with other services that already offer hi-res. As far as I’m concerned, I’m doing my part and stream (and buy) only red book.
