Just a note, that storage cost at streaming companies are trivial to their bottom line, and that MQA requires more storage/bandwidth then the equivalent 16/44
I have no particular knowledge of any streaming providers costs for anything in their environment but I suspect that however small the incremental cost to store process / stream anything it works out to real money when multiplied by 40 or 50 million.
I understand that MQA’s requirements are more than CD quality but I’m also assuming replacing CD quality with MQA might result in more streaming of the less than CD version.
Bottom line … I don’t know why this album showed up as MQA and not CD although it seems it may be CD after all.
If I encounter an album that is MQA exclusively, I do a search of the same album and it will show up two versions and one is CD 16/44.1. It happens all the times.
Don’t worry, Tidal is not ditching CD 16/44.1, it just prefers to show MQA and hide the CD 16/44.1 until you do a search.
Good point, however I have found certain albums that do not have a second 16/44 hiding behind a search. At first I would even try to find them in the Tidal app because I have at times found albums in that app that are hidden to Roon.
Mainly from 2L label at the moment, probably they gave the wrong copies to Qobuz. I guessed Qobuz will be furious as their stands are lossless streaming. Besides to stream MQA, the streaming provider must get a license from MQA Ltd.