Anecdotally, this communication has has come to a lot of Tidal subscribers in Australia overnight as an email. (Not all Tidal subscribers, but a decent number). Correlation for those receiving the mail seems to be that they have cancelled their Tidal sub and are currently in the “wind-down” period until their current (and last) month of service expires. Tidal will have no information to support the fact that these people have just subbed to Qobuz, but they’ll be suspecting it.
Tidal Hi-Fi Plus (the automatically available product) is priced at AUD 23.99 a month and interestingly the mail includes the following statement which flies in the face of @guerph’s notifaction if he’s not in Oz:
I believe it is possible that MQA decoding may still be activated (at a decreased quality due to loss of 8 bits) if the original master sample rate is a 44.1kHz multiple.
So it seems after some testing, and if the signal path is correct, that if you setup a new Tidal sub to the HiFi tier expecting lossless 44.1/16 FLAC then you’re going to be getting something other than you bargained for.
Whilst not completely consistent (some artists and albums behave differently to others), it does seem like the HiFi (non-MQA) tier can and does serve-up MQA streams. I asked the tester to repeat the tests with the infamous Led Zep MQA only catalogue and sure enough, he got spurious results:
Choosing the 44.1 MQA version of the first eponymous release, he got MQA and subsequent upsampling.
Choosing the 96 MQA version of the same release, he got 44.1 FLAC with no additional upsampling.
The MQA 96kHz won’t activate MQA decoding because by having (I assumed) Tidal resampling it to 44.1kHz for 16/44.1 delivery destroys all MQA signalling. This does not mean you’re getting a non-MQA processed album. If it was a MQA album in the first place, by paying less or forcing the quality to be 16/44.1 it is only decreasing the quality.
There is clearly stated that FLAC is now real 1144kbs ( before max 900kbs) and highres is over 9000kbs. MQA is around 1600kbs max so no, they are Not MQA redbooks. That is urban legend, also the famous “mqa video” maker has now admitted he did not know how to do the test right way.
As soon as the ‘hifi plus’ change has rolled out here I will test this again. But yes, the Masters and “hifi” versions of a track are actually the same file. Just the hifi one has the MQA flagging removed so the DAC/Player does not recognise it as MQA.
For a track on tidal marked as “master”, there is no way to stream the lossless file.
This is excellent news. Was hoping they would do this. People who love the “premium” MQA sound can now pay the extra premium and the rest of us can enjoy our inferior industry-standard format sound.